Gaming Daily A-Z

Welcome to a Free Gamer special! People often accuse the Free software and open source game sphere of lacking depth, that there are few good games. In 2009 Free Gamer is dedicated to dispelling this myth. As part of a series of articles on specific genres, highlighting the games that people develop for the love of development in order for us to play, I humbly present a set of reviews of open source city building and tycoon games. I try to be fair and critical, and I note that these games are all enjoyable in their own way. They are all certainly worth a look. OpenTTD OpenTTD I started with OpenTTD 0.6.3 - being the only formerly commercial game I'm covering today, it is good a metric for the others. Still, it is not quite Free software, you need the abandonware Transport Tycoon Deluxe to run it. The community has been working on a project called OpenGFX to create both drop-in and high-resolution graphics to replace the proprietary materials. They are getting there, but I ...

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...

SuperTuxKart 0.4rc1 has been released. It replaces the physics engine with bullet for collisions, and subsequently is far more fun to play. Some track improvements, a new character, better AI, music, and other features. I'll be honest, I thought 0.3 was unplayable because of the terrible collisions. I had a quick go of 0.4rc1 and it's much more fun. I still think the tracks are generally lacking but the game being more fun should encourage more contributors so hopefully we'll see some good tracks contributed this year. If you love MarioKart or just love SuperTuxKart, and have some good ideas for tracks, sketch them down and contact the STK team who are very receptive. Also they are looking for original gameplay ideas to give STK it's own identity, so contribute those too if you have any. FreeTrain Bloodmasters There's been a major development with the FreeTrain project . For those who don't remember, I ran a campaign asking for help translating FreeTrai...

Linux users can now get their hands on the latest version of FreeOrion , the turn-based space stategy project inspired by Master of Orion games, without having to compile it themselves. See this thread for details. It worked well for me, although the game is not easy to figure out and is incomplete - I couldn't work out how to do too much. However for fans of the genre the project is definitely worth following and I'm sure the FO guys would be glad of any extra help. There's murmours over at the FreeTrain project - tangible progress on an SDL port is evident . One of the developers posted a screenshot with a basic UI much closer to the original A-Train games. Moving to SDL is the major hurdle for making FreeTrain run on Linux - currently it uses .NET and DirectX so can only be run on Windows. Forunately the project is moving towards Mono and SDL. :-) Er, what else is happening? Not too much... There's an opinion article on Linux Lookup discussing the problems ...

There's another binary version of FreeTrain available, with additional translations, plugings, and fixing a serious bug in the previous release. It still is Windows only although the next step for the project is to make it run on SDL/Mono instead of DirectX/.NET therefore making it cross-platform. Simutrans development continues, 0.99.12 now available . I wish they'd open source the game. The original reason not to open source it (by original developer Hajo) was to prevent loss of control of the game (which is a daft reason IMHO - if game development is going well, there will be no fork apart from to take the game in a completely different direction). Lately, since Hajo stopped working on Simutrans and gave the choice to lead developer prissi and other contributors, they declined to open source it because they see no additional benefits from changing the current development model. You can't argue with that, as long as they don't stop working on it, but when they ...

The other day I came across Battleship 88 . Assuming it was freeware, being Windows only, I didn't mention it but did download it. Given the lack of a source code download on the website, I was a bit surprised at being forced to agree to the GPL before installing it. Despite what the word Battleship imbues - some form of strategy - the game is much more arcade in it's nature. You steer your battleship around blowing the <expletive> out of anything that gets near you. The game is complete - the graphics and sound are polished and it even contains an introduction to the gameplay (which is topical). Anyway, those who followed the link might have noticed it's to an organisation called www.gamecreation.org and they have completed a few games . I wonder if they all are available under the GPL and, if so, where the sources are? One game they list, which I've been looking for since forgetting it's name, is Shotgun Debugger . It's a top down shoot 'em ...

Overgod Overgod , an abstract shooter using Allegro , is a fast paced top down shooter. It's fun although pretty tough, and has a nice retro feel but with good modern graphics. It's one of those games you can pick up and play for 5 or 10 minutes, let off some steam, then be back to whatever it was you were doing without having lost too much time. It's available for Linux, Windows, and Macs. :-) Cube Legends (formely known as LOZ:Cube) is a Cube mod, inspired by the Legend of Zela series of games. Since Cube is getting a bit old in the tooth and has been superceeded by Sauerbraten , somebody has stepped up to work on Cube Legends 2007 which will bring this popular Cube mod up-to-date to run on Sauerbraten. FreeTrain has gained another developer, and progress on fixing up the codebase continues. Even better, there is an additional plugin set which contains something like 200+ plugins for FreeTrain, and in the coming weeks it is being translated as well. There'...

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...

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...

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...

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...

[UPDATE 2009] FreeTrain was translated quite sometime ago, thanks to people who saw this campaign and helped out! It still only runs on Windows but there is hope of a port to Linux - contact the team via the mailing list if you think you can help. There is a project , website , forum . [/UPDATE 2009] FreeTrain is a clone of A-Train. I can't find much information right now (please comment if you know where to look) but it's a long-running series developed by ArtDink and is primarily marketed to the Japanese. I remember playing A-Train 3 about 10-12 years ago and quite liking it. The problem with FreeTrain is that it's only availabe in Japanese. The game needs localizing and translating. I have spoken to the author before and he's open to contributors. From the website: I wanted to do a proper localization of FreeTrain to English at some point, but the game just doesn't have enough interest outside Japan to justify the effort to myself. The lack of interest...