Gem Drop X

Gem Drop X is a fast puzzle game. Placing gems in vertical lines destroys them and ultimately leads to completion of a level. It has been compared to "Tetris meets Space Invaders." The author is Bill Kendrick of New Breed Software. It is written in the C programming language. A version was included on the 100 Great Games for Linux shovelware collection.

Description
The game consists of 20 levels in which gems of different sorts move towards the player. Placing three stones of the same kind in a vertical line destroys them as well as similar adjacent gems, which may result in a chain reaction. The larger the resulting chain reaction, the more points are earned. For solving each level, a specific amount of chain reactions has to be triggered. The player is confronted with four different gems in the levels one to 15, in the last five levels there are eight stones.

Special objects
Special objects are triggered when an adjacent gem explodes. There are three of them:
 * A bomb destroys adjacent pieces.
 * Wildcards start chain reactions with all adjacent gems.
 * The stopwatch stops gem movement for a short while.

Source code and development
The source code was ported from Gem Drop and is written in C. It depends on SDL, SDL_image and has SDL_mixer as an option needed for music and sound effects.

License
The source code license is GPL 2. The license(s) of the image, music and sound files is unknown.

Trivia
After waiting for about one minute, a moving image of the author will appear on the main menu.