Gaming Daily A-Z

Scourge Up on scourgeweb.org is the announcement for Scourge 0.17 which introduces proper save-game support, earthquakes, more storyline and game media, as well as bug fixes. Scourge is a 3D adventure game, similar to Baldur's Gate with a Nethack flavour. Earlier versions were frustrating to play as there were problems controlling your party but these problems have pretty much all been ironed out in the last two versions. Cultivation 7 is also available. This is an interesting and original game, but I don't think I can beat the Freshmeat description so here's a quote: You lead one family of gardeners, starting with a single individual, and wise choices can keep your genetic line from extinction. While breeding plants, eating, and mating, your actions impact your neighbors, and the social balance sways between conflict and compromise. Cultivation features dynamic graphics that are procedurally-generated using genetic representations and cross-breeding. In other words,

Remember Mech Commander 2 ? Well, you might not, because I was originally thinking of Mech Warrior 2 when I saw it [I loved that game] but Mech Commander 2 looks cool none-the-less and Microsoft have released it [some time ago] under their own shared source license [whatever that means]. No free download on the page other than a source download so I don't quite get what the point of that is. The only place I know to grab the source is on the liberatedgames.com page for Mech Commander 2 . So I guess this is only for fans to fix bugs as I get the impression the game media/data is not under a 'free' license. However there is scope for a Linux port if somebody were so inclined. I did not know the original GTA and GTA2 were freeware these days. Grab them from liberated games. I don't know whether they work in WINE. It was quite nostalgic running over people in a stolen car in top down chases. Atomic Tanks 2.0 final is out. Woo! FIFE 2007.0 is also available.

Blob Wars: Blob and Conquer 0.8 just got released, including boss battles. I haven't yet played it but it looks fun and a nice departure from typical FPS styles. I came across BallDroppings the other day. This is less a game and more a toy - although aren't games just a form of toy? Self-described as an emergence game, you draw lines off which balls bounce to create sounds. Imagine cross-breeding a bouncey ball and a music keyboard, this is probably what you would get. Somebody else has started an open source game blog, opensourcegames.blogspot.com . Competition? :P I got one of my less tech-savvy friends playing UFO:AI over Christmas. He only found out it wasn't a commercial game or complete when he "finished" the game and it popped up a message explaining this. So congratulations to the UFO:AI developers! It says something about the quality of a Free game if uneducated players rank it alongside commercial counterparts. Speaking of commercial(ish) game

I just came across two new(ish) open source gaming portals: www.OSGamer.org and www.OpenContentGames.org I also spotted this "royalty free" media resource site: www.omnetwork.net It's great to see more sites cropping up that are dedicated to open source / Free Software gaming, so go and use them and help open up the world of Free games to the masses. It's a snowball effect - the more people work on consolidating the community the more the games will get noticed. Also early in December OpenArena 0.6 was released. Originally a TC for Q3, it now is a standalone game using ioq3 . I missed it. I missed a few other things too but I haven't yet remembered those.

Happy New Year everybody! I apologise for the lack of Free Software game commentary over the festive season but I was busy damaging my health in fun ways. Anyway..... Brutal Chess 0.5.1 is out! Brutal Chess is a game inspired by the ancient Battle Chess . A quick follow up to the strangely-not-mentioned-on-happypenguin 0.5.0 release which introduces a new codebase, AI of various difficulties, md3 support, and generally lots of other major-update-goodness. The simpler 3D chess game glChess released 1.0.1 on New Year's eve. I am having a strange sense of de-ja-vu here because I have written this all before only I was under-the-influence of several substances and Blogger does not autosave drafts as I am accustomed to with GMail. Please implement this Blogger people! Atomic Tanks 2.0-beta2 is also out. Despite the "2.0" in the version number, I don't believe there is that much different between the 2.0-beta2 and 1.5a but it got the game mentioned on Free Gamer s