Gaming Daily A-Z

I had an opportunity the other day to do some game playing with my son - so I had the constraint that the games had to be playable by a 7 year old, meaning favourites of mine like Fish Fillets were generally ruled out. First up was the ever-popular Super Tux . The young lad was an experienced campaigner at this so it didn't hold his attention for too long. However, whilst we were playing, I did notice a number of things that I think need addressing in the game: Complete lack of originality They have copied Mario down to the core. It's a clone with different graphics. Every Mario aspect (gameplay, enemies, etc) has a "skinned" equivalent in Super Tux. Really, it's one thing to be inspired by another game, but to clone it down to the last detail? I don't know, maybe I'm being harsh (after all, I'm a Freeciv fan) but I feel there's a big room for improvement in this regard. I especially don't like the fire flower; can't we come up wit...

UFO:AI 2.1 was released ( changelog , download ) yesterday. This is turning into an incredible game. It takes the best elements of the original UFO games and builds on them with contemporary technologies to produce what really has to be one of the leading - if not the best - open source games available. If you want to see how cool it looks, just go over to their screenshot gallery . Importantly this version adds the foundations for a storyline. So subsequent releases will include a story to compliment the gameplay. Awesome! :-) 3D RPG game Scourge has seen quite a lot of development since it's last version. Notably, the game has been localized and translated to Italian, and the UI is being overhauled with a completely new inventory screen that is more traditional i.e. similar to games like Diablo. With those new features and lots of bugs fixed, hopefully a new release will follow soon. The 3D post-apocolyptic RTS Warzone 2100 Resurrection team snook out a 2.0.6 release ( c...

Ok, I made a few minor improvements... it'll take a while to get this right. My advice; do not hold your breath. You'll die! :'( Shall I be on-topic for a change with a few game mentions? Ok. I'll start with Those Funny Funguloids ! This 3D "mushroom collecting" game looks gorgeous , sounds lovely, is open source, is simple and fun, but is currently Windows-only. :-( Please port it to Linux, somebody! All the libraries it uses ( OGRE , Lua , FMod Ex ) work on Linux, so it should not only be feasible but quite easy. A game that does run on Linux, though, is Widelands . And they just released their latest version of the game. If you remember and like Settlers II then you'll love this. It still feels a little rough, mostly to do with the slightly unintuitive UI and lack of tutorials, but it is definitely getting there. Music tip: TV Rock feat. Seany B - Flaunt It (Dirty South mix) Ok, the rest is diatribe about FG & Blogger so if you don't wa...