XorCurses is a puzzle game coded by jwm-art.net and based entirely on Xor by Astral Software. The original game was released around 1987 for the 8 bit home computers popular at the time. XorCurses attempts to faithfully recreate that game for Linux, but slightly ironically, uses ASCII characters instead of pixel based graphics (which even the 8bit computers could manage).
The idea of Xor is to roam around a series of mazes collecting masks. The first level is simply a matter of finding your way around, but the second level introduces fish and chickens which block your path or kill you if they hit you. From there on in things get progressively tougher and really is a challenging and difficult puzzle game.
XorCurses resulted from there not being a direct port of the game for Linux. Windows users are ok. People happy with using emulators are ok too. I settled with a character-based display (as opposed to fancy graphics) because it would be much simpler to code, and learning ncurses simply has no learning curve compared with graphics (which I did not even look into). If I could get a working game using ncurses then atleast it would pave the way for a graphical version.
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Here are some key features of "XorCurses":
· Colour ASCII for console and terminals using NCurses.
· Very little system footprint.
· Varying wall colours and wall patterns.
· Fish and Chickens
· Bombs
· Dolls
· Teleports
· Sad Masks/Wall visibility toggle
· Levels 1 - 15 from original Xor game.
· Tracking of least number of moves taken to complete a level - stored in user's home directory.
· Replays
· Nine replay speeds changable by keypress during replay
· Save replays
· Load replays
· Continue playing from any point in replay (thus use of saved replays as game progress save files).
· Help on controls, replays, tips, objects.
· Easily navigatable menus and options via keyboard.
· Three different scrolling settings, including traditional and keep-player-central - changable during play by simple keypresses.
· Confoundingly difficult levels which I still can't complete even after all these years. (Note: I've just completed level 8 - Enlightenment).
Requirements:
· GCC
· GNU make
· Ncurses
What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· This version fixes a bug/regression where fish and/or chickens failed to move after a player entered a teleport, i.e. level 14.
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