Monkeysling
Version: GIT Web: https://github.com/vkreal/monkeysling
Most people will remember the super-popular Angry Birds video game franchise that was one of the first commercially successful games for smartphones. The Angry Birds games released roughly prior to 2015 are considered to be ‘classic’ because the newer releases featured more aggressive monetisation – you’re hardly allowed to play the game without ads and numerous auxiliary bells and whistles that are mostly annoying.
Apart from running Angry Birds for Windows via Wine in Linux, there has been virtually no intersection between Rovio’s games and the Linux ecosystem, and of course nothing was ever open-sourced. So it’s time to play Monkeysling, a high-quality and utterly fun clone of Angry Birds written in HTML5 and Javascript. Monkeysling is different from dozens of other small projects at Github (trust us, we’ve waded through lots of them), because it has bright, colourful and nicely drawn artwork, plus several episodes with a dozen welldesigned levels in each one. Monkeysling develops the original genre of a crush-the-castle game by adding new elements. Most levels include check points where your monkey can hang on a rubber, plus it is possible to travel back and forth between hangers and – provided the monkey does not fall down – you can walk through the level much like in a classic platformer.
The monkey’s enemies are bees and evil plants – probably walking potato bushes. Construction elements such as crates and beams often break up inadvertently and hit the monkey, but cause no trouble to it other than being an obstacle on the monkey’s trajectory.
The game sports smooth and fluid dynamics thanks to the Box2d engine under the bonnet. Level design is good and therefore Monkeysling will likely become a captivating time-killer for you. The game can be played online at http://vorun.com/ms/ chrome, or installed locally on your server.