Gaming Daily A-Z

A somewhat neglected topic here on FreeGamer are classic puzzle games, and OGS Mahjong is definitely one of the gems of this genre: OGS Mahjong 0.9 promo The stable 0.9 release of this game can be expected shortly, so brush up your Mahjong skills or take the opportunity to finally learn the rules of this age-old classic (like me).

Trees in Coldest Video:  Coldest's Crazy Bots Bots were added to the mech fighting game Coldest. If you would like to help playtest the game together with the developer, follow the project's news feed  (there will be an announcement for a session sometime soon) and get the git version via: git clone git://coldestgame.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/coldestgame/coldestgame coldest Build instructions here .

Synchronized shooting in Mass Blaster Mass Blaster is one of the most intense arcade shooters for Windows and Linux. You will take control of two ships simultaneously to blast away at the invading Square Army. On your left, take down enemies with the red n' rad Trigerus. On your right, command the cool blue Pythagora to wipe out your foes. Choose from 4 modes of difficulty to fight your way through 10 gutsy levels. Only those with the skills to pilot both ships at the same time will go on to become High Score Heroes. This game shares a vein with games like Avoision and pumps adrenaline. Intended for one player, Mass Blaster plays superb with two pilots as well. Just get a keyboard emulator and a joystick to avoid key locking. Code is under GPL, while all other assets are under the not-so-free CC-BY-NC.

It's been big news online lately that MegaUpload was shut down.  Along with it, many of the other annoying, wait-60-seconds-and-fill-in-this-captcha-or-upgrade-to-premium file sharing services have stopped offering public downloads.  A lot of people are understandably upset about this, since in the case of MegaUpload, they don't even have access to their own files anymore. This blog post isn't about whether it was right for MegaUpload to be shut down.  There's plenty of debate going on about that, and it's something that I'm not personally interested in taking part in.  What we do know is that there were a substantial number of people using MegaUpload to distribute pirated media, and, let's be honest: a lot of people are pissed off because piracy just got a lot harder.  If you're one of those people, and you're angry and suddenly in search of ways to entertain yourself in the wake of the big shutdown, this post is for you. You may have already realiz...

Scenes from Flesh Snatcher Flesh Snatcher is a bloody jME2 fps with fast movement and dodge-bullets gameplay that is low poly and low-tech enough to run smoothly on a netbook (tested: Asus EeePC 1000H). Most models were made by the author, Arbaro was used for tree generation, FSRad (shared source, noncommercial) was used for lightmap generation. FOSS-incompatible textures from CGTextures were used. The code license is not all that clear, I seem only to be able to find the jME license in the archive. This active thread reveals more info and gives an opportunity to talk to the developer.

Traction Edge is a story driven, turn based strategy game set in a Steampunk Victorian England. Gameplay is similar to the Gollop Brothers UFO or Lasersquad series in that you have "Action Points" to spend during your turn. The game also borrows heavily from roguelikes in both look and feel. Traction Edge is currently under development and is considered alpha software. It is playable but limited. v0.2 was released for the Annual Roguelike Release Party 2011 . It is distributed as source only and requires SFML 1.6 (not 2.0) and cmake to build. Current Features: Turn based gameplay 2-4 member squad teams Destructable terrain Victorian Steampunk setting SFML based, rescalable on the fly, 16x16 graphical tiles. Planned Features: 16-20 static levels with full story arc Random content, procedural maps Procedural tech tree Civilians Z-levels You can keep track of all development activity using this feed . The Linux distro that I use doesn't support SFM 1.6 any more, which make...

A new beta of the Megaglest based standalone game Annex: Conquer the World has been released recently: Annex beta2 game-play Most important news for me: real Linux support out of the box now ;) But there are also a few other nice changes, like additional tileset and units etc. The game also has its own master-server now, thus not depending on the Megaglest one any longer.

As reported previously, the release of the Tremulous "reboot" TremZ has been pushed back to Spring 2012 and with news of their project lead "Volt" having stepped down due to burn-out, things don't look too bright for that date either... Showing off the high art quality of the new alien models However the new guys in charge seem to try hard and aim to improve community relations ( see their slightly older forums ) further by opening up a development blog . Here they also posted a link to their PR image dump from which I took this very recent picture: The new human marine model (high-poly base for normal-maps) I have to say that I am really impressed by most of their artwork so far, and last time I asked they assured me that it will be almost completely licensed under the CC-by-SA (with a sad exception of a few audio works that will be CC-by-SA-NC upon request by the creator). So I hope I will not be proven wrong when saying: TremZ will the THE FOSS game of 2...

RetroBlazer alpha demo Looks pretty nice, this Darkplaces based game, doesn't it? And you can download a RetroBlazer alpha demo now... take it with a grain of salt though as my intuition tells me that this is probably planned to be a commercial release based on a FOSS engine like SteelStorm . While this is of course not bad in general (in fact personally I think there should be more FOSS based commercial games), I always get a lot of flak in the comments for posting about games with un-Free media or such ;) On a side-note however (after playing the demo for a short while) I have to say that it is a bit too retro for me (no proper mouse aiming? is it like 1996?). I was hoping for more of a hybrid than a strait Doom reimplementation ;)

Wizznic! received more GUI enhancements [ video (00:57@YouTube) ] TORCS 1.3.2 brings menu music into the game [ .ogg  (05:50/7.1MB) ] Knights 0.19 features deathmatch [ description ] Humm and Strumm  is an in-dev co-op game engine [ design .pdf (156kB) ] SuperTux ' level contest has four entries so far [ submission thread ]

Wizznic! Wizznic!  supports mouse & touchscreen. [ Video ] Code available on GitHub . MeAndMyShadow MeAndMyShadow 0.2rc1 is out. It features tutorial, in-game help, a new default visual style and an improved editor. video: Epiar 0.5.0 game start Epiar 0.5.0 has been released: UI clean-up Expanded missions system Sound and music additions Main menu Editor greatly expanded Misc. bug fixes GemRB logo GemRB 0.7.0 was released recently. Their wiki received a clean-up as well. The engine re-implementation runs on Android and iOS. BG, TotSC, BGII, ToB, IWD and HoW can be played start to end. Some features are missing and there are some new features too.

As the FPS resident gamer here at FreeGamer (I am playing usually under the nick poVoq btw ;) ) I am keeping you up to date to the newest FPS updates: Hot of the press: the cosmic edition (1.2) of Red Eclipse was just released; Lots of new maps and feature additions (and they toned down that annoying hit-sound a bit). Sadly their trailer-contest has not resulted in a cool video yet that I could post here, so take this opportunity to make a cool one ;) Another new release ( 7.53 ) comes from the AlienArena guys, which seem to have made some nice updates to their engine to speed up the performance on higher settings. Alien Arena 7.53 Quick rundown of other news: War§ow got a new website , and there is a nice teaser webpage up for TremZ (no surprise to me btw, that they pushed back their release date by 2 months). But the engine ( OpenWolf ) they are using is making nice progress also as you can see here ( and here in a video: integration of Newton Physics and more ).

video:  Stunt Rally ver. 1.4 - gameplay From an announcement email: Hi, after some months of silence we've released version 1.4 with a huge changelog. Some highlights: 71 tracks 2 new cars (TC6, NS) Fixed shadows (self shadowing, lightmapping) Better looking shaders (fresnel effect, reflectivity/specular maps)  SSAO effect (Screen Space Ambient Occlusion) Sound effects and particles for water or mud areas Improved in-car camera Rear gear throttle-brake inverse option Also, installing this game just got a whole lot easier for linux users as there is now a binary Linux release (32 and 64 bit). Downloads page (Linux and Windows): Project's page (including info and links): Screenshots gallery: Trigger Rally 0.6 has been out for two months by now but now there are some high-resolution gameplay videos available: video:  Trigger Rally 0.6.0: Desert Rush video: Trigger Rally 0.6.0: Pulp: Cars Can Fly The game is much simpler in all aspects than Stunt Rally ...

SuperTux level design mistakes to avoid SuperTux just got a forum on FreeGameDev.net and started a level contest. Rules: A snow tileset theme  Submit your levels here until the 27th of January, when voting will start Voting on levels will end on the January 30st Winners will be announced January 31st Have fun One level per person Top few levels will/can be made into an add-on or If admins are okay with it top levels will get added to incubator island (if winners are okay with it - pick cc0 or cc-by-sa for your level) One entry per person Please make a new level. (not from and existing worldmap/levelset) Don't vote for your self. Voting will take place in a new forum topic. Feel free to comment on peoples levels, most people would like to hear what was wrong or good with their level. Get the  editor , read the editor guide (and just play around, as the guide is incomplete ;) ) and check out the style guide . You can upload submissions in  this thread .

Bits & Bots: controlling two robots at once Bits & Bots is a real-time puzzle game about figuring out the codes to moving robots around and get them to their targets most efficiently. It comes with binaries for 32/64bit Linux and Windows. Gpl code, by-sa art. Goblin Camp 0.2, probably running some fancy tileset Goblin Camp 0.2 brings a stockpile of changes: Piles replace Stockpiles. Everything is allowed and containers get automatically shuffled to where they are needed. Diseases will weaken and eventually kill your population if you don’t do anything about a growing population. Migratory animals will sometimes cross the map The spawning pool expands and spreads corruption in a smoother way, it’s improved from the abrupt way it was before. Cowardly creatures can now also panic if they encounter another panicking creature Death messages have been improved to give a bit more information, and a bit of variety has been added to them as well. Constructions strobe under the cursor ...

Two 'towers' down in MiniMek Urbie Defense A little top-down defense game was released  under GPL (art & code) as a new year's present. It shows nicely, how libre art can be used for small game programming projects. These use some art assets from megamek ( http://megamek.info/ ) and therefore these games are also licensed under the GPL  A straightforward interpretation of the GPL applied to assets. I'm afraid though, the images of MegaMek might be incompatible with the GPL, due to Battletech copyright and/or trademark. The game has good performance but little complexity except for a Missile Commander-esque twist: getting hit reduces player's spacial ability to shoot. According to the project page , more games with the same graphical theme are to be expected. I'm looking forward to them! Video: MM:UD