Gaming Daily A-Z

I was close to putting some kind of melodramatic title like "the beginning of the end" but it would have been, well, melodrama so opted for something more accurate. The blog is going into cruise control. Less posts, less frequently. Some time in the next week or so the forum RSS feeds will get integrated into the blog and this will basically mean the community gets to post news here and the blog itself will be more article focused. My part in this, other than the actual integration work, will be that any game updates I find I will now post in the Game Announcements section in the forum. People who want to make a fuss about their games can post in the Game Showcase section . Projects that need help can post in the Help Wanted section . All three threads will be the focal point of the blog frontpage. These days there's a lot of activity in the forums and it's a better place to go for info than the blog. Also there's plenty of project-specific news to be foun...

You know you wake up sometimes and look in the mirror and GAH WHO IS THAT CREe... ah was me today. After a dab of water, some tasty scran, and the gleam is back in my eye. Acer to make an "Open Standards" console ? Intriguing. People selling FOSS games on ebay ? Scandalous - but is it illegal? Navy Seals: Covert Ops Y'know how people go " True Combat: Elite would be ace if it was open source" - well it appears we've always had the option of Navy Seals: Covert Operations . Just brought to our attention , this mostly-complete and apparently rather fun Quake 3 nearly-TC is struggling to keep going. I'd never heard of it before, which means their public relations policies either didn't exist exist or completely failed. Why a nearly-TC? Well during the process of moving from mod to total conversion, the development stalled . The developers put it in a Google Code project and moved on, which is a shame because it looks like a very good game. They...

Open Football Open World Soccer Open Football development has resumed lately. I downloaded from svn and compiled, and whilst it's not a game yet, it looks very nice and the author clearly knows his stuff if you see the planning and structure that is going into e.g. the animation side of things. Still, if you are a soccer fan and want an ace 3D football game then get in touch the project . Open World Soccer , a Sensible Soccer inspired game and the successor to Yoda Soccer (which required the proprietary Blitz Basic), is also starting to take shape. Whilst not yet playable, it's not far away from a playable demo release according to the developer. JCRPG has a new " contributionary release " which introduces a very nice UI as well as a few other world features. What has been, up until now, just a framework is now starting to morph into a game. Not to be outdone by Teewars which has recently exploded onto the 2D deathmatch scene, the OpenLierox team have been h...

OpenLander OpenLander ( Forum Showcase ) is a 3D lunar lander style game. Whilst currently more a tech demo than a game, it looks very interesting and strangely reminiscent of an old Mac or Amiga game that I just can't remember, although of course with much better graphics. It's written in Python with Soya3D, and could be the type of game to make me eat previous words about Python not being suitable for non-trivial projects. Less talking, more youtube: Anybody remember that old Mac (or Amiga) game that looks similar to this? Update: Thanks to reader Michael Reed who points out the 1988 Amiga classic Virus - that's the one! Powerball Powerball ( Ogre Showcase ) is an, "arcade game where you have the roll a ball into the target. Sounds simple? Yeah, now the cool facts: Items like beamers, Coins, switches, you can control it by holding a Chessboard at the bottom of your Webcam (even in Linux)." That last bit about a chessboard/webcam combo sounds great. The...

In case you didn't notice, there's a bunch of flags under the title of the post. As pretty as they are, they are not window dressing, no no, they allow you to read Free Gamer in different languages. I have an army of monkeys in my house tapping away on imported laptops and every now and again they succeed in translating Free Gamer so I decided to put the fruits of their labour online. (Thanks to Qubodup for this!) SuperTuxKart SuperTuxKart now has it's own category in the FreeGameDev forums . Hopefully this will help the game's community and development as STK 0.4 shows a lot of potential. The forums have been more successful than I ever expected. 200+ users, 5000+ posts, 500+ topics, and amazing hosts. Hopefully this is a sign of things to come and the community will burgeon from here on in. TK-RemiX is looking for Python programmers. It is a 2D isometric action game using the maturing engine FIFE . The reason I'm pushing this here is they have some awes...

Battle for Wesnoth Well the big release of the weekend is Battle for Wesnoth 1.4 ( changelog ). Not too much to say about this game that hasn't been said hundreds of times before. It's simply the best open source game project going. Hundreds of contributors, graphics rivalling contemporary commercial 2D games. Over version 1.2, Battle for Wesnoth 1.4 brings 7 new campaigns, major UI improvements, major multiplayer improvements, many improved graphics (the portraits are stunning) and many bug and balance fixes. Wesnoth is so popular that the response to this release seems to have overwhelmed parts of their website. The wiki and forums are unable to cope. I'm wondering where they will draw the line with this project though. The main developer has since moved on to SilverTreeRPG . Obviously they could keep adding campaigns, refining the graphics etc, but surely at some point you want to say "this is it, this is the final v1 of Wesnoth" and look at making v2 w...

Hot on the heels of the rather amazing Nexuiz 2.4 release is this years main release of Alien Arena . Alien Arena 2008, or Alien Arena 7.0, or Alien Arena 2008 7.0, however you term it, brings a lot of improvements and new features to a game quickly gaining popularity. Alien Arena 2008 also offers a change to it's overall theme, moving towards a slightler darker, more serious tone, while still retaining a good bit of it's retro style, creating an interesting marriage between classic and modern sci-fi. This resulted in completely new player models, many new weapon models and textures, and seventeen, yes, seventeen new levels! The transformation is nothing short of remarkable. There are major improvements in weapon effects, per-pixel lighting, texture resolution, and resource usage, as well as the addition of a cross platform server browser, FUSE. Weapons have been tweaked for better balance, and movement has been enhanced with the addition of dodging abilities. Alien Aren...

Glest 3.1.2 has been released ( changelog , linux ). Fixes, minor improvements, good to see some sustained activity for the project and hopefully it keeps on going like this. SuperTuxKart 0.4 is being packaged as we speak. Eventually (although not yet as of time of writing) they'll be up on Sourceforge . It goes from being quite a naff game (STK 0.3 was basically TuxKart with better graphics, and TuxKart has some serious gameplay flaws) to being really quite a good game. Now it is a bit of polish and some better tracks away from being a great game. I suggest you try it out, the improvement is massive, and if 0.5 brings the same level of improvements as this release, then STK 0.5 will be a very good game indeed. There's a bit of competition around the corner though. Platinum Arts Sandbox 2.1 was released. This is a sandbox game aimed at kids and this version contains a kart racing mode so kids can build their tracks in the very easy Sauer environment (PAS is a Sauer d...

Bos Wars 2.5 has been released. Beautiful particle explosions are the highlight. I couldn't find screenshots of this online yet. I downloaded and had a very brief go. It seems to be the standard RTS fare, reminiscent of the classic C&C games. I'm not sure whether I just completely missed it, but the game lacks a story element, something that personally I really look for in this type of game. Bos Wars itself isn't sufficiently spectacular or innovative that it can be just a multiplayer RTS and attract a lot of plaudits. Also the project does not have a web forum. When I spoke to the devs about this, they were adamant that a forum would just be inactive and hence make the project look inactive, and that they preferred just irc / mailing lists. My opinion is that a forum is an ideal place for players to talk about a game and report bugs or make low level contributions (guides, screenshots, feature requests). Now that Bos Wars is close to being a complete game, a ...