Pingus – A Lemmings like arcade game for GNU / Linux and FreeBSD (Free Lemmings Clone)

Monday, 2nd January 2012

Some might remember Psychosis Lemmings that we used to enjoy back in the glorious days of DOS 😉 I remember Lemmings used to be among the played game in one line with other top arcades like Dangerous Dave, Commander Keen, Xenon etc.
The game used to be quite unique for the time and it was quite cool that it worked on quite old machines lime my old 8086 XT with 640kb of memory. It even supported two player mode! 😉

Lemmings arcade screenshot

I was happy to find out actually Lemmings remake is available in the Free Software OS realm . These Lemmings clone game is called Pingus
Instead of governing a group of lemmings which had to move to an exit door by making a save path using various tools and combination of team member character skills, the main heroes in Pingus are cute little penguins 😉

Screenshot Pingus, Lemmings game clone for Linux and FreeBSD

Pingus is built on TOP of SDL libraries and has a combination of awesome graphics and enjoyable music soundtrack and as a game play is a way better than its original predecessor.
If i have to to rank this game I would put it among the best 20 free software games ever produced for Linux / BSD.

ScreenShot Pingus on Debian Linux

pingus is available for almost all kind of Linux distritubions as well as is included in the FreeBSD port tree:

On Debian its available as a package ready to be installed with aptitude or apt by issuing:

debian:~# aptitude install pingus

For FreeBSD pingus is installed via ports tree, by running cmds:

freebsd# cd /usr/ports/games/pingus
freebsd# make install && make install clean

By default pingus will run in a Windowed mode, to run the game in fullscreen you will have to run it with the -f switch via terminal, or by pressing ALT+F2 in GNOME and typing:

$ pingus -f

The game is quite hard to complete in that resembling the lemmings. It has an embedded Mapeditor , by which new levels can be easily constructed and sent to the game developers (in that way helping the game development).

Pingus is also multi-platform, licensed under GPL2 and is also ported for Mac OSX and MS Windows, allowing others non free software users enjoy.
Pingus Windows and MacOS X binary as well as source can be downloaded here

Pingus Lemmings like Free Software Game for Linux BSD level screenshot

Playing Pingus has few benefits, one is it can be nice to kill some boredom (for sysadmins) or / and bring some good past gaming memories. It's also good for developing some elder people strategic thinking as well as very suitable for little children to help develop their intellectual (thinking) in solving complex consequential tasks. Pingus could also be beneficial for teens to develop organizational and math skills.

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2 Responses to “Pingus – A Lemmings like arcade game for GNU / Linux and FreeBSD (Free Lemmings Clone)”

  1. mass effect 3 gameplay says:
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    The writing was generally good. There were some places where I felt it was lacking but I’m saving my anger to discuss the ending. Also, character development is good, especially across the three titles; this is insanely difficult to accomplish in a game trilogy so kudos for that. There were several points in the game where a scene elicited an emotional reaction from me. In the last hour, that emotion was sheer terror that all this character development had been for nothing

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  2. Kaushik says:
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    Nice article ita very interesting and help full….

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