One of the really cool things about being part of a very small community is that it’s relatively easy to become pals with all the cool cats. One such pal is Szilárd Biró, better known as BSzili, and famous in the NG Amiga camp for porting a lot of games to AmigaOS 4, AROS and MorphOS.

His latest project is LÖVE; a Lua based 2D game engine. And he let me test it on MorphOS before everyone else. The engine does have some problems. For starters, LÖVE games are very picky about which version they can run on. Games made for older versions might not work on newer ones and vice versa. To make it even more complicated for MorphOS, never versions uses C++11 features not present in the latest MorphOS compiler. So the latest version Bszili can make at the moment is 0.8, limiting the amount of playable games.

I got an unfinshed test version, but if the final version works as simple as my version does, then all you need is to copy LÖVE and it’s data files to where ever you want, open a shell, go to the folder in question, type “love” plus the name of the game you want to play. If it doesn’t work, you will get an error message like this one:

In the final version you will be able to load from icons instead if you prefer.

BSzili was nice enough to provide me with four working games. The first one is Duck Marines, a Chu chu rocket clone:

The point of this game is to direct a bunch of ducks (?) to your goal. The one getting the most ducks inside your goal wins. I used the arrow keys to move around and when I wanted to add a “direction arrow” (that will tell the duck where to go) I held space and chose direction with the arrow keys. It sounds easy but it gets pretty darn confusing quickly. I loved Chu chu rocket, but this game really doesn’t fare well with a keyboard. I tried to get it to work with a joypad but it sadly didn’t work. Also, the game lack sound:

Next game is a silly little time waster called In your face city trains. The backstory is simple: you are a office worker who have missed the morning train. So you decide to run to work. On the train tracks! Can you make it to work?

Run Forrest Run!

To survive you must jump trains and avoid cliffs and flying birds. You can also run through trains with open doors. Here I’m about to die since I’m bigger than the tunnel:

This will happen. A lot!

Next game is an odd one called Mari0 (with a zero instead of an “o”). It’s a mixture of the classic Nintendo game Mario Bros. and the action puzzler Portal. You play as Mario, armed with a portal gun. The portal gun opens two different doors and whatever falls into one of the doors comes out in the other. It’s a good way to dispose of enemies (teleporting them into a cliff for example) or clear a hurdle. But it’s still basically Mario Bros, with mostly identical rules as the original.

You move with WASP, fire the two portal holes with left and right mouse button and jump with space. Here I have created two portals to teleport an enemy back to the right (the blue light on the floor and the orange light on the celing to the right):

Frankly, I have not gotten myself in a situation yet where this gun is useful. Then again, I didn’t play that much. But it is a neat idea.

Last but not least we have Ortho Robot. This is a very interesting perspective based puzzle game.

The goal is to reach the green area. The first level is easy since you can just move with the arrow keys:

You can change the perspective by using the mouse:

Before reviewing this game there where two “suns” you could also grab if you did change the perspective like this. The reason is that if you just move in the third dimension like the first picture you will either miss those suns, or you will take too many steps in order to reach the,. But changing the perspective like the picture above you can grab them with a minimal amount of moves, because you eliminated one dimension. Sadly though, once taken the suns doesn’t come back when you replay. Anyway, we do it like in the picture above and move to the right:

Next level. Now we really have to start using the switch of perspective if we even want to reach the goal:

We do it like this:

We can’t reach the sun like this, but at least we can reach the goal:

LÖVE will be released in the near future and downloadable from BSzili’s homepage: http://bszili.morphos.me. It will also be available for AmigaOS 4 and AROS.

If you (like me) appreciate all the hard work he has put into his various ports you should consider donating a little money (Paypal button can be found on his site).