Powermanga
Version: Web: http://bit.ly/Powermanga
You may remember the Astromenace game, we featured previously in Hotpicks [see p64, LXF192]. The game was a classic vertical scrolling arcade shooter, where you surfed space in your ship fighting aliens and avoiding asteroids. Astromenace felt like a modern game thanks to its rich graphics and various effects, but there’s also another game with a nearly identical plot but different style, Powermanga. The game has a long history with roots in MS-DOS games of the 1990s, but we’re mostly interested in it since November 2000 when it became open source.
The game’s maximum screen resolution is 640x480 and system requirements are very modest: Powermanga is happy to run on an Intel 386 CPU and 32MBs of RAM.
The action proceeds through 42 levels, each harder than a previous one. Levels are designed in such a way that you first enter small skirmishes, then fight with a fleet of enemies followed by a jaunt through asteroid fields. Some enemies leave power-ups and upgrades that equip your ship with extra shields and arm it with more advanced weapons, like a missile launcher. Every four levels a giant monster vessel bars your way and you’ll need to destroy it.
The menu system in Powermanga is extremely simple. You can’t save your progress, but some options can be passed to the game if you launch Powermanga from the terminal. Using $ powermanga --hard will make the game a real challenge (by default the --easy flag is used). Other flags you can use are: --window for windowed mode or --nosound to make the game silent. We recommend playing Powermanga in hard mode, as it significantly ups the thrill factor and keeps you wanting to complete all the levels. Getting the game installed is a piece of cake as after decades of being open source, it’s in all major distros.