Gaming Daily A-Z

Lasers, rockets, shields, health regeneration, pixels. You know. The good stuff. Just nicely packaged with levels of just the right duration and hardness, persistent upgrades, shaders, reverb... Two buttons are enough to play, since that was one of the themes of Ludum Dare #34 , in which the game came #74 among 1638 jam entries. Super Space Invader Review Supser Space Invader was made with  LÖVE  (v0.9) and thus runs on Linux, OS X, Windows. The source is available on GitHub under  zlib/libpng .

Purely by chance, I found an obviously abandoned but still fun to play mini tower defense with a skippable tutorial level and two playable missions, beautiful graphics and performance settings. To be a master is to spam en mass So you place towers and the shoot enemies that move towards your base. I know this! Being an impatient player type, I skipped past the tutorial and was annihilated in level 1. Short enough messages in a hard enough tutorial level The degree of my destruction was such, that I was thankful for the tutorial being there at all. Even though I did die in it, it taught me enough about the all-or-nothing early game (which some might refer as to "unbalanced") to get my strategy right. Turn off for speed. Turn on for awesome! You get 3 towers: that allows you to build more tower, one that allows you to shoot more and one that shoots. You can block paths and create mazes. There are no tower upgrades and that's okay. All the plot. Space to continue. Take that ...

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...

Following the release of the Torque3D engine under the MIT license ( latest release 3.5 here ), there was a lot of back and forth regarding a port to Linux (the engine actually used to have a good Linux port, but that one was dropped a few years back). At some point there was even an official Kickstarter crowed-funding attempt, which however failed to reach the estimated funds (but nether the less more than US$10k were pledged). After that things quited down, but several people continued developing a OpenGL renderer and Linux port. Now it seems like all these efforts seem to be near a somewhat usable Linux port or at least that's what I understand by following this forum thread . Torque3D running on Xubuntu 12.10 In the short term the most interesting application of this Linux port is probably that the creator of RotC has announced on his currently running indigogo campaign to liberate (and update) the game, that now there will also be a Linux port. Great news if you ask me, so d...

Quietly in the background a group of open-source and Linux enthusiast websites (full disclosure: including FreeGamer ;) ) has developed a new platform for promoting open-source games: http://www.linuxgameawards.org/ One of its regular features will be a monthly award and a related promotion drive for the winner on all affiliated sites. As a start, our community came up with the first 10 nominees for the January 2014 award and you can now vote for your favorite game of those here . P.S.: One of the nominated projects, SuperTuxKart, had a new release today also. Don't forget to check it out and vote for them if you like it.