Stairways Software Releases Greebles -- In a departure from their focus on Mac Internet tools like Anarchie, NetPresenz, and Internet Config, Peter Lewis's Stairways Software has released their first game, called Greebles. Stemming from the two-dimensional maze and block-pushing genre of the arcade game Pengo, Greebles ups the ante with over a dozen types of blocks, numerous types of Greebles (the bad guys), both friendly and nasty computer players, and 100 built-in levels. As you'd expect from Peter Lewis, although you can play Greebles alone, it's also a multi-player game with up to four people playing on a single computer and up to nine computers connected over the Internet (unfortunately 33.6 Kbps modem connections don't provide sufficiently high throughput or sufficiently low latency - see Stuart Cheshire's Bandwidth and Latency articles in TidBITS-367 and TidBITS-368). A Greebles Tracker Web page displays public Greebles games so you can join network games in progress. Greebles requires a 68040 or PowerPC-based Mac; System 7.0 or later; 3 MB of RAM; and a 640 by 480, 256 color-capable system. Network play requires Open Transport 1.1 or later and a TCP/IP network. Greebles is $15 shareware with multiple copy discounts available, and registered users can build their own levels.

<http://www.stairways.com/greebles/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/series/1014>