Gaming Daily A-Z

It's something-am, I have overdue work, and a Freshmeat announcement put a bee in my bonnet about posting. LinCity 2.0 LinCity-NG 2.0 is out in the wild, and boy is it starting to look like a nice game. There are only two things that look a bit weak these days - the name (NG? Linux-only?) and the UI (a bit scrappy). For those who don't know, LinCity-NG is a GotM fork of Lincity which brings it into this century with much nicer graphics and a more informative user interface. Plenty of nice new graphics (notably vegetation, grass, trees) make the game look aesthetically smooth. New resource management (water) adds to the depth of gameplay. There's a load of other new aspects too but there's no official announcement and I'm too busy procrastinating to go digging. Glest (the 3D RTS) is dead, long live Glest! No, really. Mainline Glest development has ended and Glest Advanced Engine ( information ), a community-born enhancement, is to officially become the new ...

OverDose is pretty What is OverDose ? Edit: correct link OverDose is a Multiplayer team objective based game with online and offline play. Two sides, Earths Confederate Marine Corps. and the evil alien Marauders, battle for control of locations on Earth. Based in a first person, the two conflicting teams must battle not only each other, but large open terrain areas. Every class has his own strong and weak points, but every class is a vital role to the game. On a technical front, it uses a highly evolved Quake II iD tech 2 engine which renders better than Doom 3 iD tech 4, as evidenced by this video and that video . The gameplay sounds quite good too. FlightGear FlightGear 1.9.0 got released. The actual announcement is buried in the mailing list. (For those fortunate enough to have never experienced it, the Sourceforge list archives are about as user unfriendly as you'll find, so you should appreciate me having found it! This release is a major overhaul of the graphics code,...

These days there's a flurry of open source game development activity and I don't have time to blog or follow it closely, but here's a highlight of some of the most recent game developments. Teeworlds 0.5.0 is out. Everybody's favourite game about tea, where you have an entire world of tea bags and... wait, Q is whispering something to me... *listens* Oh, it's not about tea. The clue was the double-e apparently. Still, despite the disappointing news that there still isn't a game dedicated to my favourite beverage, Teeworlds 0.5.0 is the largest update to the game yet. New features to everybody[ who doesn't love OpenLieroX or another game I can't think of]'s favourite 2D deathmatch Free project include demo recording, a revamped server browser and in-game voting, as well as a a gazillion changes under the hood. There is also a new, shiny 16-player limit. FreeCol ! The game where you get to free Colin! Right?! No? Dammit.... ! Ooooh, the col i...

Everything is so cheap after Christmas. I mean, look what you can get for FREE! :-) The FreeOrion project just released version 0.3.11, which comes with some polish of existing features and a few small new ones. Here's the announcement . Only a Windows binary is up at the moment, bah, source only from SVN. I complained. (I'm good at that.) There are statically compiled SVN binaries for Linux but you have to go digging to find them. Still, when digging you can find treasure, like this ship development thread . Purty! UPDATE: here's the Linux binaries and here's a quick play guide - which you really do need, there's so many clicky thingamajigs. Platinum Arts Sandbox , the game design tool based on the Cube 2 engine, saw version 2.3 released a few days ago. From the announcement: Here are the awesome new features! * New 3D sidescroller Mario like mode! Also there is a seperate RPG project, check the wiki! [ link - note it is aimed at kids and in concept ...

Well, it's belated, but better late than never. :-) The Warzone 2100 team released version 2.1 of their continuation of the formerly-commercial RTS. The news link is broken for some reason. EDIT : And here is the fixed one . Well, the big 'hole' in WZ2100 has been the FMV that was in the original game, that comes in 2.2 I am told, but 2.1 is more stable and playable than ever (although I'm don't know the specific improvements over 2.0). AssaultCube got a new website and a new release, version 1.0.2 which fixes a few glitches and brings some extra polish to the 1.0.x series of AC. Apparently Cube 2 (aka Sauerbraten) dev Eihrul has been backporting enhancements to AC, so looks much better than Cube 1, but I can't say for sure. Speaking of Free FPS games, I thought this SuperTuxKart track, Sub-sea, being ported to Nexuiz was quite intriguing: Speaking of SuperTuxKart , I can't remember if I mentioned or saw the 0.6rc1 release anywhere. By all accounts i...

Happy festive season to all those who are celebrating, and commiserations to those who are missing out or have not been blessed with a nice Christmas period. Many thanks to Q for being a custodian of the blog. It would surely have died long ago but for his endeavour and I deeply appreciate his ongoing efforts. NYC in Sauer I have a queue of interesting things... like this lovely screenshot of a NYC map for Sauerbraten that pushes the engine's performance. There was a Christmas release of SuperTuxKart and it's full of goodies. Verison 0.6rc1 (an rc, thusly YMMV) offers (among a lot of new tracks and other improvements) improved physics with skidding, nitro, a better AI, and positional sound effects. Sounds super. Gearhead2 is now completable as of the latest release, version 0.530, meaning that it is no longer a tech demo but a real live game. It's a futuristic / mech-based graphical roguelike and a very nice one too by all accounts. UFO:AI Starchaser I really liked ...

Cheese Boys breaking the fourth wall Cheese Boys is a humorous post-apocalyptic action adventure. The current two-level implementation, that features dialog and fighting already contains a lot of strange fourth wall breaking humor (although it is quite different to Fallout's.) Goblin Hack 1.16 Goblin Hack (GH) 1.16 is now out with new features , including music by Pascal Provost and new level kinds. Apparently there even is an end game level now, which I assume 0.17% of all GH players will reach. (Ever finished Nethack? Not me. :) ) Plutocracy rev 499 Plutocracy is a multiplayer 3D RTS game focusing on merchant trade and domination by economic means, although warfare and piracy are always an option. The game has a 1600s Caribbean theme, is played on a real globe, and aims to replicate realistic economic transactions. I fell in love with it's graphical style, which reminds me of Populous III . I haven't had the chance to play it with anybody else and there are no bots, ...