Free Gamer Quotes

Free Gamer is a respected news source for free software gaming. It was founded in 2006 by Charles Goodwin as a personal blog about free gaming but has since become a respected new source for the topic, even being contributed to by multiple writers. They notably scroll through databases such as Sourceforge.net and notable discussion forums to keep track of new game projects and releases, as well as host commentary on free games and free game development. Because of this, their words are of profound significance to the free gaming community. This article serves as a place to distill the most valuable quotes from the site for both exposure and future preservation. The Free Gamer blog's original content is licensed under a CC BY-SA 3.0 License, but this such concerns are usually waived when it comes to quotations.

2006

 * "It is a lesson for all freeware developers to heed; just because you have glorious plans and motivation now, know that the future is known to no-one. It is as easy to lose the desire as it was to initially dream. By keeping your project closed you exclude the world from it's development. Should life take you in another direction nobody will be there to pick up your project. Your efforts will be wasted and that is a tragedy only the Freedom of software can avoid." - June 15, 2006

May

 * "I came across the online gaming magazine Escapist. It's layout is beautiful, although totally image based. Whilst not open source specific, I found it quite interesting. Plus there's an article about girls in gaming. Seriously, I could barely believe it either, girls can play computer games. Next thing you'll be telling me is that they can play sports too! ;-)" - May 22, 2007


 * "Now, often I see people talk about how they want to create the next Oblivion and give up when they find out that just using just a paperclip and some bluetack only gets you a bluetacky paperclip and really creating something like an RPG take significant dedication, talent, and desire. As such, it is easy to poor water on these little fires by replying to such threads with a dose of reality - that commercial grade RPGs take a team of paid developers and artists years to create. And that previous efforts have just stagnated to the point of no hope (think Arkhart)." - May 24, 2007


 * "How wonderfully ironic that on the 1st anniversary of the inception of Free Gamer, I forgot to actually post. Lack of time and focus on work robbed me of the time required to bring you the usual high quality rambling... As you may have noticed, I called this post, 'A bit about me.' I won't be talking about myself - sorry to disappoint you - just a bit about this blog. (Yes, a blog can have a sense of self, y'know.) I feel that one of the reasons FG has people reading it daily is because I stay fairly on-topic. I don't talk about much else other than Free Software games (ok, throw in a few freeware titles) and the aspects surrounding the development of said games. One of the principle reasons I created FG was because there was a lack of a similar resource at the time - the Linux Game Tome was probably the closest thing but that's dedicated to Linux games meaning some open source titles never get exposure and many commercial ones do. The thing is, commercial game publishers can afford to market themselves. And open source is open source, regardless of platform. I wanted to put to use all the otherwise-useless open source game knowledge I was accumulating each day. The end goal was to highlight the best Free games out there and give exposure to upcoming projects." - May 26, 2007


 * "LostGarden ran a previous challenge called SpaceCute for which a few prototypes were already created. It's interesting to see an artist challenging programmers by proving both art and a game design. It's quite different to the usual approaches taken by designing open source games where usually the art is created for the game and not the other way around - here the game is created for the art. The advantages of this are clear goals and something that is tangible and looks good with only the basic code in place." - May 29, 2007

June

 * "There are very few efforts to create single player FPS open source games. In fact, beyond Crystal Core, I'm not sure I can recall any noteworthy games... It requires a lot of effort to create the media (levels, characters, AI etc) to create a quality single player FPS game. I remember spending days, no, weeks designing single player levels for Duke Nukem 3D and requirements in terms of detail have escalated massively since then (and back then I was a kid with nothing to do except school and fun). The proximity of players to 3D models in FPS games means the detail has to be much higher than in other types of games; this genre does not lend itself well to the open source development model. I hope Crystal Core progress continues." - June 1, 2007


 * "One of the principle reasons any open source [game] developer should use a service like Sourceforge is longevity and posterity. If you host your own stuff, likelyhood is that you will move on in life and said self hosting resource becomes unavailable. Such has happened to RG Pro Hockey, a rather amazing looking open source 3D ice hockey simulation that is no longer accessible on it's former homepage. Now it is up to people like us (me?) to chase down the author or find somebody who has a copy of the code, and then get it on Sourceforge before it's lost to the winds of time." - June 2, 2007


 * "One of 3D Realms' older titles, Alien Carnage, is now available as freeware. Download link plus random blurb here, announcement with other download link here. It's an old school platformer and, from my youngers years, pretty good fun. Dosbox required but that's ok since Dosbox works on pretty much every platform going including my mate's 11 year old waterproof Casio digital watch. Y'know, one of those blue and grey plastic monstrosities. Ok, maybe dosbox doesn't work on it, but I bet it could if the developers tried - dosbox runs on everything! ;-)" - June 7, 2007


 * "Finally for today, I don't think I've yet mentioned an article on Liberty Gaming about making money from Free Software games. It's a good article with some interesting ideas, but to me I think the way to make money from Free Software games is simple; produce your own games (don't be too reliant on giant community efforts), produce good quality games (original, innovative, not too complex), and you will get good steady web traffic. Then you have adverts and merchanising and you have a steady income stream without imposing much on your players or contributors. I really don't like the notion of premium content or asking for donations. I don't think it's necessary if you are creating quality of innovative content. For example, the Desktop Tower Defense game is very simple and free to play but the guy pulls in a high 9-figure revenue (after costs, I believe) from Google adsense and merchandising alone (up to 20 million hits a month). A simple, well executed idea will get you enough visitors to make a decent steady income from a game - and if you keep churning out good games, you'll be able to make a lot of money without ever charging your players." - June 7, 2007


 * "Sometimes I finish a post feeling apprehensive about being able to find more information to populate the next days ramble on open source gaming matters. However, just earlier I was explaining to a friend the difference between open source games and commercial ones, and realise just why there always is something more to talk about - Free games are not just an end product for a player; they are a process, a community oriented process, with visible progress along the way." - June 13, 2007


 * "I'm the Microsoft of my kitchen. Nobody gets in on my cereal without there being trouble - I invoke my landlord status. But if my cereal is out, I'm having some of yours if you live here. So today I ate some of my housemates shredded wheat. That stuff tastes like paper - who in their right mind would like the taste of that? This, of course, is why we have such a variety of games. To some people, some games are boring and pointless, but to others they are the ultimate form of fun." - June 17, 2007


 * "[Actually the first FOSS game I remember getting such fancy effects [as shaders] 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." - June 18, 2007


 * "I can't stress how much I agree with [the SFZ combat system design]. Think about it, it's set in the future. Auto-tracking should be a given. Surely space combat will be about decision making not faster-than-light reactions, so it's nice to see they are emphasising this and reducing the efforts required to target enemy ships." - June 20, 2007


 * "Somebody challenged themselves to come up with an original game mechanic/concept per day for 300 days. Some of the ideas are dubious at best but still a good source of inspiration." - June 21, 2007


 * "When developing an open source project, there is always a trade off between developing new features and perfecting what you already have. Personally I think the VDrift guys have chosen the right moment to stop working on features and refine what they have done so far. Which brings me to the title of this post - new or shiney. I think it's fair to state that code can never be both new and shiney. New code has bugs. Shiney code has been refined over time. New and shiney is not a concept that transfers from the tangible reality of goods to the abstract world of programming. New or shiney, pick one and stick at it. ;-)" - June 22, 2007


 * "So, yeah, I think the scene needs a bit of dedicated medieval and fantasy modelling to happen so that all the exciting medieval and fantasy projects can pull quality artwork from a common base. Maybe there already is this kind of stuff available, do you know where? Or maybe there are people out there interested in modelling this kind of stuff. Do you know any? Spread the word!" - June 23, 2007


 * "Some fans [of King's Quest] felt so strongly that [the series should continue] they went on to create the The Silver Lining, a spectacular looking fan-made project to create a 3-game (or 3-chapter) continuation of the series. It was formerly entitled King's Quest IX before Vivendi Universal made them ditch the official affiliation. Sadly, The Silver Lining is closed source (but freeware) and Windows-only. I did lobby a while back to make them open source it and use OpenGL instead of DirectX but it fell on deaf ears. I must say, I was not enamoured by The Silver Lining tech demo either, whilst the stills look great the animation and scene transition was shakey at best, and there was a lot of aimless wandering around with very little to interact with. Still, it's just a tech demo, so I shouldn't be too harsh." * - June 25, 2007


 * Debunking reasons not to open source indie freeware games, June 26, 2007


 * "Talking of pestering projects, I'm trying to convince the Project Kilo guys to use Sauerbraten as their game engine. Project Kilo is an effort (well, currenlty mostly an idea) to create an immersive single player 3D RPG game. Sauer is the engine also behind the Eisenstern project, another 3D single player RPG effort with slightly less lofty (but still impressive) goals than Kilo. The main feature of Sauer is in-game multiplayer map editing where all map elements are defined as cubes or combinations of cubes, it makes a lot of sense to map modellers. I think the combined nature of Sauer's very easy map creation and it's development supporting Eisenstern makes it really suitable for, at the very least, prototyping a concept like Project Kilo. With little or no code the Kilo team can be up and running in no-time, and (being open source) they can build additional features into Sauer as they require them and possibly even feed back upstream. I think it's a far more pragmatic route than taking an engine like Crystal Space or OGRE3D and creating the game logic from scratch. Map modelling itself will become far more of a burden using this approach, let alone the extra effort to make a playable scenario. I'm not saying that Crystal Space and OGRE3D don't have their place in development - they are important game creation tools - but if somebody has done 95% of the work for you like the Sauer team has, by implementing a game [engine] that not only makes map modelling easy but lets you roam around massive maps with fancy effects and is easy to customize, then surely it makes sense to start there instead of starting far behind them." - June 27, 2007


 * "According to the release announcement [Atomic Tanks] also runs on DOS, which is quite interesting. Do I sense a DOS revival, FreeDOS stealing in on the alternative OS market to consign Linux to an early Internet grave? DOS was the most fun I ever had with an OS, but then again I was young and hence not very cynical. With age comes experience, with experience, cynicism. ;-)" - June 28, 2007


 * "I'm going to open with a Web 2.0 gripe. If you don't like gripes, skip the next paragraph. The Ubuntu Forums recently "upgraded" with a "Web 2.0" feature to display the thread tree. It's a feature of little or no use in a forum where people just want to read page by page. I have a P3 1000 laptop with 512 megs of ram. My iGoogle homepage does not seem to help matters either. Firefox becomes sluggish, sometimes hangs for 5-10s, with this new feature. Is this what Web 2.0 is? Bloat? Crapware in web pages? I remember playing Wing Commander II on a 286 10mhz. Admittedly it was slow, but it was a graphical 3D space game that came on a few floppies. As I write this, firefox grinds to a halt, consuming just short of 200megs. This is ludicrous. All to display some glorified text. Welcome to Web 2.0. Sigh... ok, zen, be positive, karma, appreciate the better things in life..." - June 28, 2007


 * "Despite my involvement [with Fortress] (at the moment it looks like I'll be the main programmer) I have resisted bringing it up here since I don't want to abuse FG as a platform for pimping my own projects. However we have reached a point where there's a bit of momentum and it would be a good opportunity for people to provide some input before project direction becomes harder to influence." - June 29, 2007

July

 * "But [FreeDroidRPG] game is pure fun to play ... sometimes a bit too serious, but the story is pretty entertaining (a rare thing among OS games sadly). Not to speak of the vast amount of hidden gags (Leg vs. NetBSD anyone?) in the dialogs, descriptions of objects and names :)" - hikari, July 2, 2007


 * "There's a Windows SDK available for the FreeOrion project to encourage developers who use Windows. I think this is another good practise, making it more than easy to get started with the source code. I would go as far as to say that the indimidating factor of downloading and using various development tools is probably as big a barrier than knowing how to program. You can learn programming basics from looking at source code and following the logic, but it's meaningless if you can't make a change and see what effect that has." - July 4, 2007


 * "[Vega Strike] is an strong example of the growing pains experienced by a popular open source project and how managing releases and resources should be considered as much a task as development itself. I would put the lack of releases down to a failure to manage contributions, but I think they have turned the corner with this. For an excellent example of good resource management, look at the Battle for Wesnoth project. I'll also note it is easy to look in and criticise, but far harder to apply good practise to your own projects." - July 4, 2007


 * "Back to PU and a bit about the scene which PU comes from, and it's all a bit complex, rotating around the Vega Strike engine. Some of the VS devs (herein called the 'devs') made Privateer Remake. This got noticed by the Wing Commander nuts at crius.net (herein called the 'canons') who are dedicated to their cause. Some less fierce but equally obsessed WC fans (herein called the 'non-canons') at the same time started forming Wing Commander Universe, a super-mod that encompassed all things WC, a lot of which started making it's way into PR. Unhappy at the way PR was not completely true to the original Privateer, the canons - with help from the devs - created Privateer Gemini Gold, a fork of PR. The canons publicly denounce WCU. The non-canons decided that not only was the limitations imposed on gameplay in PGG not conducive to a fun game, but they did not go far enough, so created Parallel Universe, something even less true to it's WC heritage that embraces fun over accuracy. So you now have a triangle of groups - the devs with VS and PR, the canons with PGG who gets help from the devs, the non-canons with WCU and PU who collaborate with the devs on PR. It's quite an interesting thing to follow. It's quite a caustic atmosphere between the canons and the non-canons. At the end of the day, not everybody can always get along, and the canons are abrasive at best, with questionable forum policies and immature moderation the last time I encountered them. Anyway, my point was that PGG is the most well known of all the projects. However, feedback isn't that great on the latest release 1.02 which new players are finding incredibly hard with a high starting difficulty. The PU team could flank PGG in terms of community by being a more fun game to play so attracting more players and contributors. And there's PR in the middle that will no doubt continue to, well, be in the middle. I hope I got that all correct. Whilst it was a stormy path to the projects we have today, I think each project serves a niche and they can coexist harmoneously. It may even turn out to be one of those situations where the existance of one is what spurs on the other - Yin and Yang etc. :-)" - July 6, 2010


 * "Regular readers may know that I'm not big on posting web games (this is an open source games blog after all) but I found this one rather stylish. I bizzarely encountered it on a blog about room escape games that I found whilst cleaning up my bookmarks. I don't think there's a worse genre of game than room escape games. Every time I play one I end up feeling suicidal. Well, ok, not that bad but I can't see how somebody can enjoy just clicking randomly until something lands in your inventory and eventually you can leave a room - it's like focusing the worst aspect of adventure games. Who would repeatedly subject themselves to such torture?" - July 9, 2007


 * "Contributing to open source projects has it's benefits and it's downsides. One of the downsides is that significant contributions can be ignored by upstream and with a project the size of the Linux kernel there is no way you can realistically fork it. Indeed, in smaller projects people will put forward valid contributions that are rejected due to fear of the original author having to maintain something they did not write or create. Not every good line of code will become part of the project it is intended for. One of the true arts of open source project management is striking the right balance between accepting contributions and minimizing the problems they may cause, but it will always be a case that some bad stuff gets in whilst some good stuff gets lost. It happens to games - check out all the OpenTTD contributions many of which were great but never got merged." - July 11, 2010


 * "SoulFu would be great... if it had a decent license. I mean.. the license its currently under.. there's not much point in having the source code out there. And, on top of /that/ he wants the community to finish it for him? I mean, wtf? Then, the derivatives.. they need the user to pay Aaron Bishop? I mean, come on. As far as I'm concerned, it may have source available, but, its just as "open source" as Monolith's "Shogo: M.A.D." (the source code was released in the past, under a license that made it virtually useless.) As a result.. I find its... open-ness lacking. " - Kaelis Ebonrai, July 14, 2007


 * "The game [SoulFu] has a lot of interest and support. If, from the get go, he'd released it as open source, set up merchandising with cafepress and added Google ads to his sites, he'd be making more money than he is now and SoulFu would have many more people contributing to it and helping him market it." - July 14, 2007


 * "So, yesterday I commented on how similar Automanic and Interstate Outlaws were. The main author of IO dropped me an email: 'Just letting you know whats going on with Automanic, as you seem to be hanging out for it. I'm the guy that was working on it, but I've since dropped Automanic, and am now coding Interstate Outlaws. That's probably why they seemed similar to you :) You should try IO, i think it is better than Automanic was, and is probably similar to what Automanic 0.3 or maybe 0.4 would have been.' D'oh. After posting I did think to myself this could be the case but was busy with other stuff so didn't go back and post a note saying as such. Still, not much to say other than, 'Common Sense 1 - 0 Charlie'. That and Interstate Outlaws is a way cooler name than Automanic. ;-)" - July 14, 2007


 * "A previous release of Nuclear Graveyard had managed to become corrupted when uploaded, a fact which - much to the author's dismay - nobody reported for nearly 2 months despite over 100 downloads. Anyway, if you were one of those people who downloaded the game and (benefit of the doubt) was unable to get it working then now would be a good time to try again!" - July 17, 2007


 * "I've no idea why [SuperTuxKart 0.3.0] hasn't been announced anywhere. Thanks to the commenter who point out the fact it is available after I complained yesterday about it not being released yet. (Comments are helpful!)" - July 21, 2007


 * "Our benevolent hosts freeforums.org have lost 3 weeks worth of data. I could stomach the copious service interruptions with this free service, but losing data is just out of order. They gave a bunch of techincal excuses but the reality is that the service they provided was a long way short of what they offered, and to lose 3 weeks of data like that just smacks of incompetence. They frequently afflicted us with downtime, each time with some excuse of how this downtime would lead to a better and more reliable service, but each time it was the same. Before you shout, 'but it was free!' let me remind you they offer this free service to get a large community to whom they can offer paid services i.e. freeforums.org is a shoehorn into the hosting market for the people behind it. Ironically I was considering upgrading to a paid-for service with them to get better uptime and a few more features but do you think I want to pay to rely on them now? No, this was disgusting." - July 23, 2007

August

 * "Simple ways to help consolidate the Free gaming community will be the order of the day - none of this 'let's implement a super redundant multi-layered workflow based CMS with tightly integrated thingymajigs' that will never happen because we are all busy people. [Keep It Simple Stupid]. Anyway, the forums are a good place for organisation." - August 10, 2010


 * "Tutorials are good. If you want a good player retention rate for your game, code a tutorial. I can't stress enough how effective that is - most players are lazy. Take me for instance. I'm busy, if I play a game I want near instantaneous enjoyment. If I don't know what's going on I will quit a game within 30s. Many FOSS games I install are uninstalled very quickly - not because I don't like them, but because I don't have the desire to learn them on my own. (Note, I do not play commercial games at all.)" - August 13, 2007


 * "As a Free Software developer or advocate, we expose ourselves directly to the vocal minority of critical end users - so one of the best things to learn is not to be insulted by anything they say. Reacting only makes them happy and you stressed. It doesn't matter what some ignorant fool says as long as you stay calm and true to your principles. Such people will quickly disappear in Internet anonymity. Their comments are often worthless and not worth responding to. Next time somebody slams your game, remember that many others enjoyed your efforts and they are the people you should focus on." - August 20, 2007


 * "There's an opinion article on Linux Lookup discussing the problems with Linux/FOSS game development. On the face of things, the author seems to be spot on, but if you think about it properly I think he has completely missed the real problem with FOSS game development. It's not about lack of talent, artistic or otherwise. Or lack of good environments, or lack of anything for that matter. The single biggest problem with FOSS game development is the lack of consolidation. Duplicated effort, too many projects chasing similar goals, too many people solving already-solved problems. If we could harness just 25% of the wasted effort in FOSS game development we could produce some very high quality games. That has to be the community goal, to help eachother to help eachother because whilst competition is healthy, teamwork is powerful." - August 21, 2007


 * "It has been identified that the major weakness in creating quality looking Free games is the lack of Free art - either hard to find or just non-existent. So, we will be creating the first Common Media Project." - August 31, 2007

September

 * "Never fear, open source is here! FOSS games are often original, contrary to what many people think. Originality goes beyond the conceptual. Originality is about project direction, about improving gameplay. Free games may often be reimplementations but they usually take a proactive approach to addressing gameplay and game balancing issues. You can be sure that the same AI bugs that afflicted the initial versions of Freeciv 10+ years ago have been addressed in the upcoming Freeciv 2.1 - which already has patches for the issues I mentioned the other day." - September 5, 2007


 * "On top of that, if your Free Software game project includes non-Free art then you need to be careful. Why? Because this could happen to you. Sure it's a setback that the Warsow team will recover from, but by using an appopriate license or agreeing terms this situation could be avoided. For instance I'm accepting some non-Free contributions to a project of mine but I made sure the author agreed the graphics had irrevocable usage rights for the project. So he can't rip his graphics out if he has a change of heart." - September 09, 2007


 * "I have a few Free game commitments and I really want to focus on creating Fortress. It's been a long time coming but I'm now at a stage where I want to contribute to a game as well as making copious amounts of net noise. As such perhaps it is time to make this a more public blog - have some people contribute to it. Make it more community-based. I'm thinking about it..." - September 20, 2007


 * "The OpenTyrian project came up on the freegamedev.net forums. Tyrian is an old DOS game, a vertical scrolling shooter. Those games used to be so much fun - most games did in those days." - September 22, 2007


 * "FreeLords, the project cloning Warlords, have made their first release since changing to Java as their programming language of choice. No more dependencies (except Java, of course), automatic portability, and the promise of network play, all bode well for the future but this snapshot release isn't playable yet. However it seems their time machine works well since these announcements are from 2008 - if they have a time machine then this game is sure to succeed." - September 22, 2007


 * "There was an interesting comment on the observation I made regarding the version number of LordsAWar: '0.0.3 for the lordsawar version doesn't mean 3% done. The game has most aspects of Warlords 2 implemented, where as freelords only has a few.' Well why version 0.0.3 then? Ok, I admit, version numbers are probably one of the least important aspects of game design. But, come on, really, if your game has lots of features and close to what you consider "1.0" for your game, then label is as such. People who are casually looking for a game to play will see 0.0.3 and think, 'not even alpha.' They won't play it. Players are fickle like that. Version numbers imply the amount of progress towards the author's vision of the game. To me, 1.0 is the original vision and past that are evolutions of that vision." - September 27, 2007


 * "The gaming genre has become boring as the limitations of games have eroded away. Complete freedom to move often has the undesired consequence of making the world less interesting as there is no longer a challenge to navigating it - just find the next gap and run through it, all guns blazing. CRPGs used to be mazey, claustrophoic ordeals where you constantly had to plan to avoid getting into too many consecutive battles as monsters were quite fatal. The game worlds were not massive, but they were hard. The gaming industry seems to have forgotten that an enclosed but well defined world is more intriguing than a a massive open one which just looks pretty and has no substance." - September 27, 2007

October/November

 * "Still, I do have a soft spot for UFO2000, having observed steady progress for many years on the project. Seeing the gameplay video on the UFO2000 site made me yearn for a single player edition. I want a game I can tackle at my own pace, y'know, multiplayer games tend to favour those who play a lot."/I'm tempted to try [Battle Tanks], but again that multiplayer angle just doesn't appeal to me. Even if they offered a simple single player edition where you fought bots, that'd be fine. Please, let me play with myself. I mean, er, um..." - October 03, 2007


 * "There's still quite some way to go [in creating LibreGameWiki] (still a lot of missing / uncategorized games) but it's good to see Kiba & co sticking at the task in hand. Too many people start something then give up before it's even off the ground when it's not an overnight success." - October 16, 2007


 * "Multiplayer Civ is a lot of fun and very involving (who needs FPS games?) but importantly the Freeciv team place high value on the single player edition so it caters to the casual gamer as well as the intense one." - October 29, 2007


 * "Really, it's one thing to be inspired by another game, but to clone it down to the last detail? I don't know, maybe I'm being harsh (after all, I'm a Freeciv fan) but I feel there's a big room for improvement in this regard." - November 10, 2007

December

 * "I would like to see the author approach maybe the Open Transport Tycoon project to see if there's any room for utilizing some of their many wonderous building models. I'm a big believer in project synergy, of which there isn't nearly enough occurence in the Free Software game world. People seem to fear a lack of identity to a game, but a game identity is foremost created by experience - of which graphics are only a part of the bigger picture. Also, just becasue two projects share graphical resources, doesn't mean they have to completely overlap."


 * "I do think that a good niche for Free Software games is alternative operating systems. Not only does it allow OS enthusiasts to port games to their favourite platform (e.g. the SkyOS author has ported a number of open source games) but it allows the games to be played on a platform that commercial games are not available on, even if it is a tiny minority." - December 12, 2007


 * "It seems to me, in reference to the [Secret Mayro Chronicles] and [SuperTux] that altogether the Free Games community really has to make it a rule to quit with the clones. People played these games 10 years ago. They're cool, and everyone should be free to code what they want, but if we want free gaming to be escalated to a worthwhile endeavor, I think it's paramount that we start creating new games, with at least novel or altered gameplay, or at least improved, and that we focus on mkaing new IPs that can branch out into other areas. Mario has dozens of games, why cant we start creating open content stuff that can survive through several games, and have other media created for them too? I don't know if I'm making any sense, but I think it comes down to more than just how much do you clone something, but rather how do we stop cloning and start creating open media that can be adapted to many projects, game and otherwise. We have Tux, but really where are our open content characters that can be featued in games, animation, manga, fiction etc?" - Justin, http://freegamer.blogspot.com/2007/11/dreaming-of-sensi-xmas.html#comments

2008

 * TBD

2009

 * TBD

2010

 * TBD

2011

 * TBD