Secret Maryo Chronicles – a great open source game
Every now and then I like to play a video game or two and one I discovered recently is Secret Mayro Chronicles, an open source (ie free) game based on Nintendo’s classic Super Mario World. It has received some very positive reviews so I thought I would give it a try. A quick look through synaptic showed me that the game is included in the standard Ubuntu Linux (windows version repositories under the packages ‘smc’ and ‘smc-data’ so I installed them and went to play.
The first thing I noticed was that the game was not included in Gnome’s ‘games’ menu which is not uncommon in the world of Linux games. No problem – just open a terminal and run the command
smc
and you will be up and running…normally. Unfortunately it seems that the supporting libraries for the game were not packaged correctly so when you try and run the game you will get the following error
CEGUI::Exception: DynamicModule::DynamicModule – Failed to load module: ‘libCEGUIDevILImageCodec.so’:libCEGUIDevILImageCodec.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
CEGUI Exception occurred : DynamicModule::DynamicModule – Failed to load module ‘libCEGUIDevILImageCodec.so’: libCEGUIDevILImageCodec.so: cannot open shared obj
which looks a little scary. This can be fixed by running the following commands in a terminal just once.
cd /usr/lib
sudo ln -s libCEGUIDevILImageCodec.so.0 libCEGUIDevILImageCodec.so
sudo ln -s libCEGUIFalagardWRBase.so.1 libCEGUIFalagardWRBase.so
sudo ln -s libCEGUIXercesParser.so.0 libCEGUIXercesParser.so
All this does is set up a few symbolic links so that the game can find the files it needs. The game still won’t appear in the menu but it will run just fine from the terminal.
The version in the standard Ubuntu repositories is a little out of date but I have been playing it for the last half an hour or so and its great fun. You could go over to the games official website to get the latest version if you wish but I am happy to wait for it to be upgraded in the repositories.
If you have any children then I imagine that they would love this game and you really can’t beat it at the price. There is a windows version available too from the official site but I haven’t tried it so have no idea how it compares to the Linux version.