Torus-trooper: a shoot-’em-up in a tunnel
November 4th, 2007 edited by VinceArticle submitted by Vincent Fourmond. We are running out of articles! Please help DPOTD and submit good articles about software you like!
Torus-trooper is a pretty nice abstract shoot-’em-up taking place in what could be called a space tunnel. You drive some kind of ship or car who has to stay on the sides of the tunnel, and shoot bad enemies. This game is pretty neat and original in several ways:
- You don’t have lives or energy. Rather, you have a limited amount of time to spend in the tunnel. Every time you kill some (big) enemies, you may gain 15, 30 or 45 seconds. Every time you get shot, you loose 15 seconds.
- In addition to shooting, you can build up a kind of charge by pressing the x key. When you release that charge, it runs in front of you, destroying enemy ships and absorbing enemy shots - the latter adding significant amount to your score. One thing though: building the charge slows you down considerably.
- It is pretty fast-paced, rather faster than anything else I’ve seen, and quite neatly designed.
- I like the idea of the tunnel!
When you start the game, you can ask for full screen mode (which makes you feel more “into” the game) with the -fullscreen option. After that, you get a menu where you choose the level and start playing with the fire key. You can also see your last game re-played with the alt key.
Once in the game, you need few keys: arrows, or wasd for movement and acceleration; z for normal firing and x for charge shooting. esc will take you out of the game and p will pause it, as expected.
Some screen shots
Torus-trooper is available in Debian testing, but it still hasn’t made its way into Ubuntu.
November 4th, 2007 at 7:56 am
Wow, fast! Guess what I see now when I close my eyes…
November 4th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Wow!! It’s pretty good fast game!
Thanks for recommendation!
November 4th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
http://packages.debian.net/sid/torus-trooper-data/all/download
Can get the package ^ :)
November 4th, 2007 at 3:17 pm
Cool! I can see when garbage collector starts his work.
November 4th, 2007 at 3:46 pm
Looks like the screenshots were taken on an i810 card, which seems to have trouble with smooth lines. The lines don’t usually look like that =).
November 4th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
On Ubuntu gusty it work with debian package. You need to install libbulletml0d1_0.0.6-2_i386.deb , torus-trooper-data_0.22.dfsg1-1_all.deb torus-trooper_0.22.dfsg1-1_i386.deb and it’s ok.
November 5th, 2007 at 7:49 am
call me dumb, but I installed the package but don’t seem to be able to call it up :( Command line does not know what to do with tor tab tab, nor troo tab tab!
November 5th, 2007 at 10:39 pm
crashed the machine when I ran it. (Etch/Lenny)
November 6th, 2007 at 8:24 am
Despite appearances, it does require openGL and probably won’t work without any accelleration (doesn’t need much).
I’ve also set up my PPA to hold the packages sync’d to Ubuntu 7.10, and the entire series of these games work well.
November 6th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
Henk: indeed, it was an intel card :)
Ingo: $ dpkg -L torus-trooper | grep games/
/usr/games/torus-trooper
November 6th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Worked perfectly on Etch. I’m running a nvidia graphics card with all the OpenGL enabled. It even sounds good. Debian put a nice little entry in my KDE menu too. Looks nicer on my box than the screen shots too.
November 7th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Obviously I meant Lenny not Etch…
November 8th, 2007 at 12:57 am
I’ve loved this game for a couple of years now. It really makes me wish there was a good stereoscopic driver for OpenGL games in 64-bit Linux environments. The game works exceptionally well with 3D displays, but I’ve only been able to do that in Windows so far :(
November 9th, 2007 at 8:35 am
I appreciate that this is a Debian-centric site, but it is actually followed by non-Debian users. Why not add a link to the project homepage so we can download the source or other packages for this game?
November 9th, 2007 at 8:47 am
See there:
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tt_e.html
April 27th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Great. It’s now in the Ubuntu repositories (universe): torus-trooper
March 1st, 2009 at 7:54 pm
Very cool classic arcade game. But why on earth would the weapon keys be bunched up under WASD ?!! How bout SPACE and SHIFT. This is a big shortcoming IMO.