Gaming Daily A-Z

Today I'd like to highlight two Artifical Intelligence based games - The breve Simulation Environment and NERO: Neuro-Evolving Robotic Operatives . NERO (1) NERO (2) NERO describes itself as, "A unique computer game that lets you play with adapting intelligent agents hands-on. Evolve your own robot army by tuning their artificial brains for challenging tasks, then pit them against your friends' teams in online competitions!" It's not as scary as it sounds. In a training mode you place and play with your robots, teaching them combat tactics. The gameplay is essentially training your team to beat somebody else's, trying to evolve your squad into an undefeatable automated army. Version 1.01 was released in 2005, and version 2.0 is currently under development. I originally thought NERO was open source, but there is no evidence of this on the website although it seems to be the plan . However, with decent 3D graphics and innovative gameplay, this is probably a...

It's been slow news on Free Gamer, partly influenced by alcoholic intake and partly by the fact not too much happened in the last several days. XMoto 0.2.1 was released as was SuperTuxKart 0.2rc2 . Of course, anybody following happypenguin.org will be aware of this. XMoto development continues to be strong although the game is still pretty tough. This SuperTuxKart release addresses a few big bugs that made 0.2rc1 difficult to play so please playtest it if you had problems so the final SuperTuxKart 0.2 release can be as solid as possible. Here's a small but interesting thread on the Linux Game Tome forums where a few people highlight their favourite Linux games. They're all mentioned here but still it's nice to get the opinion of more than one person [since this site is basically all my opinion]. There's an ongoing request to make Machine Ball the LGT "Game of the Month". I think the current "Game of the Month" idea seems to be languishi...

UFO: Enemy Unknown was released by Microprose over a decade ago. For those not familiar with it and it's predecessors, or for nostalgia, here's a thorough review of one of the all time great games. It is abandonware these days and as such can be downloaded for free although you'll need DOS emulation at the least to be able to play it. The UFO series of games has a massive fan base and has such there is a number of fan-made games. Probably the highest profile project is UFO:AI , a 3D remake of the original UFO: Enemy Unknown. Now it's come out of the shadows of closed development, the project is thriving and it is evolving into a showcase open source game. There's still a little way to go - you're going to struggle if you are not familiar with standard UFO gameplay - and there are frustrated players but their issues are being addressed and, with great graphics and great music, once playability is polished the final 2.0 release should be one to savour. T...

Sauerbraten There's a new Sauerbraten download and this one is looking beautiful. Just check out the screenshot... wow! This update introduces reflective water, performance improvements, bug fixes, and lots of other little features. Well the time has come to upgrade the Free Gamer site. Things to expect: Tags Blogger beta introduces tags so now I can tag all my posts. What will this mean? Automatic listing of article types plus game name tags - so you can get a list of e.g. all reviews or e.g. all posts referencing game X. I'll be going back through my posts and tagging them all appropriately to adhere to this. Sortable Games List I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do it yet, but using an AJAX table I'll have the games in a proper list sorted by genre, type, etc etc. I'll still maintain my own little top-ten but a full list where you can order by what you are looking for will make browsing the list much easier. Plus it'll be on a separate page so ...

Nexuiz 2.1 is out ( changelog ). Not much to say other than this builds upon the success of Nexuiz 2.0 and continues to establish Nexuiz as a first class open source game. I forgot to mention (sorry!) that Savage: The Battle for Newerth is now officially freeware . I read this a while ago but at the time I couldn't find links to where to actually download it. These days it's listed as a free download on the official website - at the time I came across this it seemed more conjecture than reality that it was freeware. Savage is one of these hybrid RTS/FPS games that seem to be cropping up more regularly these days e.g. Tremulous . It's got great graphics and is free (I would attach a screenshot but I broke Firefox!) so, well, why not!? Still, I wish they would make games open source rather than just abandoning them as freeware so at least the community can fix any problems. I guess S2Games are probably a little scared of competition for the upcoming Savage 2 . Spea...

I don't know how this game isn't more well known, but I only just found out about XEvil . This game is a cross between Commander Keen and Quake and it's very fun, if a little dated. Action packed and chaotic, it's all about extreme violence platform-style. Be warned, this game contains lots of violence and lots of adult language so really is not one for your kids should you have any. I'm keeping an eye out for the next release of Privateer Remake or Privateer Gemini Gold . In the latter they are busy taking the rather garish low-res base and npc graphics and overhauling them , so the next release should be much more pleasing on the eye. When I downloaded PGG, I found the low-res bases too much of a clash with the gorgeous 3D space flight and it put me off considerably. There's also a new release of Battle for Wesnoth around the corner. The amount of people contributing to this game is phenomenal and as such version 1.2 will look absolutely gorgeous. The...

Does anybody remember Battle Chess ? I loved that game. I think it was one of the games that really got me hooked on using a PC after years of dedication to a spectrum. Well, great news Battle Chess lovers, there's an open source modern equivalent: Brutal Chess . It obviously needs better models and there's plenty to do (current release is 0.3 alpha) but it's an exciting find nonetheless! There's a new Warzone 2100 release - 2.0.5rc1 ( changelog ) - which addresses a number of problems people had with 2.0.4, especially single player games. If you downloaded Warzone and found it buggy, it may be worth trying this update. The author of Balder2D is looking for help testing packages for Debian/Ubuntu. The game is an overhead 2D shooter. I can't really comment on the gameplay because I don't have time to try it right now. I just came across FreeAllegiance . If I ever hand out awards, this game will win an award for the most uninformative web page - no scre...

There are imminent releases for OpenCity and Pingus . OpenCity 0.0.4beta is looking a lot more playable than it's version number suggests with the TODO looking like 0.0.5 will contain most elements you'd expect in a city simulation game. Pingus will probably be a 0.7 alpha release because the project is struggling for developers and Pingus 0.6 is getting withdrawn from distros as it needs the deprecated Clanlib 0.6 to run. It'd be nice to see a new Pingus release since the game is pretty much there, it just needs a few more levels and a tiny bit of polishing and it'll be better than the original Lemmings titles. SuperTuxKart 0.2rc1 is available for download. There's been a lot of code activity so I'm waiting on the next rc to try it out although I think you need a good PC to play it - I've heard a few murmours that the graphics engine really needs optimising. Enough of games that are gearing up to releases, there was a new game announced on the Linux ...

Hero of Allacrost Hero of Allacrost is a Free single player 2D RPG game that's been in development for some time without any real release. Posted in the Wesnoth forums (rather than their own) is an update on the status of the game which is looking like it could see at least a playable demo release in the near future. I must admit that after the initial flurry of activity that followed the initial talk about this game in late 2004 and early 2005, it seemed to have suffered the usual "my dream game" death that afflicts a lot of early start-up Free games. However it looks like the main developer(s) was patiently plugging away and congratulations on what looks like shaping up to be a fine game. A while ago I mentioned Stunt Playground , a free stunt car racer game that was released under the GPL. Well, the same guy Walaber has released another freeware (not GPL) game - a rather cool looking 3D trampolining simulator called, er, Trampoline . Check out the website for scr...

Fish Fillets NG is the fan-project result of the open sourcing of the original commercial title Fish Fillets from Altar Interactive. It is a fiendishly challenging and addictive puzzle game and is refreshingly original in a genre epitomised by evolutions of popular classics. You take on the role of two fish who are caught up in a fairly silly plot to, I think, save the ocean. The gameplay is oriented around using the two fish - one is small, the other strong - to escape a series of fiendishly difficult levels. Clever Level Design Lovely Graphics You can only use your fish to move obstacles in certain ways. They can lift objects - although only the shark can lift metal objects - and push them over ground or other objects. They can't carry objects on their own though and moving an object directly over the back of a fish or dropping an object on a fish will kill it. The level design is very clever. On many levels, not only must you perform a sequence of manoevoures to overcome o...