Speed and strategy in this space battle

If you miss the taste of good ol’ arcade classics, this is the perfect opportunity to go back in time and enjoy a true space battle.

Kobo is a Windows remake of Xkobo, a popular space shooter for X11 systems. This modern version achieves to maintain the look and feel of old arcade space games, including waves of colorful enemies to defeat, loads of explosions and a fast-paced soundtrack. Plus, it features joystick support so if you have one, plug it to your PC and you’ll really feel back in the eighties!

Kobo’s aim is simple: kill whatever moves on your screen and don’t let your spaceship get in touch with anything. Your mission consists on destroying enemy space bases by firing their weak points: some of them are really easy but some others require more shooting. In fact, the only difficulty I found was the spaceship’s movement itself: instead of drifting along, your ship moves following a grid pattern (such as, for example, the snake game in mobile phones) which takes a while to get used to.

Kobo is an old-style arcade game that provides nostalgic fun, but requires some ability to control the spaceship’s movement.

Kobo Deluxe is an enhanced version of Akira Higuchi’s game XKobo for Un*x systems with X11. Kobo Deluxe adds sound, smoother animation, high resolution support, OpenGL acceleration (optional), an intuitive menu driven user interface, joystick support and other features. Recent versions also add a number of alternative skill levels with slightly modernized gameplay. Kobo Deluxe uses SDL for graphics, sound and input, which makes it possible to build and run the game on pretty much anything.

See what the game features:

• Fast paced retro arcade style gameplay
• Smooth, high speed 8-way scrolling
• Very simple controls – the game is about speed and strategy
• 14 different enemies; fighter ships, kamikaze attackers, proxy bombs and more
• 50 maps, each with it’s own feel and strategies to figure out
• Maps are built as you enter them – each game is unique!
• Structured audio technology – hi-fi sound in a tiny download
• OpenGL support for extremely fast and smooth animation
• High resolution support up to 2560×1600 – five types of scaling
• Supports any display color depth – dithering for 15 and 16 bpp
• Supports control by keyboard, mouse or joystick
• Runs on pretty much any hardware and operating system
• All code and data is Free/Open Source! (GPLed game logic; LGPLed engine code.)