This is the fifty-fourth post in our Game of the Day series.
Gaming on Linux is far worse than gaming on Mac, but I rediscovered that today when attempting to play ASCIIpORTAL. The website says:
ASCIIpOrtal is by Joe Larson with sounds designed by Steve Fenton. Original concept inspired by Increpare’s Portile game, Super Serif Bros, and Valve’s Portal. Source code is included in the zip. Simply unzip and play.
Unzip and play? Okay, I'm a nerd and I guess this game is targeted to us, but what the crap? Double-clicking the binary (which has no icon) in Nautilus / Ubuntu does nothing and then running it at the terminal yielded this:
./asciiportal: error while loading shared libraries: libSDL_mixer-1.2.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directoryI would have given up here, but some helpful bloke in the comments mentioned the error and said the exact name of the SDL component required (
libsdl-mixer1.2 which you could figure out eventually based on the error and the SDL lists in your local neighborhood package manager).
Alright, all bitching aside, the game is very clever. Too clever for me, though. I had trouble figuring out what was going on from the text "graphics" and only made it as far as the storage room. If you have time to kill and want to try something different, go for it. Otherwise I recommend going through Portal again.
