Weekend fun with free Cubes game
Posted by JohnnyAppleseed | Under Games, Review, Software Friday May 9, 2008The deal here is that you can go and download this free game called Cubes, which comes in Mac and Windows versions. The company behind it offers several other games but most of them are not free, and you can’t tell which are free and which are not from the main page. You should assume that if you are downloading a demo version of one of their games, you’ll only be able to play a limited number of times. We suspect that Grass Games is giving away Cubes in the hope that you’ll come back and perhaps download something else and buy it (and this is reinforced by the fact that you see an ad for another of their games when you exit Cubes), but as far as we can tell you can play Cubes as often as you want without payment or registration.
So, what is Cubes? It’s a falling brick game - in other words, it’s whole lot like a very popular computer game of Russian origin, that’s been around for at least a couple decades now. The game is highly configurable and has more options than you might expect, and while we couldn’t find any documentation, the effects of most options are fairly obvious. The nice thing is that you can pick the screen resolution you want the game to run in (up to 1920×1200!) and run it in full screen mode, or in a window (interestingly, there seems to be a bug where you have to select your desired resolution while full screen mode is selected, and only then switch to windowed mode). If you run it in full screen mode, the effect is much like playing on an arcade machine, except that the sound of your Mac’s fan screaming may alert you to the fact that your CPU is being pushed to the max (unless maybe you have a newer multi-core system). You can mitigate this somewhat by going into the options and under the “MISC” section, set the “PROCESSING POWER” to a lower value.
Our screenshot (showing the options selections) don’t really do the game justice, because we selected a low screen resolution to minimize page download time. They could have used a typeface that renders a bit better, but it’s not as cramped as it looks here if you’re using a decent screen resolution. Not that it matters when you’re playing the game - you’re looking at colored falling bricks, which could probably be successfully rendered on an old Apple II, though the overall effect wouldn’t be nearly as good as what you are getting here.
We do wish this game didn’t monopolize the CPU quite so much (we watched the Activity Monitor during one run in Windowed mode and Cubes was far and away the biggest user of CPU power, even making Firefox look like a lightweight), but then we did play it quite successfully on a dual-core Mac Mini without any apparent problem (well, except for the fact that Big Crab stinks at these kinds of games!)
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