3 Great Command Line Games
In honor of Command Line Week, I wanted to give some love to a few applications that I’ve been quite enjoying over the last several days. As a reminder, #CLIweek is running until this Tuesday — October 18 — so there is still some time if you want to get in on the festivities!
To be clear, I’ve not been “living” in the command line all week. In fact, I’ve not had much time over the last few days to do much of anything other than work and take care of the kiddos with my wife being out of town for the weekend. That said, I have tried out a number of programs that were recommended by Gabe on Github and here are some of my favorites so far.
Ascii Patrol
Ascii-Patrol is, as it’s name implies, an ASCII reimagining of the 1982 arcade classic Moon Patrol. I’ve been playing it on Linux and on Windows (via WSL) this week, but it is also available on macOS (via Homebrew), DOS, and on the web via HTML5. My advice if you play it and you seem to be having trouble with the UFO’s would be to check your terminal’s color scheme. Mine was too bright at first and I wasn’t able to see their shots until I adjusted it.
I took the easy way out and just installed it to my Ubuntu MATE desktop using it’s snap package, but you can always build it from source if that’s something you’d prefer. Instructions are on the projects GitHub page.
Install on Linux via Snap:
sudo snap install ascii-patrol
Gorched
When I was in middle school my friends and I would take turns on our homeroom’s classroom PC blowing each other away on Scorched Earth (aka The Mother of All Games!). For the uninitiated, Scorched Earth was a 1991 shareware artillery game for MS-DOS where you would play against multiple enemies (humans or bots) to see who could survive the bombardment. It was actually really helpful for me to understand some of the concepts of algebra and physics at the time.
Gorched is an terminal-based implementation of Scorched Earth written in Go. Just like Ascii Patrol, you can build this game from source, but it’s also available as a Snap package. You can also run it on macOS using Homebrew, and even natively on Windows using Scoop — though admittedly, the Windows version looks like garbage in both CMD.exe and PowerShell.
Install on Linux via Snap:
sudo snap install gorched
Install on macOS via Homebrew:
brew install zladovan/tap/gorched
Install on Windows via Scoop:
scoop bucket add zladovan https://github.com/zladovan/scoop-bucket
scoop install gorched
Pokete - Grey Edition
I’ve made no secrets about being a long time Pokemon fan. Granted, I tend to prefer the earlier games, but I’m still a fan regardless. So, naturally, when I heard this wild rumor that someone had made a Pokemon-inspired terminal game I had to check it out.
Pokete - Grey Edition (a nice throwback to the Pokemon color versions) is a Python game that has a lot more going on than it first appears to have. The developer included many standard elements of Pokemon games including type advantages/weaknesses, a trade system, and a dex system for your adventure. It’s far from perfect, and it crashed on me several times, but it’s a cool concept. Also, it’s written in Python making it very easy to get up and running on whatever OS you’re using.
Install on Linux/BSD/macOS
git clone https://github.com/lxgr-linux/pokete.git
./pokete/pokete.py
Install on Windows
git clone https://github.com/lxgr-linux/pokete.git
pip install scrap_engine
pokete.py