Saturday, January 2, 2010

World of Goo Review

I first saw World of Goo while I was browsing the games at the local Target store.  From the box, I gathered that it was created by a 2 man game studio with a minimal budget.  The game was also very reasonably priced at $20.00.

Demo version of "World of Goo", for Linux

The creators of World of Goo, 2dboy

I didn’t actually play the game until I happened upon the demo version that is actually native to Linux.  It just happened that the Linux distro Sabayon which I was installing at the moment had a download link for the game.  After downloading and installing the game, I quickly became hooked.  

The simplest way of describing this game is to say it’s a physics simulation with specific goals you must accomplish.  It’s a puzzle game like you’ve never seen before.

The great thing about this game is that there’s a native version for Windows, Mac, and Linux.  This most likely means the future games coming from 2dboy will also be cross platform.  It’s a great example to the larger game companies that think there’s only a windows game market.  This game also has NO form of copyright protection.  I’m sure this was partly due to their minimal budget, but I think they also realize it’s just a nuisance for people and really doesn’t stop pirating.

The only oddity I saw with this game is that the resolution is very low.  This applies on all platforms.  There’s just no option from the menus to adjust it.  You can manually hack the config files, but then there are other graphical glitches associated with the game being in a higher resolution than it was designed for.

Thank you 2dboy for making a game that is amazing and fun, and runs natively on Linux.  We need more intelligent game companies out there like you.

3 comments:

Todd Partridge said...

Yes, great game. If you're like me and want to play more, you can check out the community add-on that allows user-created levels called gootool.

Happy Linux Guy said...

Thank you, I had never heard of that add-on. I'll have to check it out.

Anonymous said...

I'm the author of berry4ll, please set the download link to http://www.berry4all.com/install (old SVN link no longer valid)
Thanks.