Shadey

Shaders seem all the rage these days. Now Thunder n Lightening has support for them too just days after Danger from the Deep implemented shader support. Wavey reflecty shiney water. I smell pretty FOSS games! :-)

Boson

Actually the first FOSS game I remember getting such fancy effects was Boson. A 3D RTS, the codebase suffers from KDE dependencies which limit portability somewhat as well as making it a pain to install on Linux systems without KDE. Given how cool it looks, I'm sure they'd be much further on as a community if it was easier to install on non-KDE systems. I'm sure they would get much more developer interest if the game were available for Windows and Mac OS X and available in a format other than tarball for Linux.

Somebody just pointed me in the direction of Qonk, a space strategy game. It's in the early stages of development but has a much smaller scope than typical space strategy projects like FreeOrion, so is already very playable. Games only last a few minutes, and it is billed as, "a small build-and-conquer strategy game with very simple rules."

Finally, Bygfoot 2.2.0 was released mid-May. Strangely it didn't appear on the Game Tome or Freshmeat. It seems that new developers have taken on the mantle of improving this FOSS football management game, which can be downloaded for Windows and popular flavours of Linux and probably compiled on Mac and BSD systems. This is the only well-featured open source football management game going although personally I find the UI to be counter-intuitive. Other than that I found it a lot of fun when I played it last year so it can only be better now.

As a recovering Championship Manager addict (that game destroyed my teenage years) I'll probably not try too hard to get into Bygfoot. ;-)

Ugh... Missing Title

Following up the recent release of Thunder & Lightening, the action flight combat game, the author has posted a video on the website showcasing a major feature of the next release - an aircraft carrier. It looks cool and TnL is looking like an excellent game. Definitely close to the top of my games-to-play-when-I-upgrade-my-PC list.

What do you get whewn you cross-breed Elite and Space Invaders? Scum of the Universe: "a space trading game that combines two genres: arcade and strategy." It is open source and runs on Windows - but if you are feeling charitable, interestingly, you can still buy the game. From the screenshots, it looks fun. Bah, too many games, not enough time for Charlie to play them!

The other day I mentioned Damnation of the Gods, a Dungeon Master clone. Sadly I jumped the gun a little as development has been inactive for a year or so. However one diligent reader attempted to get it running and overcame a few compilation problems but has yet to get the game in a playable state.

Blocks 5, a challenging freeware puzzle game. Windows only. Check it out if that's your thing, it looks very good.

Ok, enough disjointed messages... I post to FG everyday but my time is limited meaning I don't get the opportunity to do everything I want with the site. Therefore I'm looking for a bit of feedback on what people think I should focus on. Firstly the current content, and secondly what extra feature I should prioritize. Voting will encourage me, if nothing else, so do your bit for the community let me know what you think. :-)