Gaming Daily A-Z

Crikey, it's been a while. What can I say, life gets busy, and games sometimes just can't be a priority. I know, it's crazy talk. I meditated long and hard, facing many demons, moments of utter despair, but I couldn't get past the conclusion that sometimes Free Gamer won't be on my list of things to do. Fortunately Q has been on top of things so it's not silent when I'm off the radar. Today is a temporary reprieve, brought on somewhat by enjoying the current development pace of the Scourge project. Timong, of JCRPG fame, has been taking a break from Java coding to indulge in his new found passion for music composition. You can listen to the new main theme music he has composed for Scourge, one of many he has contributed lately. I think it sounds pretty damn good. Meanwhile you can now roam around a massive persistent outdoor world in Scourge, with generated villages and NPCs as well as varying climate and weather conditions. It all sounds quite i...

Tremfusion is a fork of Tremulous, that wants to be more open in development. There's more to read on its organization and philosophy (too many words for my taste). One of the most noticeable changes is the use of the Xreal as the game engine. Thanks to Julius for letting us know . An audio interview with Quake2World 's lead coder reveales details about improvements in his graphics and physics engine. (I don't like podcasts usually but this one is pretty interesting.) An audio interview of Lee Vermeulen, founder of the Nexuiz project, was published on the new site Open Gaming Now . The audio unfortunately is of a not-so-good telephone line quality and the added music makes it even a little bit harder to listen. Lee tells about the early history of the project, but other than that it's mainly a introduction to Nexuiz. The rest & snippets Voxelstein Andrewj, one of the best Let's Play artists, has recently recorded a playthrough of Voxelstein , the Wolfenstei...

Sauerbraten [ more screens ] Cube 2: Sauerbraten Trooper Edition has been released [ download ]: new logo, new maps, new weapon looks, bots! (from BloodFrontier ), movie recording function (I have to check this out ASAP), rag dolls , new music , and so much more . Sauerbraten characters The bots are rather dumb as of now and don not know what a powerup is yet but they're definitely better than no bots at all. What I found most amazing about this release is the characterization of the player models. Each of the three has a little back story . I felt that Sauerbraten had no soul before this release. Now it has a little soul. :) Mark IV The tank simulation engine Mark IV [ project , web page , blog ] v0.80 Alpha-1 is out and first-time playable over network. It however uses FMOD (which can be avoided, see this ) and RakNet. Windows users will be able to use the pre-compiled binary . A little arcade Atomic Worm has recently been open sourced. It appears to be a Pacman-Snake mix plu...

== Insert introductory text here == Strategy games Civitas city Civitas is a project of a colaborative educational game, where children from schools can cooperate in a network for the construction of cities. This sounds/looks like a multiplayer OpenCity . Civitas is a GPLed project written in Java. Thumbs up to kid/education-related game projects whose creators are brave enough to use standard free licenses ! Clippers Clippers is a board game designed by Alan R Moon that is an abstract island connection game based on clipper ships and the south pacific. This computer version is written in Java 1.5 and includes AI players. Just like Civitas, I wasn't able to give it a spin. Sorry, Java issues. :( The Spring Engine has a nice new homepage and a pleasantly clear list of games . (This is probably very old news but kind of new to me.) I was told that Kernel Panic is a 100% open source game for Spring, but unfortunately I am either too stupid or too lazy to make it work. :| Role-play...

Nexuiz 2.5 has been released 6 11 15 days ago. (I *am* taking my time! O_o) You might have spotted the announcement on Phoronix . Here is the 666 MB heavy download. In case you care about traffic more than graphics and sounds or have a weak system: An Arch Linux user created a ~60MB version for 32-bit Linux systems. So what are the big selling points of 2.5 from the player side of view? According to the changelog : New HUD , new weapons , new racing game mode , improved look & sound , better bots . Nex is also supposed to be faster regarding processor and network utilization, I did not try to test this though. Head-up display Nexuiz 2.5 - more screenshots I did not notice any revolutionary changes in the user interface - besides the better score board and noob-friendlier map voting system. Unfortunately the game menu part of the GUI is still slightly weird with its microscopic quit button. Racing mode Futuristic "Racetrack" "Race" is a game mode, in which ...

Here is some commercial free software gaming news, which I partially failed to deliver on time. Paul's Music Liberation Experiment is a product of jClassicRPG's lead developer following his passion for composing music. He releases music tracks under the gratis but non-free BY-SA-NC license and visitors can donate to specific tracks, which in return will be released under the free BY-SA license . The money earned from this will be covered to cover Paul's expensive music software purchases and hopefully a proof that at least small bucks can be made with freely licensed media. It's called " experiment " after all. :) I am a big fan of this project! I detest the non-free Creative Commons licenses, but this method is perfect to illustrate just how many people think that being free is more important for media rather than just being gratis. Tremulous T-Shirt Logo Ministry of Frag (MoFrag) sells a Tremulous T-Shirt and 25% go to the Tremulous team. That's the ...

Diamond Fighters Товарищи , Diamond Fighters is a tank arcade game that can be played alone or in two-player mode against computer-controlled enemies in a progression-based level system. I find it quite fun (it has upgrades & destroyable walls!) and good-looking (yay for pretty explosions!). Its source code is GPLed (no idea about art.) iamar [ home page , project page ] is a project for teaching students how to make 3d games. It covers 3D modelling in blender and 3D game programming. The project consists of video material and the "iamar browser" which uses an in-house scripting engine called "semblis". I have not tried to run it yet, but it is rather relevant to my interests , even though the "we made our own scripting language" deal does sound rather lame. iamar has one huge advantage over Alice and Platinum Arts Sandbox : A 100% free software license (the GPL). (I'm especially confused about Sandbox' license .) MyMan Geek game news time! M...