Solar Wolf
Version: 1.5 Web: http://bit.ly/SolarWolf
We’re continuing to discover classic games that are undeservedly forgotten and left to collect cobwebs in the interweb’s attic. Let’s blow dust out of Solar Wolf, a relatively modern reincarnation of SolarFox, which was released in 1981 and later ported to the Atari 2600. SolarWolf is an accurate and faithful port of SolarFox for modern operating systems, including Linux. The game is written in Python and uses SDL output, though we suspect it could run smoothly even without any OpenGL acceleration. Regardless, we found the game very captivating.
You control a small starship that you have to guide through a series of squared solar cell matrixes inside a rack. While capturing the cells you must avoid fireballs thrown by sentinels, which move continuously along the perimeter. Level by level the task gets harder as more fireballs and obstacles are added, such as mines and asteroids. Your starship can also collect power-ups that can either slow everything else down or provide extra shielding. For each game you have three lives, and when you eventually expend all of them you can continue playing from where you died. This lets you advance further into harder levels, rather than just giving up.
The game is accompanied by sprightly music with a wolf howling from time to time and despite its simple graphics and limited number of obstacles, SolarWolf is a nice little time killer and a perfect way to improve your reactions.
Installing the game is a peace of cake – the game exists for numerous Linux distros and can be found either in your standard repos or downloaded straight from the project’s website. The game has also been adapted to run correctly on modern widescreen displays, which used to be a problem some time ago.
“Faithful port of SolarFox for modern OSes, including Linux.”