Chips Challenge - Tile World

[Level42]

OK, for those who never played Chips Challenge, shame on you One of the best games ever I played, and definitly the best game on the Atari Lynx.

Chips Challenge was developped in an amazing 10 weeks time, but you can never tell that from the game ! It was written by Chuck Sommervill, who worked at Epyx and did a lot of work on the Summer Games, Winter Games series.

Basicaly it's a Tile-game, (Chuck initialy called the game Tile World). Remember Sokoban ? Remember Boulderdash ? Remember Crystal Mines II ? Well add these games together, multiply fun, intelligence and gameplay by 10 and you've gat Chips Challenge.

Now, if you want to play this on your cab you could of course get an Atari Lynx Emulator (handy) and find the game. However, the quite low resolution of the Lynx is ok for the small Lynx screen but not very pretty on a 25" CRT.

Some time ago (2 years ?) I found out there was actualy a PC port for the game, made by (heaven help !) MS. I found it, played it and was completely disappointed. The game just doesn't feel the same. Movement of monsters is jumpy, while the Lynx is very smooth.

However, recently I found out that there is an open source emulation of Chips called Tile World (I wonder where they got that name from ? )
This can play both the Lynx version and the MS version (why would you want that), but with updated graphics and sound. Of course I played the Lynx version and it feels just as smooth playing as the original. I've not yet played it on my cab (only on PC) and I'm sure you will need to reprogram some keys to control the game (not the arrow keys though).

However, for copyright reasons, the distribution does not have the original 150 levels, but "home made" levels instead. If you read all the info, you will find a way to get the original levels back.

You will find Tile World here:
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tworld/

Much more info about Chips/ Tile World canbe found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chip's_Challenge