Earlier in the week, Koonsolo Games revealed that the Mystic Mines game had sold more copies of the Linux version than the Windows one, since it's launch in February this year. Though there are no specific sales figures, the blog post reveals that the Mac version sold best with 42% of the sales, Linux came second with 33% and Windows brought up the rear with 23%. That's impressive enough for the supposed 1% of PC users that run Linux, however it gets better, as Koonsolo's figures also show that Linux users were actually the most likely to buy the game based on site visits by operating system, otherwise known as conversions.

Trying out the demo

I decided to take a look at what all the fuss was about, so I downloaded the 64bit demo for my Ubuntu 9.04 machine. Double clicking the mysticmines icon in the folder did nothing, so I open up a terminal window, navigated into the decompressed folder and tried running the game from the command line.

./mysticmine

Leading to a slew of messages

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/cx_Freeze/initscripts/Console.py", line 29, in
File "monorail.py", line 47, in
File "hud.py", line 3, in
File "ExtensionLoader_pygame_font.py", line 12, in
ImportError: libSDL_ttf-2.0.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So, Mystic Mines uses SDL, and apparently the the TTF font extension wasn't installed on my system. That's quick to fix with synaptic, and even faster using the command line.

sudo apt-get install libsdl-ttf2.0-0

It'd be handy for inexperienced users if games could pop up an error message for missing libraries. After that it was simply a case of firing up the demo by again double clicking on the mysticmine file in the folder. If you decide to buy the full game then you'll probably want to install it properly so you have an icon on the menu

How does it play?

At first glance the game is quite simple and easy to understand without needing instructions. The player is presented with a pseudo 3D railway track upon which a ore cart is moving rolling under it's own power. Clicking the mouse on the highlighted junctions will cycle the through a series of track pieces that change the path that the cart will follow when it reaches the junction.

The objective is to guide the cart around the track a certain number of the coins that appear on the track in the given time limit.

Picking up a coin will place another somewhere else so you have to then switch the next junction to send the cart back around to collect it, resulting in another coin appearing, and so on. Speed is of the essence as the cart moves along quite quickly, so it's easy to accidentally have it take a wrong turn a few times, wasting precious seconds.

Based on the demo, it looks like a well designed game that would especially suit action/strategy gamers who want to kill a little time.

Why not try the demo yourself? It's free!