Allacrost and Free Allegiance

Hero of Allacrost

There's some new screenshots over at the Hero of Allacrost project. It is looking really nice these days and they have come a long way. They are looking for people to help test out their next release so head on over to their forums if you are interested. :-)

Speaking of forums, have you registered for the Free Gamer Forum yet? Why not? ;-)

Bloboats - a side-scrolling race against the clock whilst dodging obstacles by using the way the boat interacts with the water. Think X-Moto meets the sea. It is cross platform but only Windows binaries are officially provided :-( so you either have to compile from source or try the unofficial Mandriva 2007 rpms or hope the guys at getdeb get on it. (I'm an Ubuntu user, can't you tell!?)

Free Allegiance is the open source community effort spawned from Microsoft releasing the source code to their [now abandoned] game Allegiance. (See, MS are not all evil, just mostly.) Damn, I forgot to mention this a while back when I did an article on open source 3D space games.

Free Allegiance

Free Allegiance is a multiplayer teamplay-oriented 3D space combat game. I like the fact that it focuses on teamplay. It can be difficult for new players (don't make me say n00bs) to get into online games with more experienced players mopping them up repeatedly. However if it is a team game, the experienced players can take on leadership roles, and by virtue of that, mentoring those of lesser ability experience.

Oh, and the game looks pretty too. Always a plus. :-D

Super Retro Mega Wars... at the moment, just a blog on the development of a retro mega game - a multiplayer environment where each player gets to choose the type of game they play (all game types based on retro classics) and somehow the game types get mixed together. Anyway, it's an intriguing concept so I'm gonna keep an eye on it.

I should probably give Second Life a mention at some point... it is open source after all. Just they don't really need the marketing help. And I think games should be fun and immersive but not a second life. Right?

The title of today's blog post is so unimaginative. I'm not feeling very creative today.

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.