It's Been Brutal

Happy New Year everybody! I apologise for the lack of Free Software game commentary over the festive season but I was busy damaging my health in fun ways.

Anyway.....

Brutal Chess 0.5.1 is out! Brutal Chess is a game inspired by the ancient Battle Chess. A quick follow up to the strangely-not-mentioned-on-happypenguin 0.5.0 release which introduces a new codebase, AI of various difficulties, md3 support, and generally lots of other major-update-goodness. The simpler 3D chess game glChess released 1.0.1 on New Year's eve.

I am having a strange sense of de-ja-vu here because I have written this all before only I was under-the-influence of several substances and Blogger does not autosave drafts as I am accustomed to with GMail. Please implement this Blogger people!

Atomic Tanks 2.0-beta2 is also out. Despite the "2.0" in the version number, I don't believe there is that much different between the 2.0-beta2 and 1.5a but it got the game mentioned on Free Gamer so it must be worth it.

The ambitious Free Ryzom project failed to get the rights to the game. They were not able to compete with other commercially-rooted offers to take on the flagging MMORPG so were overlooked by the court deciding what happened to the company behind Ryzom.

The freeware and free-to-play MMORPG Eternal Lands released version 1.3.3 of their client with new monsters and maps. One of my friends played EL extensively. It looked very social but very boring. Lots of slow and repetitive menial tasks to level up seemed to be the order of the day but it could have been because he was playing the game in a daft way [risk-free levelling instead of fighting].

And finally in a move a tiny bit off-topic for this site, I'm going to plug musikCube. This music player/manager for Windows went 1.0 a few weeks ago and I've been enjoying it ever since on my work machine. I'd long been looking for a music player other than Winamp [I don't understand why people like Winamp so much - if you have more than 3 songs it's crap for managing them] or iTunes [barf]. The previous version of musikCube was good but had a few minor problems and development seemed to be stalled but it seemed the author was simply working away quietly instead of flagging noisily. Anyway, it rocks so if you have to use Windows then I highly recommend this Free Software music player. I think musikCube has a very bright future.

I'm sure I had some more games to talk about but I forgot..... :P

Brutal Chess, Warzone, Balder2D

Does anybody remember Battle Chess? I loved that game. I think it was one of the games that really got me hooked on using a PC after years of dedication to a spectrum. Well, great news Battle Chess lovers, there's an open source modern equivalent: Brutal Chess. It obviously needs better models and there's plenty to do (current release is 0.3 alpha) but it's an exciting find nonetheless!

There's a new Warzone 2100 release - 2.0.5rc1 (changelog) - which addresses a number of problems people had with 2.0.4, especially single player games. If you downloaded Warzone and found it buggy, it may be worth trying this update.

The author of Balder2D is looking for help testing packages for Debian/Ubuntu. The game is an overhead 2D shooter. I can't really comment on the gameplay because I don't have time to try it right now.

I just came across FreeAllegiance. If I ever hand out awards, this game will win an award for the most uninformative web page - no screenshots or information about the game? Thank the Lord for Wikipedia. It was originally developed by Microsoft Research around 2000. After failing commercially and being abandoned by Microsoft, they eventually released the source code in 2004 to the dedicated fan base. A 3D space game, it is a mixture of space combat and RTS with deathmatch based gameplay. Sounds interesting!

Thats enough for today.