Gaming Daily A-Z

The driving game FOSS scene is quite healthy. With actively developed games like VDrift , SuperTuxKart and Ultmiate Stunts , and relatively complete games like ManiaDrive , Stunt Playground , and Torcs , there's quite a decent choice. But there is always room for more! :-) Motorsport aims to become the most "realistic simulation of wheeled vehicles". It's been going since 2003 so there's a lot of development history and it looks like it's got a bright future with several consistent developers moving it forward. It is unclear whether this will end up as a racing game or a stunts game or maybe just a generic driving game, but it looks fascinating and has lofty goals. Stunts 2005 is a fan remake of the classic Stunts game from yester-year. To be fair, a lot of the FOSS driving games seem to take inspiration from Stunts aka 4D Sports Driving. Anyway, Stunts 2005 comes with it's own level editor but development seems to have halted after the initial r...

Ultimate Stunts 0.6.2 is out. I always loved the original Stunts 4D game that inspired this. Ultimate Stunts looks a little more free form than ManiaDrive and reminds me of an old game Car & Driver whose graphics haven't aged a bit *cough* *splutter*. That game was ace. I was did a 49 rotation somersault off a cliff, bounced of the bridge, did several flips, and landed on the road. Tell me another game where you could be so Mick Jagger . There's a new Free FPS on the go. I say new, I mean "re-released with better graphics". It's Marathon Rubicon X which takes the original and drags it kicking and screaming into the modern PC world. I believe it is sprite based instead of 3D enemies, so is a modern throwback to the days of Duke Nukem 3D . I couldn't find any screenshots of Rubicon X. On the Game Tome I also found The Black Legacy Darkness 0.9.9 . This 3D Fantasy Sci-Fi MMORPG project looks something like a cross between Quake 3 and Anarchy Onli...

Due to personal reasons Free Gaming has been a bit slow lately. Here's a few snippets... Next version of True Combat: Elite will have HDR lighting making it the first Free Software Linux game to ship with HDR lighting (thanks Albert Santoni) VegaStrike gets network deathmatch support - go register and play on the online server ManiaDrive 1.2 bugfix release "no more crashes" Warzone Resurrection 2.0.4rc2 OpenArena 0.5.0 - btw it's now a standalone download (and has been for a while, I think) Scourge! 0.15 which should be much more playable than previous releases with lots of work on making the character movement better Frets on Fire makes guitar playing fun ;-) I'm off to suffer having lost my gal to her desire to be free! If only the female mind were open source...

There's been an update to Mania Drive . This one introduces a beginners storyline, which is a welcome addition to any non-expert drivers given the difficulty of the previous release! Lots of bug fixes, lots of new levels, and this game is definitely now one of the leading Free Software driving games available. Also of note is the 2.1-beta2 release of Freeciv . I checked out the SDL version and it is really looking nice. However, the term "beta" means beta. The release is laden with bugs. Loading it up, the "Start New Game" option is disabled. After manually starting and connecting to a localhost server, the "Server Settings" button was impotent. Still, I remembered "set aifill=6" to give me some opposition although I couldn't work out how to make them tougher (and was too lazy to google) so played on easy AI. I'll start by saying that they really need to review most of the UI - it is a usability nightmare. Everything is iconi...