Math Evolver, needs to evolve a bit more….

Math Evolver is a game by DimensionM used to teach pre-algebra to middle school students.  While perhaps not quite as exciting as Halo, its very good.  Good enough that my older son is willing to actually think in order to play the game (at least when I won’t let him play Halo which, of course, requires very little thinking).

But I find it has a few glitches, at least the Mac OS X version.  Game play is good if you are the one who installed the game.  If not, well, you will find it crashes at points and you simply cannot get past some levels.  In level 5, you crash when trying to get the jetpack. Level 6 crashes immediately after loading the game level.  The problem?  Another game developer that seems to think that "personal" computers should be used by only one person who should be able to scribble any place on the disk they feel like.  Bad, bad, bad.  This should have stopped with Windows 95 and Mac OS 9.  Its a pet peeve of mine that developers should have good security habits when they write.  Files that need to be written by users should be written to the user’s directories, not to system areas.

If you find you can’t play the game, try the following:

cd /Applications/Evolver.app (or whever you installed it)
find . -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod a+rwx
find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod a+rw

Voile, you can now play as any user logged into the computer.  Of course, any user logged into the computer can now trash the game for everyone.  Lovely.