Posts tagged atom arcade
Atom Arcade: Ultimate MMA Simulator is a fun (and very different) league sim
Jan 5th
League manager and sim games aren’t anything new. The Football Manager series has been extremely popular for years, and SI Games’ Eastside Hockey Manager has long been a favorite of mine.
Ultimate MMA Simulator, however, is a new one to me. And it’s just strange enough that it’s worth having a look at.
Select fighters from a huge database covering every league imaginable and all different weight classes, build a card, select a venue, and fire up the simulator. Your scrappers duke it out in pure-text glory and you’ll be evaluated for the quality of your event when it completes. Obviously, my effort above was a little substandard – that’s what I get for careless selection!
The sim offers plenty of depth and runs nicely on the Atom, making it a perfect thinking man’s timewaster for your netbook.
You can grab Ultimate MMA from the author’s link to Mediafire or from Freewarefiles.
Atom Arcade: Eat the Whistle is pixelated soccer fun with power-ups
Jan 2nd
Eat the Whistle isn’t a new game by any stretch – you’ll notice a “plug” for the France ’98 World Cup in its splash screen and the 2001 version is “current.” Despite its age, you’ll be hard pressed to find a lightweight soccer game that’s as much fun as ETW.
One of the first features worth mentioning are the power-ups: winged sandals for speed, a canon for a harder shot, and other random goodies appear on the field during play. Pick them up to give your players an instant boost!
ETW is absolutely packed with options. There are more than half a dozen play modes, a practice mode to hone your skills, and an awesome full-contact challenge that turns the game into a soccer slugfest.
Don’t be fooled by the simple graphics. Everything you’d expect in a full-blown soccer game is here. Pitch conditions can change (and drastically affect play), you can create and edit custom tactics, and there’s a team editor you can download to build your own rosters (make sure you have a .lha compatible archiver like 7-zip to open the file). Network play is also supported, but may be a little buggy.
Just pulled off an awesome play? Use the replay feature to record the awesomeness and play it back later!
Read more about ETW at GGSoft and download it from SourceForge – it’s available for both Windows and Linux netbooks.
Atom Arcade: Boggler is a must-have for vocabulary gaming fans
Jan 1st
I love a good puzzle game, and I also enjoy a good vocabulary workout. Games like Scrabble and Boggle have always been favorites of mine. If you’re a fan, too, check out Boggler.
One of the biggest things this game has going for it is a fairly extensive dictionary – a lot of free vocabulary games can be frustrating because they only recognize commonly used English words. On top of that, Boggler supports custom dictionaries. British, French, and Italian are included in the zip file, and you can customize them any way you choose.
There’s even an option to alter the letter selection algorithm. Click letter distribution under the options menu and you can make certain letters appear more or less often (depending on the number of times they’re repeated in the list).
I forgot just how much hair-pulling and pencil chewing a jumble of Boggle letters can inspire, but Boggler reminded me in a hurry. It’s a great way to keep your brain limber.
You can download Boggler for free from Wiki4Games or from FreewareFiles, and it’s portable. Chuck it on your USB flash drive for a quick spelling fix anywhere!
Atom Arcade: Magic Maze is throwback fun for Gauntlet fans
Dec 31st
Don’t download Magic Maze expecting to be blown away by modern-day graphics. DO download it if you used to love playing dungeon games like Gauntlet – or even text-based Roguelikes.
Use your plucky little wizard’s spellcasting ability to defeat the bad guys as you roam around collecting treasures, keys, and potions. Pay special attention to the latter – you’ll need their regenerative powers to quickly boost health and mana when you’re in a tight spot. Magic Maze is a perfectly fun fit for netbooks, and it’s actually more enjoyable on the Atom than a desktop processor. Why? Because it’s a little too fast.
Let’s hear it for vintage gaming!
If you’re running a Ubuntu-based Linux distro on your netbook, just head to terminal and paste in sudo apt-get install magicmaze. Windows users can grab the zip file from RubyForge.