Legendary

Overgod

Overgod, an abstract shooter using Allegro, is a fast paced top down shooter. It's fun although pretty tough, and has a nice retro feel but with good modern graphics. It's one of those games you can pick up and play for 5 or 10 minutes, let off some steam, then be back to whatever it was you were doing without having lost too much time. It's available for Linux, Windows, and Macs. :-)

Cube Legends (formely known as LOZ:Cube) is a Cube mod, inspired by the Legend of Zela series of games. Since Cube is getting a bit old in the tooth and has been superceeded by Sauerbraten, somebody has stepped up to work on Cube Legends 2007 which will bring this popular Cube mod up-to-date to run on Sauerbraten.

FreeTrain has gained another developer, and progress on fixing up the codebase continues. Even better, there is an additional plugin set which contains something like 200+ plugins for FreeTrain, and in the coming weeks it is being translated as well. There's stuff like a rollercoaster plugin in there, so it should be really cool. Internationalization is the next task to be tackled, then after that it will be replacing DirectX with SDL so that the game can be ported to Linux and other platforms. :-)

Last one for today, StarShip Troopers: Last Defense development is going well. They posted a gameplay video which looks promising, and expect to have a playable release in the next week or so. However despite the obvious progress being made with the game, there is obviously a fair amount of work to do before it captures the veracity of the battles in the movie, so don't be too expectant. I hope they offer a Linux version of this Glest conversion but could find no information one way or the other.

Strategic Importance

FreeSynd 0.2 is out! It's not yet mentioned on their site but you can get it from the project download page (Windows only, but 0.1 had a Linux version so hopefully it'll follow soon). I loved the original Syndicate (although the sequel Syndicate Wars was better). What a game that was. I can hardly wait for it to download... downloaded... playing... ok! That was a blast from the past. Only the first mission is playable but it's clear they have gotten through a lot of the harder work on this project. Future versions should be quite fun to play.

However they are using the art & media from the original - I would have thought that is of questionable legality (the game is classed as abandonware) but I can't comment properly without knowing the facts and they are not so easy to come by for a game with so little official documentation online.

Speaking of classic DOS games and open source efforts to revive them, UFO2000 no longer needs data files from the original to play it - a new fan-made set of graphics is included with UFO2000 by default. UFO: Enemy Unknown is probably one of the best games for it's time. Ever.

There's some more screenshots up on the OpenFootball website (although the rest of the website is somewhat barren). It's looking very, very cool. I can hardly wait for the first release. :-)

Dark Oberon

One of the lesser-known open source real-time strategy games is Dark Oberon. Ubuntu packages have been made for it so maybe now it'll get a bit more exposure. Dark Oberon has a fairly unique approach to graphics design - the images have been created from plasticine models giving the game a very distinctive and original look and feel. However I'm not sure that there is an AI included in the latest release as the roadmap states it has been removed, and it's reinstatement is part of an ongoing reimplementation of most parts of the game.

Speaking of free RTS games, Globulation2 alpha23 was released a week or so ago. The codebase is going to undergo a rewrite before the next release so I imagine alpha23 will be the last release for some time. Rewrites can be deadly for open source projects as a game can be in limbo for the duration of the rewrite and if the rewrite is never completed then the game often stagnates. It's happened to quite a few games over the years. Still the Globulation2 development has been steady for several years so hopefully it will not meet a similar fate.

Woo, all those games have Linux support. I was beginning to get worried I was mentioning far too many Windows only titles lately. ;-)

Beats Of Rage

Funny how I have a quick moan about Beats of Rage yesterday only to find OpenBoR today. In fact I had mentioned OpenBoR before on this site but forgot plus these days they seem to be a little more organised. Saying that, borgeneration.com seems to have a few issues (forum down, mod links 403).

Beats of Rage is an old school arcade beat em up game, and there's various mods for it such as Double Dragon (what a game that was, eh!?). OpenBoR is an open source effort to provide a free engine compatable with Beats of Rage. I'm hopeful that OpenBoR will run with more success on my Linux laptop than the official BoR game does.

There is even an "enhanced" fork of OpenBoR found on lavalit.com. I use quotes because I can't vouch for that, it's just how I found it described on the Beats of Rage article on Wikipedia.

The BoR community seems to be pretty active, and there's lots of mods. If I had the time I would try out a few. But I don't.

Just to prove that Wikipedia isn't all that, it mentions OpenHOR - supposedly a subproject of OpenBOR that allows modders to create horizontal and vertical two dimensional aircraft shooting games... really? I think not.

Interestingly there's (crazy golf aside) no open source golf sim games. That doesn't bother me - golf is boring although Neverputt is fun (comes with Neverball). :-)

I wanna post more but I am out of time... I'll just note that I'm going to add a translation tool to the site (some cool JS hack I found on another site) among other things and that the completion of the games lists is put off for a few more days because I'm too busy with real work (had to do it some time). Ciao for now.

Super Heroic Efforts

If you want to help the next SuperTuxKart release then be sure to check out 0.3 alpha which has been uploaded. Expect bugs but once ironed out this should be a cool game again. :-)

The lead developer of Heroes of Allacrost kindly let me know that a new version is due in the next two weeks.

Colonies

The "other" Colonization-inspired effort, now called Colonies, saw version 0.0.3 out yesterday. I'm not sure how indicative of the gameplay state that version number is e.g. I wouldn't say that OpenCity 0.0.4 reflected the state of development, I would say it was more like 20-30% complete but what would I know! Anyway I don't have time to check it out properly but I eventually found the screenshots (not in the most obvious place).

Any really dedicated Free Gamer readers may note I said that they claimed to be an open source sequel to the 1994 original, but they are explicit that this is not the case (don't know whether I was being sensationalistic or ignorant or they have changed tact - was too long ago). However they claim it's open source but I could find no source code locations

What's this? 3D Wesnoth? As an RTS? Screenshot posted by the lead Wesnoth developer... maybe he's working on something eh? We'd be so lucky. :-)

FreeOrion

There's now a roadmap for FreeOrion 0.4. I'm looking forward to the next few versions of this open source game, which is inspired by the Masters of Orion series. MOO II is one of those games that sapped up [too] many hours of my younger years. FreeOrion is very thoroughly designed and the graphics are very, very slick. When it's done, it'll be one of those FLOSS games that will be, um, simply awesome. The research UI is especially nice. Still, a few years to go before version 1.0 though.

I wish Beats of Rage (download) was open source. It doesn't run on my Linux laptop. Does it run for anyone else? It looks like fun... so no fun for me! :-(

I would post more but I gotta save at least a few things for another day. ;-)

Vega Strike Release Due In Summer

At last, a Vega Strike update is coming in the summer. It's been long overdue. :-)

The next Ultimate Stunts release is imminent. It won't bring much in the way of features but should keep things moving forward. I like this game, it's a little different to the other racing games out there - a little more freeform and funky. (It makes sense to me.) A few more graphics, levels, and cars and it really would be a cool game, but there's only so much that 1 guy can do unless others chip in. ;-)

Pingus needs an SDL guru... well, not a guru, but somebody prepared to take the SDL port which "sort of" works and make it "really" work. I might run a little campaign now that the translated version of FreeTrain is coming together.

Speaking of FreeTrain, a Windows binary is due in the next couple of weeks. The end goal is to replace any Windows-specific code and make it cross platform but that is going to have to wait. The game lacks proper save game support (saves are done using serialization - meaning they are very fragile when it comes to new versions of the game) so that also needs working on. Still the future is starting to look rosey after nearly a year's campaign on Free Gamer to get it translated and, eventually, ported. :-)

Nexuiz Ashes: TWC

Y'know, I haven't given Nexuiz enough of a mention on this site. This deathmatch FPS game looks beautiful. Everywhere I look I read glowing reports on how much fun it is, how well balanced the gameplay is, how good the graphics are and how well it performs even on modest hardware. Nexuiz uses the Darkplaces engine which is a highly modified Quake 1 engine. I think it is kinda cool how Darkplaces is in some ways more advanced than the Quake 3 engine - using ioq3 as a reference.

If you lurve your FPS games then you should be downloading it already.

How am I doing? Hmm... one more...

Ashes: Two Worlds Collide is inspired by Ultima VII amongst others. I'm fairly sure it's only going to be freeware, but free advanced RPGs are a pretty rare thing so this is an exciting looking project. Some gameplay movies are due in the next couple of weeks showing off the latest progress.

Ashes tries to be a complete rpg experience

An exciting prospect. I'm not sure I'm a fan of the cartoony graphics [which are a homage to Ultimate VII] but otherwise it does look pretty cool for a free game. Now if only it was open source... :-)

No music tips currently. I've made too many and forgotten what I already posted so it's put off until I instate a music tips list mainly for my own reference.

Put Your Hands Up For Free Gamer

*Cheer* A Linux version of Those Funny Funguloids is being prepared. Stop by the OGRE forums if you fancy an early look although you will need to compile it yourself.

*Cheer* The next release of Scourge is imminent - due this weekend. Improved UI, more story, more game art, localization, bug fixes, and general Scourge love mean this should be a kicking release. (Scourge is a fave Free game of mine!) :-)

*Cheer* Also due this weekend is some real RSS abuse as I take on reinstating the Free Gamer lists in full. Social life + no home Internet + sometimes having to work == delay thus far.

OpenOutcast

*Booes* I got a bit of stick yesterday for slightly misrepresenting the fact that Crystal Space is more than just a 3D engine - whereas OGRE is just a 3D engine - so yesterday's comparison of the two was slightly unfair. No stable release for something like 3 years was a mistake by the CS team (a similar mistake being made by the Vega Strike developers) but it's good to see CS getting back into shape and hopefully this open source game engine will be the foundation of some cracking titles in the near future. Ecksdee, OpenOutcast, and Crystal Core are a selection of those in the works with Planeshift being the leading game using Crystal Space.

*Cheer* OpenTTD 0.5.1 got released. That game can be addictive although I think I'm all played out from my younger years. You need the original game [files] to play it although it is not hard to come by.

*Cheer* And I'll round things up by mentioning the Secret Maryo 0.99.6 release. I like the regular releases of this project and the graphics are starting to look really nice. A bit more work on improving the gameplay, levels, and efficiency of the engine and this will be a really, really good game. As it is, it's already a good game and if you like Mario or platform games in general then I would check it out.

*Booes* And so I return to the daily grind...

(Don't worry, the imaginary crowd won't return tomorrow! ;-)

Crystal Core Tech Demo

I know what I wanted to post about yesterday... the Crystal Core tech demo! This rather sexy looking FPS is designed to showcase Crystal Space 3d engine. Crystal Space used to be the open source 3d engine of choice in it's early days, but then OGRE roared past with much better management and more frequent releases. (Developers of any project: release early, release often.) It's difficult to see CS ever getting back on level terms with OGRE but it's good to see progress. I want another Ecksdee release though!

Battle for Antargis 0.2 was rather quietly released several days ago. I've mentioned this game a few times on FG - I like it because it's fairly original i.e. not another remake and because it's inspired by a fairly unique game - Powermonger.

Ok so the ZX Spectrum turned 25 yesterday. I'm older, so I am not amused. What does amuse me is the classic spectrum games - Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy II. Those two remakes had me up until 3am last night, sadly they are Windows only. They should work in WINE though. And are not Free games, just freeware.

This strip can be enjoyed by everybody [who remembers JSWII] - Jet Set Willy Online.

Got any favourite old Speccy games you wish were remade?

Blue Mondays

Plasma Pong

Well, actually, if you're playing Plasma Pong your Monday is probably multi-coloured! What a cool looking variant on a classic game, eh? Shame it's only available for Windows & MacOS X at the moment but it works in WINE. Another shame is that it's not released under a FLOSS license. (The author wants to keep his research into fluid effects proprietry.)

A pong game that is Free and looks quite cool can be found on darkdawn.co.uk. This one is FLOSS and has a few nice particle effects.

If you like Frets on Fire, be sure to check out this thread in the Ubuntu forums which gives details on some cool improvements you can get for the game as well as some song locations.

And there's another release of FIFE, the engine which has evolved from a Fallout port to a "unique 2D RPG engine". This release takes the engine much closer to being a viable generic RPG engine. I've got a feeling we'll be seeing a game or two based on FIFE crop up in the nearish future. :-)

Barbie Seahorse Adventures. Sounds terrible, but is fun in a cute retro way. If you are a little girl. Just joking, grown men can enjoy it too. It is a former PyWeek game entrant that's been improved a bit. Like I said, retro & cute.

Quick gripe. Flash games might look good sometimes, but I rarely ever find them fun. Usually they are just poor imitations with a bit of gloss and the gameplay sucks. That's why I don't mention them. Example. Oh, and they are rarely, if ever, released under a Free license.

I swear I had some more interesting stuff to talk about but the weekend's antics have removed whatever they were from my memory. Which reminds me... music...

Today's music tip is awesome:
Atrocite - Only You (Dennis Hurwitz mix)

Don't Fret!

There's a Frets on Fire update. I swear that game has the coolest logo. New features for this guitar-meets-DDR game include wobbly effects for long notes, combo totals, and support for left-handed players, plus the usual bug fixes.

You can now play FreeTrain. It lives! Still missing are pre-made levels, proper save game support, and tutorials, plus a few of the plugins don't work. FreeTrain is an interesting game when it comes to architecture. Almost everything is written as a plugin, trains and all. Anyway if you have a copy of VS2005 you can play it now, otherwise you'll have to wait a bit longer before binaries are created.

I somehow missed a game out yesterday in the flight combat article... Edit - added it! Carrier 2, an opengl remake of the old classic Carrier Command. It looks good and 4 years steady development means it should get better. ;-)

Also I don't think I mentioned that Egoboo Resurrection 2.3.7 got released - for Windows & Mac only at the moment though. I can't remember if I mentioned the April 1st Warzone 2.0.6 release either.

What are you waiting for? Go play them.

Music tip:
Huntemann - 2 Beloved

I don't know whether many people bother to download these tips, but this one is another really cracking track.

On a side note my list plans are coming together soon so expect RSS abuse. I also need to update a ton of articles that are missing <p> tags since I switched off auto line breaks in blogger.