Planet Free gaming

I thought I'd check out how Super Tux development is going. I grabbed the lastest svn, compiled, and performance was so abominable that it took me a minute just to quit. It didn't help that it was placed half-off the screen (probably because I have a dual screen setup) Super Tux used to run fine. I'll hold my hands up and say I'm using an nvidia chipset and the open source driver without any significant OpenGL Acceleration, but it's a 2D game. I hope they work on some kind of OpenGL-less fallback.

One little-known but very promising platformer is Mole Invasion. The website is mainly in French, but there is a dedicated English page. The game language defaults to English. The current release is version 0.4, and the first thing you notice is the Mario-like logo; obviously the inspiration for the gameplay. The second thing you notice is the performance - it runs great. It's really smooth, the animations are good, the characters move well, and there's plenty of variation. A lot of the levels are obviously made with testing in mind, and some of the graphics are still a bit raw, but otherwise it was a fun experience.

Mole Invasion feels like it is headed in the direction that Super Tux should have been. I can't help but feel that Super Tux development has significantly lost it's way. The first few post-GotM releases of Super Tux were very promising, and very well received. That was now several years ago, and little has changed for the better, some questionable decisions (move to OpenGL), and new milestones seem on the other end of a development void.

There's a new Parallel Realities game out. The Legend of Edgar is a platform game with a fantasy setting. I had a go with 0.1, which is playable with a single player storyline. For me, it suffers from the same issues I have with Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid - the movement is just way too slow. It takes many minutes to navigate levels to the point that exploring a level is just tedious as you wait for your character to amble his way around.

Remember Frogatto is a old-style platformer starring an anthropomorphic frog, championed by the lead developer of Battle for Wesnoth? It celebrates pixels and thrives on cute blocky graphics. There are updated Frogatto builds for Windows and Mac from the weekend, although pious Linux users must compile from source. I couldn't compile it. I had previously, and it was looking promising! Anybody else managed to compile it on Fedora?

The next version of Widelands - based on the classic RTS gameplay of Settlers II - is fast approaching. "Build 14" will come with GGZ support, making it much easier to find multiplayer opponents. Map auto-generation, lots of other small enhancements, more campaigns and a better beta testing phase should make this the Widelands release well worth playing.

Battle for Wesnoth continues to get stupendously good art contributions such as this series of Loyalist portraits.

Hot on the heels of Extreme Tux Racer 0.5beta, contributor and original Tux Racer developer Erin has introduced his rewrite to the world. Tentatively named Bunny Hill, the rewrite has a better design resulting in better performance, nicer graphics (in some ways, lesser in others) and more features. It looks like it will probably become ETR 0.6 once the dust has settled.

PARPG is back from the dead. 3 weeks not blogging being 'dead' apparently. The project itself is thriving, with plenty of graphical creativeness whilst the coders assess their options for developing the game.

Unknown Horizons will have a new release very soon!

Widelands is getting randomly generated maps.

It looks like Simutrans is getting subways, at least pak96.comic is anyway. Subterranean!

There'll be loads more updates to your favourite Free games but I don't have my finger on the pulse as much as I used to, so...

...so...

...post them in the comments!

Update: the FreeOrion project released version 0.3.13 and it has a huge changelog.

Lots of these guys down at Mackenzie Ponds in Red Deer. They are so cute!

Some friends of mine were having a conversation about a TV show that I’ve never seen called Deadliest Catch, and this scene popped into my head. I really like the color theme on this one.

Here’s the theme on Kuler.

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 impressive.

On another dungeoneering frontier, Iter Vehemens ad Necem (aka IVAN) is probably the most challenging and addictive nethack variant I ever played. (Although I only ever played a couple.) It has surprisingly good 2d graphics, which aren't done justice by the screenshot, but alas development stalled after 2005. The IVAN community seems to be filling the void left by the developers who[se motivation] seem[s] to have met some kind of gruesome demise - perhaps their brains turned into banana flesh by a vindictive god.

There is the IVANX project which seems to pull together a lot of the popular community contributions, and should be more likely to compile on Linux. There's also LIVAN which stands for Linux IVAN, thus should compile on Linux. Neither compiled for my Fedora laptop, somewhat thankfully as it means I can't play it and thusly be more productive! \o/

Of extra interest is IVAN 3D which turns it into a bit of a funky pixelated adventure. There's obviously quite a few challenges to overcome when transposing a totally 2D described game into a 3D world without it looking a bit other-worldly. Still, I don't think pixels are a bad thing. After all, it's a game, not a life simulation!

Hey look, Open World Soccer is moving steadily towards being a modern Sensible Soccer clone. Impressive looking! However the AI doesn't do too much yet, just keeping the two teams level with the ball.

Raidem is one of those vertical scrolling shooters, a nice classic pixel explosion fest. It is surprisingly well done, but it's also bloody hard - I never survived more than 20-30s. From the intro screen, it looks like the author needs an additional graphic designer but other than that it's a very nice looking game. No development since 2006 though so I guess it's to be taken as-is.

Another game that is surprisingly well done is Abe's Amazing Adventure. It looks weird, really weird. However the animations are very smooth and the game plays pretty well, far better than it looks. Still, I couldn't quite get over the game's oddness.

Tomatoes are my favorite kind of toes!

Following the flower theme of yesterday’s post …

Fun drawing of some flowers in a bottle. I gave myself a little bit bigger palette this time.

Here’s the theme on Kuler.

A new Development release is ready. This is the first release in the brand new 1.7.x tree. A lot was changed since the start of the stable 1.6.x branch and since I am too lazy to list all the great changes in here, better have a look at the forum thread which describes the most important changes.
As with the last releases, we continue to offer two versions of changelogs: a rather nice to read players changelog that only includes changes every player will probably notice and the (rather) complete changelog with (almost) all the details, which is likely to cause a serious headache...
At the moment the Windows package and the MacOSX packages are ready. You can find them at the download page. Once the others are done you can find them at the download page, too. Please keep in mind that it is a development release which might include quite many bugs. If you find one, report it.

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Rubygame 2.5.2 fixes a single, somewhat major bug:

• Fixed: HasEventHandler#handle (and other methods) dealt with NoMethodError exceptions in a stupid way.

Thanks to Kiba for reporting this bug.

Full docs are online at docs.rubygame.org. Source tarball and gem are available for download at Rubyforge and download.rubygame.org, or you can install with gem install rubygame.

Enjoy!

• NEWS
• Rubygame 2.5.2 Docs
• Download @ Rubyforge
• Download @ Rubygame.org