The Cute Game 'Cuyo'

By Mike "Iron" Orr

A new game appeared in Debian this month, and it's so cute I have to write about it. Here's the Debian description:

Description: Tetris-like game with very impressive effects. Cuyo, named after a Spanish possessive pronoun, shares with Tetris that things fall down and how to navigate them. When enough "of the same type" come "together", they explode. The goal of each level is to blow special "stones" away, you start with. But what "of the same type" and "together" means, varies with the levels. If you hear someone shout that a dragon is always burning his elephants, so that he is not able to blow the volcano away, there a good chances to find Cuyo on his screen. WARNING: It is known to successfully get many people away from more important things to do.

Level 1 screenshots

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The object is to join like colors together. They don't all have to be in a straight line, they just have to be next to each other.
[screenshot]

When you get enough like colors joined, they disappear with a "poof"!
[screenshot]

You also get these gray little Pac-Man ghosties, of unknown purpose.
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When one side gets the bottom row taken out, the bottom row slides over from the other side. In the previous panel, the grass has already slid right, which is why there are two layers of grass. Now in the next panel, the second row of grass has slid up, and a row of ghosties is sliding right, to go underneath it.
[screenshot]

Level 2 screenshots

The same principles apply here but the theme is different.
[screenshot]

Other comments

Get the package from Debian Unstable or download the source from the original site: http://www.karimmi.de/cuyo/. Poor Ben tried to install from source and and found he was missing some QT library files, as you can read about in his article.

Ben wasn't happy about the fact that the window isn't resizable. This caused him problems when an 800x600 window took over his 800x600 screen and he couldn't reach for his taskbar. To me, the problem is insignificant since my screen is 1152x864.

I hope the next version has even more cool themes!

Mike Orr

Mike ("Iron") is the Editor of Linux Gazette. You can read what he has to say in the Back Page column in this issue. He has been a Linux enthusiast since 1991 and a Debian user since 1995. He is SSC's web technical coordinator, which means he gets to write a lot of Python scripts. Non-computer interests include Ska/Oi! music and the international language Esperanto. The nickname Iron was given to him in college--short for Iron Orr, hahaha.

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