Gaming Daily A-Z

SMC 1.5: New particle effects and enemies You can now download version 1.5 of Secret Maryo Chronicles (smc). Lots of improvements found their way in: New World, many new sprites, replaced enemies, particle emitter, ambient sound, many fixes and more! The project is moving the game's visual style further away from it's Mario inspiration - I applaud to that. There still is a bunch of tasks for audio and 2D graphics artists though. A bit of a while ago, the platform game scored first place on yet another genuine top open source games list ™. Okay. The update on smc was actually just a cover up. You and I, dear reader, we have to talk. Text browser folks and RSS users can leave now. This is what Free Gamer will look like... maybe This blog will get a new look soon. If you care about the style of the text you read here, please take a look at the current work in progress and comment on it. Let me help you help me help you (help me?)

Glest 3.1.2 has been released ( changelog , linux ). Fixes, minor improvements, good to see some sustained activity for the project and hopefully it keeps on going like this. SuperTuxKart 0.4 is being packaged as we speak. Eventually (although not yet as of time of writing) they'll be up on Sourceforge . It goes from being quite a naff game (STK 0.3 was basically TuxKart with better graphics, and TuxKart has some serious gameplay flaws) to being really quite a good game. Now it is a bit of polish and some better tracks away from being a great game. I suggest you try it out, the improvement is massive, and if 0.5 brings the same level of improvements as this release, then STK 0.5 will be a very good game indeed. There's a bit of competition around the corner though. Platinum Arts Sandbox 2.1 was released. This is a sandbox game aimed at kids and this version contains a kart racing mode so kids can build their tracks in the very easy Sauer environment (PAS is a Sauer d...

Yoda Soccer Yoda Soccer 0.73 came out at the start of November - looks like that one slipped past most of the open source community. However it looks like 0.73 will be the last release for this Sensible Soccer clone. Whilst they have gone most of the way to recreating the classic game, the limitations of the platform used to create it (the proprietary BlitzMax) means the authors have created a new project, Open World Soccer , which will be a Sensi clone in C++. There is already an alpha release (very alpha) which shows off higher res graphics although not much more. For those people pining for a bit of Sensi nostalgia, try out Yoda Soccer which is relatively complete. The Castle 0.8 is available for download. It's still a bit of a tech demo, but the initial level looks promising. It's nice to see somebody making progress with a single player FPS game, although there is still a long way to go with this one. Dream Chess Dream Chess 0.2 is pretty amazing as far as chess g...

Extreme Tux Racer The team over at Extreme Tux Racer - the latest fork to take on the Tux Racer continuation mantle - have made their inaugral release. It's still a bedding-in period with no real major updates other than a new campaign (cup?) but hopefully it will signal the start of a new lease of life for development of a popular open source franchise. FreeLords , the project cloning Warlords, have made their first release since changing to Java as their programming language of choice. No more dependencies (except Java, of course), automatic portability, and the promise of network play, all bode well for the future but this snapshot release isn't playable yet. However it seems their time machine works well since these announcements are from 2008 - if they have a time machine then this game is sure to succeed. LordsAWar , a fork of discontinued FreeLords C++ codebase, has hit version 0.0.3. Whilst that sounds very small I think it's not really a reflection on the comp...

I came across an interesting Ubuntu forum thread the other day - where I posted this on May 26th 2006: This thread has inspired me to do something: http://freegamer.blogspot.com/ Fascinating. It's come a long way since then! :-) The big news of today is probably the Secret Maryo Chronicles 1.0 release. It's an intriguing project and is gaining some very nice vector-based graphics. I'm still not convinced they have replaced all the ripped graphics and sounds that were in the previous version (0.99.7) nor addressed the gameplay defficiencies I felt were present - the feel of the game wasn't quite right - there is no acceleration, you are either running or not running, making it hard to control the character. It is still an ongoing project and importantly it's a playable game with a fair amount of levels and decent graphics so is worth checking out. It's definitely close to being an open source game that makes people go, "Oooh, nice!" ;-) Finity F...

Well, not really, I never enjoy reading rubbish people try to make up to be funny. Honestly, if I want a laugh, I'll go to a comedy store. Anyhow... World of Padman . 3D, Toy Story esque setting and freeware. It's a deathmatch game but comes with bots, it runs on Linux and Windows, looks fantastic, and even has a promo trailer . Released today, surely this is not an April Fool's as it is too elaborate. Or maybe it is just a promotion for a commercial game, released as freeware for today only? Who knows. This is why I don't like April 1st. Anyway, download it and see. It's not open source though. I've been whining about a lack of good platform games, but I found a few on GetDeb . The Goonies I came across The Goonies just after posting on Friday. It's a remake of a classic NES game, but with better graphics and sound. It's quite tricky to play but a good time waster. Then I tried to play Magicor which looks fun, but it crashed on my Feisty F...

Bygfoot Football Manager development has been resumed. *Cheers!* The latest unstable release is 2.1.1 and contains updates to the UI, the addition of a "luck" factor to make long term success more challenging, and new country definitions. Bygfoot is a good game. I played version 2.0 a fair bit because I've always been partial to football management games. However, the UI is atrocious. It's clumsy, it does things you don't expect, it forces you to do things you should not have to. For example... In football you tend to have a first team - that is, your 11 best players - with substitutes to cover that first team. So typically, assuming no injuries or tiredness, you always start with the same 11 players. This is by far the most common approach. However in Bygfoot when you make a substitution in a game, the "team change" is carried over past the game. This forces you to manually undo substitutions after every game. Being a management simulation...

...if you wanna be a record breaker! Oooo ooo... </singing> One of the great things about Free software games is that people are free to dedicate themselves to whatever makes them happy. Check out this ship, the Atlantia , created for a Vega Strike mod [not yet published]. Speaking of Vega Strike, the musings over the last couple of weeks suggest a new 0.4.x release [the current engine] later on in the year. I don't think the real juice [the 0.5 OGRE -based engine] will come until 2007, but when it does it will be good. Check out the screenshot to the right, a sample of planet shaders that VS developer klauss is working on. More images here . That's simply beautiful. There's a new dungeon game in town. Sadly it is a Doom 3 mod so it's not really free, but we know what happens with iD engines so there is hope! The game is Dungeon Doom and hopefully it will evolve into a stellar Free game in the future. Another interesting mod [UT2004 this time...

No, Free Gamer has not met a premature demise! I am merely temporarily really, really busy . Still, there were a few notable releases in the last week. ScummVM hit version 0.9.0 which brings GUI enhancements and support for [at least] two [new] games. Legends jumped 0.0.0.1 versions to 0.4.1.40, and you should see the changelog . I've already ranted about discussed versioning debacles issues. Warsow bumped out another release and really seems to be picking up momentum both as a game and a community. They have started up a development blog . This is a great idea and it would be cool for every major Free game to have one; then we can have Free Game Planet! I spotted yet another 3d engine on Freshmeat : Nelit2 . Information is sparse but the screenshots show off some fancy features. It has a long way to go to compete with the heavyweights of this division like OGRE and Crystal Space . I also saw Carworld as well. It looks like it could be a very cool driving simulator...