Building a Retro Linux Gaming Computer Part 49: One More to Go!

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Continued from Part 48: Byzantine Labrythine

Candy Cruncher stands as an interesting piece of Linux gaming convergence, with it pulling on almost all of the major threads that defined the industry up to that point. The lead developer of the game was Brian Hook, who is best known for being one of the key architects behind the Glide API for 3dfx, but he would also find success working on both Quake II and Quake III Arena at id Software; founding Pyrogon was his attempt at a slower pace after being at the top of his field for so very long.

The Linux port was crafted by Ryan "icculus" Gordon, not long removed from his initial freelance work on Serious Sam, with the game also being one of the first titles to be picked up by Linux Game Publishing. Founded by retailer Michael Simms in 2001, LGP was an attempt to carry the torch dropped by Loki Software, and thus extend the shelf life of his Tux Games online store. So many people's hopes were tied up in this otherwise unassuming product, making it a shame it was but a mixed success.

Helping to set this tone early on is the CD-ROM, with the installer not having the right executable permissions set. To install the game you should instead download the candycruncher_new_installer.sh from the archived Linux Game Publishing website, as this will pull all of the relevant files off the disc as well as provide you with additional patches. A free Candy Cruncher demo can also be found through there, although for some reason it would never let me enter my name into the high score table.

The full version sidesteps this by just grabbing the name from your user account, but Candy Cruncher would still sometimes fail to initalize and then hang before reaching full screen mode. These hitches would prove to be sporadic for me however, with the port otherwise demonstrating itself to be solid. What bothered me more was how the demo lied to me by claiming you will get to choose your starting level; instead, you can choose from starting blocks of about four levels each capped at level 22.

This forces you to replay levels that you have already solved over and over, and only seems to be done as means to artificially increase the game's difficulty. Casual games can be challenging, but they should not be frustrating, and it feels like Brian Hook was not far enough removed from Quake to realize this. In fairness he was always hesitant about the implementation of a time limit, but the blaring alarms in the game are far from relaxing, even if you can turn the sound effect itself off in the options.

Candy Cruncher is at its best then when you treat it like Solitaire; just something you can launch to kill a few idle minutes before inevitably finding yourself stuck with a bum hand. When playing from the starting stage I usually make it to about level 19 before becoming boxed in, although when I was playing the game more studiously with the level select I did manage to achieve a high score of 769019 after coming close to solving level 27, which is about as far into the game as I think I am going to get.

There are a purported fifteen different candy types in total, so I have yet to encounter all of them, but the only real difference is in their appearance and in the points awarded. What differentiates Candy Cruncher from similar match-three games, other than the obvious fact that you match six here, is that you do not actually move the candy pieces themselves. Instead, you drag about the blank space found on the board, and use that to nudge the candies into line.

Wrapping your head around this is critical to mastering the click and drag technique required to get through the higher levels. While the game does support both mouse and keyboard controls, Candy Cruncher is optimized to be played with the mouse, and for a very specific technique in particular involving holding down and dragging the cursor that the developers themselves admit to being unintuitive at first in the supporting documentation.

The only real way forward is through trial and error, with there being enough randomness to the board layouts to make solving a stage often become a coin toss. The main strategies involved are recognizing when you have enough candies of the same type to complete a line, and navigating around the dreaded black jelly beans, fixed pieces that cannot be matched and exist solely to block your columns or rows. Candy canes can break these, or be used to match with any other candy type.

What promised to be sweet often proved sour, but Pyrogon was able to release one more title, NingPo MahJong, through LGP for Linux before closing up shop in 2003. The next installment will be the 50th part in this series, and with this in mind, I needed to choose a game that was both big enough and historically important enough to warrant that distinction. To that end, I present to you a true Linux gaming milestone: what may very well be the first big boxed Linux game to ever hit retail store shelves.

Carrying on in Part 50: Dawn of Civilization

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