Recently I installed Linux on my computer to find out what all the fuzz is all about and although Linux is big enough to spend many a month learning I found that I was booting into Linux more often to play KPlumber than for any other reason and thus I decided to recreate the game for the Windows™ platform. The result is what you see here.

The main objective of Linkz™ is to connect all the open ends of the pipes, electronic circuits, roads or whatever tiles you may be using together so they form continuos shapes. And all this takes place in the form as a race against time.

A simple enough task you might think. Granted, a 5 x 5 map is not very difficult to complete (try and top my 6 seconds!) but the bigger the maps get the more complex the shapes will be and you should be busy quite some time solving a 50 x 50 map.

For those who don't want to have the game take this long there is also the option to choose any size between 5 x 5 and 50 x 50 and there are also some default sizes to choose from so you can compete with your friends.

And competing with your friends (or foes, as the case may be) couldn't be easier; Hiscores are kept in seperate files which may be shared in a network enviroment and even if your not using a network, combining hiscore files is as simple as pasting two files together in Notepad and the next time you start, Linkz will sort them automatically.
To stop the losers from winning, the hiscore files are encrypted so they can't be edited by the average hacker.

You can also download our special Linkz Hiscore Combiner program, which allows you to combine directories containing the Linkz hiscores into one single directory easily so you can share your hiscores with all your friend. The Hiscore Combiner automatically combines, sorts, verifies and cuts the hiscore directories at high speed.

You will have access to a range of 10 different sets of tiles with some very strange and interresting alternatives, the smart person will learn how to use the characteristics of every set of tiles to his own advantage as Linkz will allow you to swap tiles during the game.

Besides having these 10 pre-designed sets of Tiles you can also use your own self-made sets or use sets downloaded elsewhere. You can create custom tiles using any graphics application and download the Tiles Development Kit (TDK) for information and some samples and templates.

Although all maps can be solved (and the bigger may even be solved in multiple ways) you might get into problems when you're working with a big map and lose track of the open ends, for those people there is an option to graphically mark all the open ends so you can quickly see where there's more work to be done.

Control is done by mouse, left click to rotate the tile below the mouse pointer clockwise, right click to go the other way around. Most of the other features are conveniently available through the Function keys so you can quickly select a new map if things get rough.

All in all Linkz has turned out to be a small but fun and varied game and although it will not give you any technological wizardry and weird effects it will run on any plain Windows system, including your company's Windows NT machine!

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Thanks to Burkay Genc, now you can play Linkz on any platform! Using the Java Runtime Environment, you can play this special Java version of Linkz on pretty much any hardware configuration you can imagine. Ranging from Mac to Linux to PDA's to heavy Unix boxes, if your system supports Java 1.1.3, it will run this game!

JLinkz  has been developed by Burkay Genc (visit his website at http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~bgenc) with minimal assistence and tips by us regarding our implementation. As a result this game has a set of it's own rules (i.e. time is added for every move made) and may play a tiny bit different but it's still the same brainteasing puzzles.