Welcome back to the Open Source Spotlight, and happy holidays! We’ve covered a number of open source projects so far in OSS, so you know that the open source community has created everything from P2P file sharing programs, to FTP servers, operating systems, and compression tools. But, open source isn’t just about utilities and office suites! Open source projects have produced some pretty fun games too!
Frozen Bubble is just about the best open source game I’ve found. Frozen Bubble has a simple concept, match 3 or more of the colored bubbles hanging from the ceiling to make them pop loose by firing bubbles at the ceiling with your bubble-launcher. The object is to clear the ceiling of all of the frozen bubbles without letting them drop below a certain line on the screen. What makes it hard is you can cover up your matched bubbles by misaligning your shot, or firing the wrong color, thus making the stack come closer and closer to the line. Oh, and I almost forgot – the ceiling is dropping in a little more every few seconds.
Frozen Bubble is a beautiful looking game! It’s very colorful, and the animated penguins that keep you company (as well as freak out if the bubbles get to close, or you take too long to line up your shot), are very cute, fun little guys. And the rainbow of bubbles are very well rendered – they actually look 3-D. The website boasts that Frozen Bubble uses 7 unique graphic transition effects. Now, I’m not sure what those effects are, but the game looks very cool.
Frozen Bubble doesn’t just look cool, it sounds cool. Each of the songs on the soundtrack are 20-track, professional quality original experiences. And the stereo sound effects add another level of depth to what could have easily been a very shallowly made game. It’s the attention to detail that makes this game just stand out above the rest.
This game looks very cute and innocent, but be warned, it gets very addictive and very difficult. With 100 pre-built levels, you’ll be spending hours just trying to beat them all. But even if you somehow master all 100 levels – the game doesn’t end there.
You can try your skill head-to-head in 2-player mode. Pitting your bubble-busting skills against a friend, you can see who can clear the levels fastest. But don’t go too quickly, because one false move could block the one bubble you needed to win, and send you into a frenzy of trying to unbury that key piece.
And if that’s not enough of a challenge, you can make your our levels with the easy-to-use level-editor. You can create your own levels of mayhem, with complex series of bubbles that must be unlocked in a certain sequence, or leave that one certain key piece that can only be hit at a specify angle, that only you know about.
Frozen Bubble is a test of skill, nerves, geometry, accuracy, and speed. But it’s also a ton of fun. You won’t be able to turn this game off once you get it.
Frozen Bubble was first made for Linux, the open source operating system, but it has been ported to Windows and Mac OS X, so now virtually anyone with a computer can play this highly-addictive, outrageously fun little game that’s not as little as it seems. Like the game’s website says, “You need this game!”
You can grab a copy of Frozen Bubble for Windows here and you can learn more about the game, here.
