This is a great project in order to bring in new programmers. It's so simple, but so entertaining. If fun little "toys" such as these keep popping up, it's sure to create more interest for the rest of the population. :)

I hope this will be included in future Shoes versions. Shoes is already awesome for making (portable!) retro-games. This will add another great deal of retro-ness. ;)

He wrote it for Hackety Hack, which will be built on Shoes for its next version. Whether or not it's included in Shoes itself or just HH will remain to be seen, but I'd love to see it in the former.

for python loving folks, who don't want to miss out on the fun...

you can do this easily with pygame.org too... Or with pyaudio(a good wrapper of portaudio).

Also the latest pygame pre-releases include a wrapper for portmidi... so you can do midi sounds easily.

can't get it to run on OS X. It complains about an initialization error with portaudio :(. Maybe the MacPorts version of PA does not work with it?

  curl -LO http://www.portaudio.com/archives/pa_stable_v19_20071207.tar.gz
  tar xzf pa_stable_v19_20071207.tar.gz
  cd portaudios
  ./configure && make && sudo make install
  cd ..
  curl -LO http://www.complang.org/ragel/ragel-6.3.tar.gz
  tar xzf ragel-6.3.tar.gz
  cd ragel-6.3
  ./configure && make && sudo make install

Now go back to bloopsaphone and

  make clean
  make ruby

(Make sure "/usr/local/bin" is in your $PATH.)

I also had to modify the portaudio Makefile to remove the -arch flags, and it worked then.