Gaming Daily A-Z

In Shotgun Debugger , you play a hacker on the run from black-shades-agents and fight against armies of droids. Projectile and energy weapons serve your cause, the most original of which gets reflected by walls and can be used to destroy enemies out of sight. Game mechanics include damage-inducing surfaces, exploding barrels and droids and simple press-the-button or find-the-key tasks. The story progresses in text boxes which appear between levels. Varying level styles... Relatively simple puzzles... Various weapons, including grenades... ... a kind of 'blue rocket launcher'... ... and a reflecting laser rifle Shotgun Debugger has two problems: default control and perspective, thus here are two hints for playing the game: Press 'v'. It will fix the perspective. Use WASD and mouse (or set different keys in ~/.sdb/preferences.txt) Also, here's one hint, in case you get stuck in the first level: "behind the police car". I didn't know about 'v' and...

Todays date is 07/08/09 if you're not a silly yank (m/d/y wha'?) and it made me think about how long the blog has been going. 379 posts... quite a lot! It's been a while since I started doing this blog. Who knows how far it'll go before life moves on, eh? I originally started out to make a place that documented all the worthwhile Free software game projects. I stumbled a bit along the way - the original version of the blog (for those who don't remember) had a nice list down the side. Now we just have this broken old page that is too much of a PITA to edit and update. Hopefully one day I'll find the time and energy to sort it out properly. Without a good central resource* of worthwhile projects, it can be easy for things to get lost in the Internet haze. People complain about a lack of polished FOSS games but there's more out there than you realise, even if some are still in active development. Then there's those that probably fell by the wayside ...

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 ...