Gaming Daily A-Z

Fall of Imiryn r792 Annchienta is an isometric RPG engine. It is being used by the console-style RPG Fall of Imiryn (FoI), created by the same developer. The terrain is kind of 3D while everything else is good old pixel-ish sprites. So how playable is the game? Well, it has NPCs and enemies, it has end bosses and maps and character levels and skills and spells. There is grinding and there are savepoints. Sounds complete? Oh right, story! It has story too. I don't know how much though, still have to find the right spot to catch some fish first... EDIT: Oh, I forgot, I made a video recording of FoI, which you might or might not enjoy. Spoiler: I die. I must admit that because of FoI I will go to bed one hour later than planned. (Is it clear that I'm trying to say that it's interesting enough to waste your time on it? Because I'm tired and not sure my phrase there is 'gettable'. O_o Moving on..) Lavirinto 3D 0.6.2 Lavirinto 3D is now of version 0.6.2 and com...

I had a few links collecting that I wanted to get off my chest. Nothing is worse than having a folder full of old links that would have been interesting, but are now out of date. That's a lie, I accidentally drank off-milk this morning - that was worse. Still, I'm digressing! Eisenstern Significantly better than off-milk, is the activity burst on the new Eisenstern development effort. Basically the lead Sauer devs, who had been creating Eisenstern as a side project from their work on Sauerbraten, have turned it over to the community. The community has regrouped using Sourceforge and now (with 24 registered team members) it is one of the most active projects on the whole of Sourceforge. Using the rapid collaborative level creation abilities of Sauerbraten as well as all the other features that hard work has delivered over the years, I predict good things for Eisenstern - to finally fulfil that void of a good Free Software single player first person role playing game. Or...

Sauce the Game is a new video review effort for open source games. His first review was of Tremulous, obviously a favourite game of his. It'll be interesting to see where this goes, good luck to him. FreeOrion 0.3-rc7 was released. The changelog since 0.3.1-rc6 contains quite a few new features. I don't quite understand their versioning system. To me 'rc' means 'release candidate' which means, really, you shouldn't be adding features. Especially since this is a sub-1.0 codebase, why not just do 0.3.1, 0.3.2, ..., 0.3.n? Oh well, I should be thankful that version numbers count for much less than effort and there's plenty of effort in this game which really looks lovely. Sauer NYC Lots of action in the Sauerbraten forums if you ever look. Somebody is trying to recreate New York City and doing it in style. Other stuff focuses around trying to remedy the problems causing Sauer to be rated the worst FPS shooter - which in fairness it probably is....

Well, well, it's 2008. Happy birthday time! Thanks to Qubodup for posting, and I'm sure he'll be doing so regularly this year. I'll just catch up with a few of the other game releases over the festive period that snook under the general radar, and suprisingly so too. Simutrans 128 Simutrans 0.99.17 got released on December 20th. It's a "stable candidate" due to the increasingly few major bug reports the developers are receiving. The game has improved immeasurably over the last year. Given that Simutrans is now Free Software, it's a bit of a shame that it doesn't get as much publicity as OpenTTD which (people forget) still requires proprietary data. They also have a new website at simutrans.sourceforge.net in addition to the community site www.simutrans.com . And, whilst OpenTTD engages in a still far-away effort to create a hi-res version of the game, Simutrans is already playable in 128x128 tile textures and looks fantastic. And you can ...

Did I not mention this Sauerbraten update ? I don't recall doing so, and I swear it was not a thread in their forum at the weekend despite being listed as posted on the 12th June. Anyway... it fixes a whole lot of bugs, adds graphical enhancements, and cleans up scripting support a little. Probably more of an update for people making mods/games with Sauer than players but, shucks, I love this project. Embarrassingly this was a 2006 release... *oops* There's the possibility of a StarShip Troopers: Last Defense , the Glest mod, becoming available for FreeBSD . The Java Classic RPG project has posted a snapshot for anybody who wants to play with it in it's very early stages of development. Work continues at an impressively frantic pace , soldiering away on features. Hopefully a modeller or two can start contributing to the project to make the artwork updates as impressive as those to the codebase. I keep pestering the Vega Strike team to make a new release. I, and ...

netPanzer netPanzer development seems to have resumed. "New" developer Krom Xp issued an update back in April that I'd not seen until now. He seems to have focused on making the game more stable, which is a Good Thing (tm). This action-strategy war game (doesn't action-strategy sound better than RTS?) is available for Windows and Linux and looks rather cool too - helped by formerly being a commercial game. The other day I was whining about the lack of single player open source FPS [or FPS RPG] games... well, d'oh, I forgot Eisenstern . A collaborative fork of Sauerbraten , the design for Eisenstern makes for very interesting reading. It will be one huge map with 5-50 hours worth of gameplay, very few limitations on what the player can do, with most story and quest work being done through the guidance of NPCs - although they can be ignored and you can slaughter everybody if that's what makes you feel good. That's not the only SP-focused mod appearing...