Gaming Daily A-Z

F-Zero and Wipeout set the standard for the futuristic sci-fi racing games genre and inspire many game developers. Over the years, four projects of that genre were started and developed to a playable state that are now open source code: H-Craft by Irrgheist is a free sci-fi racer with IAP on Android. It is built with the Irrlicht engine and was recently released as free software  with freeware data. While gameplay is simple without pickups, boosts or weapons, the campaign keeps it interesting. The 180°-Turns used in H-Craft level design are very refreshing to the genre. CoreBreach is a commercial anti-gravity racing game with combat gameplay. There is a freeware dataset that allows compiling and playing a simpler-looking version. Being an Objective C project, it was unusual to compile for me on latest Arch Linux but possible . Campaign mode, weapons and split-screen multiplayer make it cover many bases. Racer  is the only project with 100% free as in freedom data, yet unfort...

Well what would you know. There actually was plenty happening yesterday just I wasn't looking in the right places... The assualt course racing game Sturmbahnfahrer has been renamed for reasons of political correctness. The new name is Stormbaan Coureur (dutch for "assault course racer") and there is a new release, version 1.5, which has save points, a half pipe, turntables, brakelights and more. It is currently only available as a source download , but hopefully that'll change soon. Whilst the game is aimed at Linux, it uses PLIB and ODE so is theoretically compilable on anything those two support (which is all major platforms). Crashtest Stormbaan Coureur is also the basis for another game - crashtest , the education crash test simulator for Linux. Interesting... :-) There's also a new version of the Atomic Tanks . It's a worms clone and the project makes regular releases. Good stuff. There's a lovely long post on the Vega Strike devblog from t...

VDrift continues to improve at a rapid rate, with somebody contributing rudimentary AI drivers . The next release should, therefore, be a little bit more fun to play as you get to race the computer as well as yourself! Ecksdee 0.0.9 was released. This includes a large city track. For those people who doubt that open source games don't often look very good, take a look at this video . Impressive graphics, I think. I look forward to more major releases. A few more tracks and some tweaked gameplay and Ecksdee should be a very good game.

There is a release imminent for Mars: Land of No Mercy , which got it's own .org domain name recently. This isometric strategy mech game is developing at a steady pace and sees version 0.1.2 released next week. New Ecksdee Level The next version of Ecksdee is shaping up nicely. There's some preview screenshots of a new level for the next version (0.0.9) one of which can be seen here. There's another level in development which is more ambitious and targeted for the 0.1 release of Ecksdee. The Ecksdee developers will be at the Crystal Space conference this weekend in Aachen, Germany. An Ecksdee talk should take place on Sunday at 1pm local time. There's another stunt-like Free game on the horizon: Sturmbahnfahrer . The game describes itself as, "Simulated obstacle course for automobiles." As such, the gameplay is oriented around using physics to complete the levels rather than racing. There's a curious new freeware game based on OGRE . The Bl...