Gaming Daily A-Z

So it seems that Scorched 3D , Wormux , Hedgewars , and Atomic Tanks are all clones of inspired by... Worms ? No. Scorched Earth ? Nah. Gorillas ? Nope. Tank Wars ? No. That's right, their roots go all the way back to a 1980 on the Apple II under the name Artillery . Even earlier ascii versions from as early as 1976 are reported. Now that's real history - all other games (pong and chess excepted) are modern upstarts. ;-) Atomic Tanks home • screenshots • download One of the older and more mature open source Artillery clones, with version 0.5 first available in January of 2003, Atomic Tanks doesn't seem to have the online presence of it's contemporaries. This is probably because it doesn't look that nice, with garish colours, coarse widgets, and almost badly drawn sprites. Update: Markus comments, "I am sure that the graphics and such in Atomic Tanks are intentional. It is a fairly faithful reproduction of the original Scorched Earth, and for those of us...

200 posts to this blog now. :-) Pingus Pingus revival efforts are looking for bug testers. That means we can expect a new Pingus release soon, and even sooner if you head over there and help test it. Also looking for testers is iteam , the Gunbound/Worms clone. Test packages are avaialabe for Windows and Ubuntu. Links and compilation instructions can be found in the Ubuntu forums thread where the game concept was originally incepted . There's another snapshot release of JCRPG too, which has very lovely foilage lately. Now a few modellers have started contributing to the project so in the next few weeks hopefully we'll see a bit more gameplay development and perhaps the beginnings of the first game to use JCRPG which itself is a framework project for creating classic RPGs. Somebody commented on yesterday's article that perhaps the Flightgear team should be avoiding the version number 0.9.11 given that the game is a flight sim. What do you think?

Good news today. Not only did I finally succeed in getting to name a What the Duck strip, but there's a new Thunder and Lightning release. There are some sweeet new features, focused around AI and an aircraft carrier as well as purty graphical enhancements as you can tell from yonder youtube video below. Also the game is now available as an autopackage making it easier to install for Lusers everywhere, as well as Wusers (!?). That's the first time I've embedded a youtube video on this blog. Should I do it more regularly? I've avoided it in the past but I quite liked that one. iteam progress The iteam project is making rapid progress. Only incepted about a month ago they have made tangible progress. Whilst you still can only get this Gunbound-inspired game via SVN for the time being, it surely can't be long before an actual release should they keep up this kind of momentum. I'd never heard of Gunbound before I came across iteam. Showing my age a bi...

Before I start, a quick note of two changes made here. Firstly the main articles are linked on the front page now - they were getting buried too quickly. Secondly I reorganised FG forums to condense them a little - there were too many subforums. Also FreeForums seems to be a bit more stable now so There are handy links on the right of FG for the latest forum entries and help wanted sections. I encourage you to join in the open source game chat. :-D I'm going to open with a Web 2.0 gripe. If you don't like gripes, skip the next paragraph. The Ubuntu forums recently "upgraded" with a "Web 2.0" feature to display the thread tree . It's a feature of little or no use in a forum where people just want to read page by page. I have a P3 1000 laptop with 512 megs of ram. My iGoogle homepage does not seem to help matters either. Firefox becomes sluggish, sometimes hangs for 5-10s, with this new feature. Is this what Web 2.0 is? Bloat? Crapware in ...

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 ...