LINUXGAMES

Version 1.4.0 of Chocolate Doom was released recently; the project aims to replicate the behavior of the original DOS DOOM releases. I’m a bit of a DOOM purist, so this is the source port I use when I want to play single player. Moreover, developer Simon Howard was interviewed by Fragorama.se about the game:

Simon: There’s such a variety of reasons why people still play Doom. In terms of game play, I think some things are balanced in a unique way that is different to modern games – things like the speed of the player and the selection of weapons. I’ve seen comments to the effect that no other first person shooter is as fast-paced for deathmatch as Doom is. For single player, while modern games have moved on to one-on-one battles with intelligent AI opponents, the Doom gameplay remains enjoyable – slaughtering your way through hundreds of (comparatively dumb) monsters to reach the exit.

Also, my other favorite DOOM port, Odamex, is now at version 0.5.0. Multiplayer-focused, Odamex now has improved netplay and other optimizations/bugfixes. The team also requests that if you’re interested in assisting their efforts, please sign up at the Odamex bug tracker.

Download: [ Chocolate Doom | Odamex ]

Version 0.30b of Endgame: Singularity, a rogue self-aware AI sim, is out; changes include assorted bugfixes.

Download: [ emhsoft.com ]

The latest development release of Wine has been announced. New items in this release include the following:

• Support for drag & drop between X11 and OLE.
• New ipconfig.exe builtin tool.
• Support for favorites in builtin Internet Explorer.
• Beginnings of a shell Explorer control.
• A number of DirectDraw code cleanups.
• Improvements to the calendar control.
• Various bug fixes.

Download: [ Wine 1.3.1 ]

XONG (pronounced “zong”) is a Lisp-coded procedurally-generated puzzle game.

Download: [ github.com ]

Thanks to Nemoder for the notice that a new sci-fi MMO game called the Shores of Hazeron now has a Linux version in early beta testing.

“Shores of Hazeron is an ambitious and revolutionary game of science fiction adventure, intrigue, and war.” (full description)

Warzone 2100 2.3.2 has been released, with its follow-up bugfix releases 2.3.3 and 2.3.4 (thanks cybersphinx!). Changes include:

• The minimap shows impassable cliffs, and burning oil wells
• When run the first time, use the desktop resolution instead of 640×480
• Fix fire damage to take armor into account
• Optionally use the middle (or left+right) mouse button to rotate the view
• A new 4 player map, Pyramidal, and fixes to two of the included maps
• Lots of other small changes and bug fixes, among those a memory corruption bug present in all previous 2.3 versions

Warzone 2100 is a 3D real-time strategy game in a post-apocalyptic setting with a single player campaign and skirmish games against the computer and/or other players over the network. It was commercially published in 1999 for Windows PCs and the Playstation, and in December 2004, the source code and assets were released under the GPL.

Download: [ wz2100.net ]

The Tankaar Team have announced a new release of Tankaar, a two player artillery game:

• 50 weapons/astras
• Option to play against computer at 5 different levels of varying difficulty
• XMPP connection through port 443 and using old SSL Port Method
• Improved interface for friend invitation.
• Keyboard controls for power, angle and fire.

Tankaar is unique in the sense that game is powered by XMPP (Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol). So two players which
are connected through a XMPP messaging service like GTalk, Jabber etc. can play against each other. In absence of a real opponent
player can play against computer. The inspiration of the game in drawn from Indian Mythology and players duel as archers with divine arrows
(called astras). And the best part, it is free.

Download: [ tankaar.com ]

After several months work, Hamish Paul Wilson has announced the release of The Chzo Mythos GNU/Linux Binaries. The Chzo Mythos are a series of adventure games created by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw of Zero Punctuation fame.

Although these games could always be run on Linux through the use of the AGS Linux Interpreter, now there are builds for all of the games available for Linux using the runtime. This makes them easier to use and also means there are now Linux specific binaries for the games. This includes 5 Days A Stranger, 7 Days A Skeptic, Trilby’s Notes, 6 Days A Sacrifice, and Trilby: The Art of Theft.

Yahtzee’s an entertaining, yet ruthless, game reviewer, so I’m very interested in seeing the results of his own design and development efforts.

Download: [ icculus.org ]

LinuxLinks is posting a three-part article delineating twenty-four “addictive” free Linux games:

Many of the LinuxLinks crew grew up playing games on the ZX Spectrum, an 8-bit personal home computer. By today’s standards, the games were simple with basic graphics plagued by attribute clash and primitive sound generation. However, this did not stop the best games being incredibly addictive. The famous Crash magazine (a monthly publication devoted to the ZX Spectrum) used to rate games by their addictive qualities. This was often the rating that interested us the most.

The purpose of this article is to identify some of our favourite free Linux games which have these addictive qualities. They may not offer breathtaking graphics, innovative ideas, or the highest presentation. However, what they do provide is great gameplay coupled with the urge of always having just one more play.

Part One and Part Two have been posted to date.

This is a quick one as I’m pressed for time:

QuakeLive is out of beta, and now has subscription tiers with additional features. I ran into a libpng issue with the current build, but this forum thread was helpful in resolving it.

I’m missing QuakeCon for the first time since… 1997 I guess. Fortunately, Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo is liveblogging the event and captured this info from Carmack’s (ongoing) speech:

• 2:35: Says id was looking at Quake Live as a bellweather for Linux, says that more people play Quake Live on Linux than on Mac, but it’s a small amount
• 2:35: Says he uses Linux on his rocket work but that he’s disappointed by Linux desktops
• 2:35: talks about how there’s a lack of “give a damn about user experience” on them
• 2:36: but he said he installed a new version recently and found it “neat,” that it is coming together and works nicely now
• 2:36: But still isn’t about to put a game out on it.

By “put a game out on it”, I’m assuming he means at retail, as id has previously stated they would still continue to port their games and provide Linux binaries for them. I hadn’t heard that stat about Linux users for QL; that’s encouraging.

Alsoooo, Carmack mentioned during the speech that the Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory source code is being released today:

Talking about how he wanted to get Wolfenstein Enemy Territory “stuff” out… E-mailed to do that a day after QuakeCon. Bosses said that would be something for the lawyers to sort out. Never contacted the lawyers. Had Todd follow up with the lawyers. And so now the source code for Wolfenstein Enemy Territory is available on the id FTP now. Should be a press release about it shortly

I can’t login to the id FTP at present, but once it’s available we’ll update, as well as when the inevitable projects using it get going ;)

Edit: It’s up, thanks to kevlarman for the URLs; and it’s the full RTCW sources, not just ET(!):

ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/ET-GPL.zip – Enemy Territory
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/RTCW-MP-GPL.zip – Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Multiplayer)
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/RTCW-SP-GPL.zip – Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Single Player)

Edit #2: In response to an audience question about Linux support, Carmack stated that it’s “really hard to justify the benefits” of porting to Linux, and projects like Wine “make more sense”, but they’ll continue to support open source at id. Previous high-profile id efforts for Linux (Quake III: Arena in particular) had “pretty negative” results, but he believes that Linux will have a role in future cloud gaming efforts.

Version 1.8.4 of The Battle for Wesnoth, the lauded open source fantasy-themed turn-based strategy game, was released:

• Campaigns:
  • Delfadors Memoirs:
    • Make Lionel’s portrait in Delfador’s Memoirs story screens the same as his unit portrait since there doesn’t seem to be a current higher-res version available
  • Descent into Darkness:
    • Made ‘Alone at Last’ slightly easier. Also, Dela is no longer invulnerable but cannot be assassinated easily.
  • Legend of Wesmere:
    • Removed gold overlay when defeating both leaders
    • Reduced the difficulty of scenario 14 and improved the AI of the ally.
  • Liberty:
    • Increased the difficulty in ‘Glory’ by making the defenders behave more intelligently.
• Language and i18n:
  • Updated translations: Chinese (Simplified), Galician, Japanese, Serbian, Vietnamese.

Also, I stumbled across this essay at Gameology concerning the user-made Flight to Freedom campaign, which uses it to examine the social messages in fantasy games and fiction:

The second, more difficult shift requires that the player choose not to explore and conquer the entire map. The second shift in thinking is the true “line of flight” for the Drake war machine, because exploration and conquest are basic components of Wesnoth and the entire genre of strategy gaming. Deterritorializing strategy gaming in this way necessarily throws the other conventions of the genre into question. The ludological feeds back into the narrative, giving new meaning to the game text in which Malakar claims that the Dwarves are not his people’s enemies and that the Drakes should only fight them where necessary.

As a result, “River of Skulls” raises the question of whether we, as players, should take pride in wiping out the enemy in any videogame. This question of in-game violence, usually raised only by the mainstrean media and only in terms of graphic 3-d violence, is a nonstarter with most gamers. The common response is “it’s just a game.” And it is just a game, but I am far from the first to suggest that we are trying to have our cake and eat it too: if nothing one does in a game matters outside the game, then games cannot be meaningful or useful in any way; but if games can be meaningful, their meaning can be objectionable.

Screenshots: [ View ] Download: [ wesnoth.org ]

Achron, a real-time strategy game focused on temporal mechanics from indie developer Hazardous Software, is currently in an alpha testing phase for pre-ordering customers as development continues.

By pre-ordering a license to Achron, you can download the latest alpha release, and all the upcoming future releases of Achron, including the full final game. Other pre-release programs available to those who pre-order include mod tools, tournaments, community artwork submissions, community level submissions, the Resequence Engine, and possibly third party Resequence time travel games. Please see our release calendar, frequently asked questions, and end user license agreement for further details.

It’s a neat (and fairly unique I believe) idea; moreover, the gameplay itself requires elaboration:

Achron is the first game to feature single-player and multiplayer free-form time travel. It is the world’s first meta-time strategy game, a real-time strategy game where players and units can jump to and play at different times simultaneously and independently.

You can undo your mistakes, change your strategy after committing to it, preview the future, freeze time to perfectly coordinate attacks, and send entire fleets through time to when they are needed. However, all of your opponents will also be independently moving across time, attempting to rewrite history in their favor…

There are additional gameplay videos illustrating the core concepts here; as a sci-fi nut for pretty much, like, forever, I plan on making the time for this ASAP.

While there is a recent super-high-profile RTS release that shall remain nameless, I encourage you to at least read about what Achron is attempting (here’s a good preview from earlier this year at Ars Technica). There’s also a blog entry concerning the process of porting to Linux.

QMC2, a M.A.M.E./M.E.S.S. Catalog / Launcher II, has been updated to version 0.2.b16
Changes in this release include:

• Enhanced emulator configuration template format to allow for OS-specific handling of certain options and attributes
• The ini-importer now cleanly handles white space in string values
• The built-in MP3 player received another set of improvements and fixes
• Generally, QMC2 now better supports Qt 4.6 environments
• Major efforts have been made to cleanly support Mac OS X (however, there’s a Qt/Phonon bug on that platform which causes a crash on exit)

Download: [ QMC2 0.2.b16 ]

Thanks to burschik for letting us know that FreeCol, a turn-based strategy game based on Colonization, has been updated to version 0.9.4:

• Several serious bugs, including a memory or reference leak that caused 0.9.3 to slow to a crawl, have been fixed.
• A graphical modification (mod) by misiulo adds new graphics for goods and resources.
• Translations for several languages have been considerably improved.

Download: [ freecol.org ]

And Yet It Moves, a paper-collage-world platformer, is now available for Linux. There is a demo available and the full version is available for $9.99.

A teaser / trailer video is available via Vimeo and YouTube.

There are also several glowing reviews delineated here.

The developers of Steel Storm, a 3D top down arcade shooter, let us know they’ve posted a new video demonstrating typical gameplay for the upcoming project.

The Undergrounder is an indie game developed by Lowpoly Studios for Linux, Mac and Windows:

The player plays the role of a worker that needs to travel around a city using the underground (editor’s note: the subway for our American readers) for his/her duties.
Even if this could seem a simple and boring activity, there are a lot of hazards making things hard and challenging every day: underground faults and congestions, strikes, work rivals… Everything makes regular duties become challenges against the passing time.

The debut trailer was published on the game website today; since moving to New York I can certainly appreciate the unique challenges encountered with robust public transit (I don’t miss highway traffic though). Anyhow, this looks cool and I’m looking forward to its release.

Thanks to Nemoder for the quick notification that S2 Games is running a free play promotion for their online battle arena game Heroes of Newerth:

Come join us for a Free To Play Week starting Monday, August 2nd at 1:00 PM EST and ending on Monday, August 9th at 1:00 PM EST. Set up your free account and download the client here.

It’s fast and easy to do. You’ll be playing HoN again in just minutes! And, for FREE.

Come see what you’ve been missing. You will have access to the full game and all 68 heroes, including the newest hero, Doctor Repulsor. You will be able to see all game replays, but no cumulative stats will be available for F2P accounts.

It’s a complex game, and so far the best new player’s guide I’ve seen is this post on the SA Forums.

Edit: Joystiq also has a new trailer showcasing the Hellbourne.

One of our readers, Maquis196, will be receiving an OpenPandora game console soon and was wondering if any other LinuxGames readers have ordered or already have the system. If so, what are you playing on it?

Commander Genius, an interpreter of the Commander Keen series and the successor of CloneKeen and CloneKeenPlus, has been updated to version 0.3.2.1.

Download: [ sourceforge.net ]