►War of Tiny Creatures (or: play Worms on Linux)

Last posts were always related to music, so I think (or hope) my readers will “excuse” me for posting “off-topic” this time – although I could even write about astronomy, if I had anything to write about it, because this is my own blog, duhhh… but now I’m really getting off-topic lol…

This post is about an oooooold “addiction” of mine (and many other people as far as I know), more precisely a video game (and believe me, I’m not the video-game-guy AT ALL, I hardly ever play anything…):

Worms Armageddon

Yes, that funny game from 1999 by Team17, about a “nuclear” war between worms.

What?! Don’t know it? Go right now and read more about it, then keep on reading here.

Anyway, this post is not only about this game and me having re-discovered it (again, yes, for the second time, first time was about two years ago, playing against my house mates in my university days), but about something much more special, at least for me:

I am playing it – with almost EVERYTHING working! – on my Linux laptop, yes, you’re reading correctly, here’s a screenshot:

Worms Armageddon on Linux
Worms Armageddon on Linux  (scaled down to fit, click to see full resolution)

I have to say that this is something I always wanted to do (as I don’t have any windows anymore), but until most recently it was very complicated and didn’t work well at all and you had to mess around manually with patches for WINE.

And so I thought I’d share this with you, might come in handy for someone else on the internet out there aswell.

Well, the secret is a program developed by a programmer and “Worms Addict” who calls himself Lookias, that program is a wrapper and also includes – obviously, that’s the heart of all – a patched version of WINE and libraries.

Lookias Frontend to play Worms on Linux
Lookias Frontend to play Worms on Linux

With this program, all you have to do is install W:A (don’t want to know from where you get it or how, that’s not my business) and then you can directly launch it from there, it will run at first attempt (at least did so in my case). You will find instructions in the package itself and also on the other site I list further down on here.

Great work, Lookias!

The only issue I had was sound, first wouldn’t work at all, but then I did a search on the net, and found the solution (which is NOT well documented on the websites I will list further down on here), so I thought I’d better share it aswell.

Sound will start working if you set “Audio Acceleration” in the WINE Settings dialog (under the Tab “Audio”) to “Software Emulation”. Yes, strange at least, but really effective. Will work 90%, which means, sometimes sound will stop working for a minute or so but then start working again, by itself.

With this, the game is 100% playable, and really well. Only thing I didn’t test (never played it before anyway) is Online playing. But as far as I can read from other users’ experience, this should work aswell.

So, here are the links:

Official Website of W:A

Lookias Website (here you get the fantastic frontend)

Website of ViolatoR (quite well written userguide for the frontend)

Have fun!!! 😀

►Feeling nostalgic: songs I haven’t heard for some time

Some days ago, on a Friday evening when I was driving home from work, once again, 250 km like every week, listening to the radio, feeling tired and far away in my mind, suddenly a song was played that got my attention, because I hadn’t heard it for some time… so I thought I’d do a little post here with a few songs I’ve always liked but are rarely transmitted on radio or other means.

Not all are what you would call a classic, in fact one ist quite recent. But they all share one thing: although they managed to be successful to some extent, they never got into those mysterious “standard-playlists” that appear to be almost the same everywhere and nobody really knows why, although everybody suspects the same. You know what I mean.

It’s not that these were “underground” or whatever, they just had something “too much unique” (so there would be people actually disliking them, which generally is a good sign, because people SHOULD have different tastes, something that seems to have gotten into decline over the last decades, but let’s not talk about that now) or didn’t have enough commercial feel (would really love to find out one day how those “program people” up there in radios and magazines, online-review-sites and record companies editing “best-of-some-year-genre-or-what-have-you-compilations” get to the conclusion that a certain song is an all-time classic or should be classified as “one-time-hit” and therefore remain in the disc-archive starting to accumulate a thick layer of dust…

Nostalgic Listening Suggestion no. 1:

Bran Van 3000 – Drinking in LA

 

(maybe it’s the band name that wasn’t convincing? But then again, how on earth could someone calling herself “Lady Gaga” be successful? Doesn’t “gaga” mean something like “crazy”, useless yadda-yadda, or even, according to TheFreeDictionary, somebody who isn’t in possession of his complete mental capacities anymore?)

 

Nostalgic Track no. 2:

Youssou N’Dour ft. Neneh Cherry – 7 Seconds

 

(let’s see… this song was number one in many countries’ charts and was played on “Live8”, but in these days on most radio stations I happen to listen to, it plays maybe once a year? Maybe here the “problem” is the song being to “polemic”, talking about racism?)

 

Not-really-nostalgic-at-all Listening Suggestion no. 3:

Hercules And Love Affair – Blind

 

(you’re going to say: “hey! Wait! This song is from 2008!” and I have to admit you’re right. But wait, the point I’m trying to make is this: their song disappeared pretty quickly from radio play, at least in this country and until that last friday I had never heard it again, despite it being a great track (at least in my humble opinion). They just published their second album, but I somehow don’t think they will be chosen for those “infamous” playlists. They are just too “different”, not mainstream enough. Read this interview and you know what I’m talking about.)

So, to finish this post (going too long already lol): maybe it’s all in my head. But what I see around me, everywhere, regarding music business, is a total degradation of the relation between quality, originality, artistic value or musicality and the level of success that’s reached. In most cases, they get more success with totally pointless videos containing almost pornographic scenarios than with music. Real music.

But then maybe that’s not new and it has always been like this, only changing style, outfits and (stupid) names?