Word War vi
September 19, 2009 10:52 PM   Subscribe

Word War vi
In a world divided by two editors, one man sets out to face down his destiny in an epic battle to the death to save his lost data files from being destroyed by the system. It's a dangerous game... did I say dangerous? I meant ridiculous. It's a ridiculous game, but somebody's got to play it. You are that somebody. This is that game. Word War vi.

Ostensibly, this is a game about the battle between vi and emacs. It's really more of a tribute to Defender, Stargate, Scramble, Parsec, and a lot of those old side scrolling shoot 'em up arcade games.

Should compile ok on linux, and Mac OSX.

Works best with an xbox 360 wired controller on linux. So far as I know this was the first game to support the rumble feature on the xbox 360 controller on linux, as of the 2.6.26 kernel.
posted by smcameron (5 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite

Nice! You did get my hopes up, though, that it would actually involve vi (commands).
posted by spiderskull at 10:42 PM on September 21, 2009


spiderskull, actually, you kind of can use some vi moves. You can precede most any key action with a number, and it is repeated that many times, for example (up to a point). e.g. if 'z' fires the laser, then '6z' fires 6 lasers. '6b' drops 6 bombs, and the numbers can be used with the motion keys (kjkl) as well.

The already thin metaphor breaks down a bit though, as I can't very well have 'G' instantly take you to the end of the level, or ':s/gdb//g' wipe out all the gdbs, and various things like that without wrecking the game.

And the config file for options is ~/.wordwarvi/.exrc, and has the same format as vi's .exrc file, sort of. So there are a few vi-isms in there.

It's a better (and very different feeling) game with the xbox 360 controller though
posted by smcameron at 7:30 PM on September 22, 2009


I'd just like to say that this is awesome.
posted by miyabo at 6:53 PM on September 24, 2009


That's epic, then. I haven't had a chance to actually play the game yet, so once my freedom from the slavedriver of time is in my grasp, I'll try it out!
posted by spiderskull at 2:52 PM on September 29, 2009


Very late update: apparently Word War vi has been ported to iPad by someone.

Source available here: http://code.google.com/p/ppiecuch-projects/downloads/list

And if you just want to run it on the iPad here's the iTunes link.

-- steve
posted by smcameron at 11:05 PM on January 20, 2012


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