Classic gaming: OGS Mahjong

A somewhat neglected topic here on FreeGamer are classic puzzle games, and OGS Mahjong is definitely one of the gems of this genre:

OGS Mahjong 0.9 promo

The stable 0.9 release of this game can be expected shortly, so brush up your Mahjong skills or take the opportunity to finally learn the rules of this age-old classic (like me).

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Coldest: Mech AI and Playtesting with the Dev!

Trees in Coldest

Video: Coldest's Crazy Bots

Bots were added to the mech fighting game Coldest. If you would like to help playtest the game together with the developer, follow the project's news feed (there will be an announcement for a session sometime soon) and get the git version via:

git clone git://coldestgame.git.sourceforge.net/gitroot/coldestgame/coldestgame coldest

Build instructions here.

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Mass Blaster: Ambidextrous Abstract Shooter

Synchronized shooting in Mass Blaster

Mass Blaster is one of the most intense arcade shooters for Windows and Linux. You will take control of two ships simultaneously to blast away at the invading Square Army. On your left, take down enemies with the red n' rad Trigerus. On your right, command the cool blue Pythagora to wipe out your foes. Choose from 4 modes of difficulty to fight your way through 10 gutsy levels. Only those with the skills to pilot both ships at the same time will go on to become High Score Heroes.

This game shares a vein with games like Avoision and pumps adrenaline. Intended for one player, Mass Blaster plays superb with two pilots as well. Just get a keyboard emulator and a joystick to avoid key locking.

Code is under GPL, while all other assets are under the not-so-free CC-BY-NC.

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The silver lining of the MegaUpload shutdown

It's been big news online lately that MegaUpload was shut down.  Along with it, many of the other annoying, wait-60-seconds-and-fill-in-this-captcha-or-upgrade-to-premium file sharing services have stopped offering public downloads.  A lot of people are understandably upset about this, since in the case of MegaUpload, they don't even have access to their own files anymore.

This blog post isn't about whether it was right for MegaUpload to be shut down.  There's plenty of debate going on about that, and it's something that I'm not personally interested in taking part in.  What we do know is that there were a substantial number of people using MegaUpload to distribute pirated media, and, let's be honest: a lot of people are pissed off because piracy just got a lot harder.  If you're one of those people, and you're angry and suddenly in search of ways to entertain yourself in the wake of the big shutdown, this post is for you.

You may have already realized that to some extent piracy creates buzz about media.  If people enjoy a movie or a game or an album or whatever, they talk about it, and the word gets out, even if the person doing the talking pirated it.  This is not a justification for piracy, mind you.  If someone wants to make content and then threaten to send you to jail for using it the wrong way, that's their prerogative under copyright law.  On the other hand, people and companies who do that don't deserve your business, and they don't deserve the buzz that you create by talking about their media.  This is particularly true given the fact that they're spending the money you give them to curtail your freedoms through draconian legislation and copyright treaties.

Ask yourself this, dear reader:  Do I need the RIAA to tell me what music I ought to like?  Do I need the MPAA to tell me what movies to like?  Do I need crappy, DRM-loving, morally-bankrupt game studios like EA to tell me what games to like?  I mean, seriously, have you seen big budget movies lately?  Most of them are complete lowest-common-denominator tripe.  As intelligent individuals, we can do better than that.

There's an awful lot of media out there released for free (or at least very cheaply in some cases), directly by the artists, musicians, cinematographers, and game studios that make them.  Some people like to argue that piracy doesn't harm anyone if you never would have paid anyway; I would contend that by pirating big budget, mass-market crap, you're hurting dedicated artists who are releasing their work for free, because the time you spend finding a pirated copy of whatever it is you want to download could have been spent discovering and talking about their works.

Even better, you could spend some of that idle time creating entertainment rather than just being entertained.  If you haven't worked on your own art, music, movies, or game projects, I would strongly encourage you to try it out.  Creating entertainment for other people to enjoy and getting their feedback on it can be immensely satisfying.  As an honest aside here, even a brief browse through open media libraries will make it obvious that movies are by far the weakest link in this chain, followed by games.  Music, being easy now for individuals or bands to produce on a large scale at home with a few hundred dollars worth of equipment, is by far the strongest.  If regular people like us are willing to spend the time helping to create games and movies, we can close the gap.  It'll take time, but if we can pull it off, it'll be worth it.

Media doesn't have to come from a feeding tube.  Go out, look around, and see the world.  There's a lot more out there than the big studios would like you to believe.  And while it's not yet equal in some ways (special effects, etc) to the big budget stuff, your interest and contributions can help it get there, and at the same time help render the big studios and their anti-consumer copyright laws irrelevant.  The big studios may, to some extent, be able to make it more difficult to pirate their content.  What they cannot do is force us to give them money -- we can always choose not to watch their stuff.

Here are some places to get started.

Viewing:

• SoundCloud
• Jamendo
• Some open movies
• Wikipedia's list of web television series 
• Wikipedia's list of free and open source computer games
• Indie Game Reviewer
• GameBoom
• Armor Games

Getting involved:

• Creative Commons
• Free Software Foundation
• Electronic Frontier Foundation

Creating:

• Scirra Construct
• OpenGameArt.org (disclaimer:  yeah, it's my site ;) )
• WeAreTheMusicMakers on Reddit
• BandCamp

If you have other sites to add to this list, drop me a line and I'll add them.  In the meantime, go discover something. :)

P.S.  If you agree with this, tell people about it.  Retweet, reblog, upvote, +1, whatever.  I can talk about this all day, but we need a real movement if this is going to change anything, and that means we need people to be aware.

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Flesh Snatcher: Bloody Java Polygons

Scenes from Flesh Snatcher

Flesh Snatcher is a bloody jME2 fps with fast movement and dodge-bullets gameplay that is low poly and low-tech enough to run smoothly on a netbook (tested: Asus EeePC 1000H).

Most models were made by the author, Arbaro was used for tree generation, FSRad (shared source, noncommercial) was used for lightmap generation. FOSS-incompatible textures from CGTextures were used.

The code license is not all that clear, I seem only to be able to find the jME license in the archive.

This active thread reveals more info and gives an opportunity to talk to the developer.

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Traction Edge: Squad-Based Tactics, Roguelike Interface

Traction Edge is a story driven, turn based strategy game set in a Steampunk Victorian England. Gameplay is similar to the Gollop Brothers UFO or Lasersquad series in that you have "Action Points" to spend during your turn. The game also borrows heavily from roguelikes in both look and feel.

Traction Edge is currently under development and is considered alpha software. It is playable but limited. v0.2 was released for the Annual Roguelike Release Party 2011. It is distributed as source only and requires SFML 1.6 (not 2.0) and cmake to build.

Current Features:

• Turn based gameplay
• 2-4 member squad teams
• Destructable terrain
• Victorian Steampunk setting
• SFML based, rescalable on the fly, 16x16 graphical tiles.

Planned Features:

• 16-20 static levels with full story arc
• Random content, procedural maps
• Procedural tech tree
• Civilians
• Z-levels

You can keep track of all development activity using this feed. The Linux distro that I use doesn't support SFM 1.6 any more, which makes me unable to test this interesting sounding and looking squad tactics game.

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Annex: Conquer the world Beta2 released

A new beta of the Megaglest based standalone game Annex: Conquer the World has been released recently:

Annex beta2 game-play

Most important news for me: real Linux support out of the box now ;)
But there are also a few other nice changes, like additional tileset and units etc. The game also has its own master-server now, thus not depending on the Megaglest one any longer.

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