"For people who enjoy swearing at their computer, Bastet (short for Bastard Tetris) is an attractive alternative to Microsoft Word." (taken from http://hublog.hubmed.org)

Description

Have you ever thought Tetris(R) was evil because it wouldn't send you that straight "I" brick you needed in order to clear four rows at the same time? Well Tetris(R) probably isn't evil, but Bastet certainly is. >:-) Bastet stands for "bastard tetris", and is a simple ncurses-based Tetris(R) clone for Linux. Unlike normal Tetris(R), however, Bastet does not choose your next brick at random. Instead, Bastet uses a special algorithm designed to choose the worst brick possible. As you can imagine, playing Bastet can be a very frustrating experience!

Further information is in the README file inside the package, so go and grab it now.

Have fun with Bastet, and don't complain if it calls you "scarso" (poor) ;-)
For information, bugs, feature requests, and highscores submits you can send me an e-mail (address in the AUTHORS file).

Reviews

On April 2005, Slashdot has published an article about Bastet, which makes me very proud of my creature :-)
Go read the comments, as usual they are the best part of Slashdot.

Download

Linux source

• version 0.41: features a brand-new AI, which should provide a much less boring gameplay and avoid some bugs of the previous one. I have not done any work on the interface since my primary goal is having a good algorithm, and not the eye-candy. This new version somehow avoids the endless queues of the same block you saw in 0.37: unfortunately, this makes the game a bit easier (now you can do five lines with much less effort). If you do not like the thing, you can tweak the figures at the bottom of bast.c, which should look like this:
  const int bl_percent[BLOCK_TYPES]={75,92,98,100,100,100,100}; that is: 75% chance you will get the worst brick, 92-75% for the second one and so on (no chance to get the best three bricks). Editing to 85,95,100,100,100,100,100 will considerably increase the difficulty of the game (TODO: some better way to choose this...). Moreover, the old 0.37 algorithm can be compiled in (instead of the new one) by simply renaming bast-old.c to bast.c
• version 0.37: First public release.

Linux binary

• Debian: Bastet is in the main archive, just type apt-get install bastet and you're done. Thanks to Debian maintainer David Moreno Garza for packaging it and including it into the repository.
• RPM package for Fedora Core 3, thanks to Jan Kasprzak.

Windows

• version 0.41: Salvatore Meschini has ported Bastet to Windows; so, if you don't think it is too frustrating to run both Windows and Bastet on the same pc, here it is. The package includes both the source (for MinGW32+PDCurses) and the pre-compiled binary.

Unsorted patches and material

• A patch for getting Bastet 0.41 to compile under Mac OS X. Thanks to Lawrence Gold (who sent me this patch), Chris Clepper, Saad Mahamood and Tim Douglas for reporting the problem and its solution.
• Another patch which fixes an improper use of the select(2) call, submitted from Rudolf Polzer (Sorry for the late publishing. By the way, it is Peter Seidler's fault, not mine :-) )
• Abandoned Bricks, a nice SDL tetris clone by Milan Babuskov, features a "Bastard mode" based on Bastet.

Future

Bastet would really need some more developing, unluckily I am quite busy at present so you will have to wait some time to see a new version. I must improve the algorithm, the one in the present version is straightforward and is still to be merged with the 0.37 one.