Having been busy and stressed out lately I haven’t had much time for tinkering or gaming. This is where smaller games that you can play as a quick distraction can help, as they are easy to squeeze in between other jobs, and todays game is one such game.
Xsokoban is obviously a clone of the old classic game sokoban. The original was made for the PC-8801 way back in 1982 by Thinking Rabbit. It has since been implemented and ported to pretty much every system, Xsokoban is one such port for Unix systems running X windows.
There isn’t anything really remarkable about this particular port. The quality of the graphics is quite reasonable, and it works well on pretty much any system I’ve tried it on including my older machines such as the Sparcstation 20. I’ve even played it over SSH via my comparatively slow ADSL2 connection, and it worked really quite well.
Interestingly the game has been studied in the field of computer science, it turns out it’s quite a difficult problem computationally, being PSPACE-complete. Lots of different researchers have worked on different algorithms for solving and producing optimal solutions. The complexity certainly makes me feel better about getting temporarily stuck on level 6!
As far as enjoyment goes, it’s really enjoyable for the puzzle solver in me, even when I’m stuck. It doesn’t take a huge commitment to play for a short while, and is quite challenging! This particular port isn’t any better or worse than any other, so don’t go out of your way, but NetBSD and FreeBSD users will find it easy to get running.
sparcie 
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