Gaming Daily A-Z

Open Football I'm really excited this morning. Go on, ask me why! Well, since you asked :-) it's because I came across a new football game project... Open Football . Ok, it's only available from SVN , the game is far from complete, but look at the screenshot. It looks full of potential! Project description: "Open Football aims to become the new best multiplatform soccer game that everyone can enjoy. Providing arcade style playing while still mantaining the manager side of the game ensures hours of high quality, nail bitting fun." I'm giddy just imagining it. I hope they set up some more infrastructure (think nicer phpBB forums, mailing lists etc) so people can get involved. As all you budding developers [should] know, infrastructure fosters communities. No infrastructure, no community! And the SF.net forums are a pile of stinking < censored > so don't rely on those. ;-) So, yeah, I want to install Freeciv 2.1beta3 on my Linux laptop. Wha...

Wormux I had a go at Wormux last night. It's a Worms clone, closest to Worms II. I'm impressed, this is a well done game although it lacks is AI. Once it has AI, it will be one of those awesome games that everybody should have (like Frozen Bubble ). There was a game looking for testers... I forgot what it was though. :-( Another game that needs a bit of help testing new developments is Battle for Antargis . Development seemed to have stopped earlier in the year but fortunately it has restarted. A bit of testing and ironing out of any major issues and they'll make another release, so go help out if you have time. Battle for Antargis Battle for Antargis is one of the more original FLOSS games (inspired by Powermonger which older readers might remember), so it would be nice to see it progress further. Now that FreeTrain in English development has begun, I might make another project to resurrect another FLOSS game. At the moment I'm thinking either Emilia Pinball...

I had these grand plans for today, but instead I slept through two alarms and got to work 2 hours late, and forgot what my plans were. *groan* Eat the Whistle ActionCube Anyhow, onto relevant matters, that previously-imminent VDrift release is now official . Go get it, honestly it is a good experience. And it looks great too. :-) I played Eat the Whistle for the first time yesterday. Any attempts to run it on Linux had failed even though it has been ported, but I thought I'd have a crack on my Windows laptop and (despite a few graphical glitches) it worked! It's good fun although whenever the other team had the ball I struggled to locate the player I was in control of. However in terms of gameplay feel, it's quite nice to play and a little reminiscent of Sensible Soccer although more dynamic but not quite as sharp. Not sure if I've mentioned this before, so I'll mention it now... ActionCube looks fun. I might have a bash at it later in the week. Think Count...

Firstly a quick update on FreeTrain . The main game has now been translated, so should compile and run on Windows. At the moment, though, there are a few things to be addressed before it can be officially released and also it probably needs porting to SDL to run on Linux as - although Mono is implementing WinForms - it makes a few DirectX calls. That and I'm too lame (in combination with VS2005) to even make it compile on Windows. FlowFlowMania , a Pipe Mania clone, showed up on Freshmeat today. Sadly there's only 2 playable levels and graphics for a resolution of 320x240 but it's early days yet so hopefully development will continue. I loved Pipe Mania when it came out on my ZX48+ . Since I was commenting on FLOSS platform games (or lack of) the other day, "Steve" brought to my attention his game - Danger Man . I gotta say, although it's early days for this game (don't expect much), it was a fun to play for a few minutes. It's only v0.1 and th...

I didn't have an opportunity to sleep last night so inaccuracy, incompleteness, general rubbishness, etc, to be expected. ;-) FG has come a long way since it started. I got sortable tables working yesterday for the main list so next step is to fill out the list properly and create the other lists. More tweaking is required on the template, but I think I'm in a position to finish off the upgrade next week. Not today. In case you hadn't guessed I'm a little light on subject matter today. TecnoballZ TecnoballZ is a breakout game with an anime feel. The graphics have a nice oldskool feel to them, the sound is entertaining, and importantly the game evolves very quickly. Too many breakout games leave you waiting for ages to nail the last few bricks - but with weapons and multi-ball and all kinds of enhancements that quickly build up you never seem to suffer that with TecnoballZ. It's fun for a few minutes. :-) There's stuff happening over with Windstille , a ...

Egoboo 2.3.6 is released! This is a major development in what was a dead game. Egoboo used to be a darling of open source gaming, so I'm hopeful it will rise like a phoenix and restore it's reputation. Somebody has joined the FreeTrain localization effort! Daniel Markstedt, who also contributes to FreeCiv under the handles dmarks/hima, has started translating the game into English and posting patches to the mailing list (soon to be in SVN). The VDrift team are gearing up for a release. I downloaded the latest test autopackage and, I must say, I was impressed. Aside from a clunky menu, this felt like playing a commercial racing game. Nice graphics, nice car handling, nice tracks. It took me a while to work out how to get started [you need to press 'w' to shift up a gear to start a race, even with autoshift enabled] but it was a lot of fun after that. :-) I believe this will be a landmark release for VDrift that will see it rise to the challenge of being a via...

Ok, I made a few minor improvements... it'll take a while to get this right. My advice; do not hold your breath. You'll die! :'( Shall I be on-topic for a change with a few game mentions? Ok. I'll start with Those Funny Funguloids ! This 3D "mushroom collecting" game looks gorgeous , sounds lovely, is open source, is simple and fun, but is currently Windows-only. :-( Please port it to Linux, somebody! All the libraries it uses ( OGRE , Lua , FMod Ex ) work on Linux, so it should not only be feasible but quite easy. A game that does run on Linux, though, is Widelands . And they just released their latest version of the game. If you remember and like Settlers II then you'll love this. It still feels a little rough, mostly to do with the slightly unintuitive UI and lack of tutorials, but it is definitely getting there. Music tip: TV Rock feat. Seany B - Flaunt It (Dirty South mix) Ok, the rest is diatribe about FG & Blogger so if you don't wa...

Ok I had a bad weekend and FG dropped down the priority list something rotten. Just when I needed spare time I had it all robbed by some annoying RL incidents. Normal service will resume probably next week now. Sorry! :-( The games list is available in a raw raw format here: http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2001/01/free-games-list.html Btw if anybody knows why there is a huge gap in that page, tell me... it'll save me a few hours working out why.

[UPDATE] Doing this redesign meant I had to upgrade the blogger template. As I feared I could not just go for the redesign behind-the-scenes. I had to upgrade the template to get the new blogger structure stuff. So no games list for a bit but I have backups so it'll be back online ASAP . Thanks for your patience. Complaints can be sent to this_is_free@be_happy.com and will not get responded too! ;-) [/UPDATE] Ok I'm finally taking the plunge. I have created new graphics (some of which are really cool, even if I say so myself), planned a new layout, and now the only remaining (and biggest) task is to migrate the games list (which you currently see on every page) into it's own page. I'm going to be pressing ahead with the template redesign today and putting up a bunch of new pages. Please bear with me whilst I mess up your RSS readers and generally create havoc. >:-) Back to the important stuff... FREE GAMES! VDrift A VDrift release is imminent although prob...

The Widelands team put out a release candidate for their next release, Widelands build10 , of their Settlers II inspired game. Check it out! Egoboo Now who remembers Egoboo ? Or the continuation effort that fizzled out? You know, the cutesy 3D roguelike where your characters waddled around? Well, there's a new place to go for Egoboo development. Several individual efforts have been released and now those efforts are being combined. The most notable ones are Egoboo 2.2.4 and Egoboo++ . Hopefully we will see a new release in very near future. :-) Pingus , the Lemmings clone with penguins, which seemed to have died a death at version 0.6.0 - which was a promising release as well with a nice playable tutorial island - has seen development restart. The original developer, and general FLOSS game hero, grumbel has been working on porting Pingus to SDL away from Clanlib . Whether this work will culminate in a release any time soon is another matter, but it is always nice to ...

I'll start with a couple of interesting freeware titles... A while ago I came across (but forgot to mention) Hidden and Dangerous which has been released as abandonware by it's commercial developers Illusion Softworks . Linux users will need Wine but other than that it's another free gift to the gaming community. Clonk Another game to highlight is Clonk This freeware puzzle game seems full of potential. However I found the controls unintuitive and the tutorial rather unhelpful - I couldn't get past the second tutorial level! Still it was interesting and had a nice old school Amiga-ish feel to it. Again it's Windows only but should work with Wine. I did a little article on IVAN the other day. It appears that IVAN development has stagnated but, no fear, the power of open source is here! The community created their own forum found at attnam.jconserv.net . There is an unofficial 0.60 version of IVAN as well as a fork called VLAD . Thanks to blogger user n...

Before I get onto my main topic for today, I'll note that Kimboot 1.00 got released today. You swing a ball and chain around and bloodily annihilate stick men. Lots of violent fun without being too gross. :-) I spoke to HellcatV today. For those who don't know, he's one of the original Vega Strike developers and pretty much the guy in charge of VS. Vega Strike has not released an update for over 2 years. On the face of things that might be a sign of inactivity but that is the opposite of the truth. The community and developers have been continuously active and there is massive change between the last version (0.4.3) and the current version. I'm trying to push them to release an update. "It's imperfect!" they lament. "It needs playtesting and bug fixing!" they decry. Commercial game companies have QA testers. Open source games have a community. Make a release, label it beta, and people will be happy to try it and report bugs. That...

Well not much really to talk about. I get back online after the weekend to see nothing newsworthy so today I will just talk about a few FOSS things related to moi. Although first, budding FOSS artists, check out this rather awesome animal print patterns pack that should boost your creative texturing efforts! It's CC share-a-like attribution licensed so basically no restrictions as long as you credit the creator. They are photoshop patterns :( but I'm sure there's a way to get them into el Gimp . I imported FreeTrain CVS (from sourceforge.jp) into SVN (on sourceforge.net) and set up a basic website: http://freetrain.sourceforge.net/ The next step is to get the thing compiling and have a dig around to see how deeply rooted all this Japanese stuff is, and to find somebody who actually knows Japanese. The game is written in C# and uses WinForms. However Mono recently got improved WinForms support so hopefully this will make FreeTrain run on Linux. :-) However that's...

cspop I wanted to mention it yesterday but held off... check out this post in the happy penguin forums effectively announcing a 3D RTS inspired by populus! Currently there is only an SVN repo and no official website but it looks like it's full of potential. I used to have high hopes for FreePop , a 2D populus clone, but sadly development fizzled out. This game - working title "cspop" - looks like it's actually further along in development than FreePop and is a much more exciting project. Whilst it looks a bit sparse, the author states (with grammar corrections): Note I have been concentrating more on the logic to start with, so the look is still a bit cheesy, but that will be looked on soon also. Logic is close to finished though. Random thought: I wish somebody would revive Emilia Pinball . I did suggest it as a GotM candidate at one point, but it didn't happen. Maybe when I've sorted out the FreeTrain stuff (*eyes look wearily up*) I'll focus o...

Another game whose development appeared to have stagnated was Glest . This 3D RTS was widely acclaimed as a leading open source game when it came out, with high quality graphics and solid gameplay. Although it lacked features, it seemed like the ideal platform to build a game that had depth as well as eye candy. Sadly development just seemed to stop but it looks like it's restarting, with the release of Glest 2.1-rc1 . Don't expect anything spectacular with this release but hopefully it's the start of a return of Glest development. However a game that has shown very nice steady development activity (something that always makes me happy) is VDrift . And a new release is imminent . With a host of new features that really add to the gameplay, this release... well, I'll let their lead developer 'thelusiv' explain: I'm pretty excited about the release...this will be our first in almost five months, and not only fixes a ton of problems but also adds lots of ...

Bygfoot Football Manager development has been resumed. *Cheers!* The latest unstable release is 2.1.1 and contains updates to the UI, the addition of a "luck" factor to make long term success more challenging, and new country definitions. Bygfoot is a good game. I played version 2.0 a fair bit because I've always been partial to football management games. However, the UI is atrocious. It's clumsy, it does things you don't expect, it forces you to do things you should not have to. For example... In football you tend to have a first team - that is, your 11 best players - with substitutes to cover that first team. So typically, assuming no injuries or tiredness, you always start with the same 11 players. This is by far the most common approach. However in Bygfoot when you make a substitution in a game, the "team change" is carried over past the game. This forces you to manually undo substitutions after every game. Being a management simulation...