LINUXGAMES

ETQWPro, a competition mod for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, has had a new release with additional functionality and bugfixes.

Download: [ etqwpro.net ]

Teeworlds, an endearing multiplayer 2D shooter (3D-accelerated) with mouse-based aiming, has been updated again:

This is a major maintenance release, with no less than 35 fixes. Highlights include several improvements to the UI and input system — including binding a key to multiple actions. Also in this build we added some anti-spam features, fixed memory leaks in the server and made sure the low-quality mode still renders fonts properly.

Make sure you read the download notes (or the full changelist available on our trac roadmap.) It contains important information, and we will not respond to any bug reports resulting from users not reading the release notes.

Screenshots: [ View ] Download: [ teeworlds.com ]

AMD has released their monthly Linux ATI Catalyst display driver package for their graphics cards; the requisite release notes delineate these changes:

• Introduces early look support for Ubuntu 8.04.
• Selecting Wait for vertical retrace in the AMD Catalyst Control Center – Linux Edition no longer results in the FPS of the application not matching the display’s vertical refresh rate.
• A black screen is no longer observed on some hardware when switching to the console or leaving the X window system when a Vesa framebuffer console driver is used.
• Video Playback is no longer displays incorrect colors and additional shadow images when cropping or expanding a video file using a video player that utilizes the XVideo extension.

Download: [ amd.com ]

Industry Entertainment sent in a press release to announce Master Kick, a foosball simulator:

There is something new, just for you! In the crowd of excellencies of virtual pleasures here comes Master Kick! New, bright and green, keen and mean, table soccer like you never seen! It doesn’t wait, it bites your guts, it sky rocket your soccer rush! Try it casually, enjoy it continuously! Master Kick for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows from now till beyond. Master Kick establishes new standards of arcade sports games:

• GREAT ATMOSPHERE – Master Kick gives you the full atmosphere of soccer match combined with table soccer.
• ADDICTIVE GAMEPLAY – The most addictive and challenging table soccer ever.
• AMAZING VISUAL EFFECTS – Brilliant graphics, weather effects, including several playfields (grassy, indoor, cyber, snow), different teams dresses.
• SIX PLAYFIELDS / SIX TEAMS – Play it indoors, outdoors, in cyber world, on real grassy playfield, in mud, on the snow…
• VIVID SOUND FX AND MUSIC – Vivid sound of cheering and dynamic music.
• ACTION REPLAYS – See how gorgeous goal you scored.
• LOCALIZED IN MULTIPLE LANGUAGES – Available in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Hungarian and Serbian languages.
• PLAY ANYWHERE – Game is available for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Asus Eee PC computers and Windows Mobile and Palm OS devices.

The Asus Eee is a Linux-based subnotebook computer.

Screenshots: [ View ] Download: [ indus3.org ]

Computer and Videogames.com has a feature up extolling 1999′s Aliens vs. Predator as “the best Aliens game ever made” by virtue of its mauling features:

Shoot an Alien directly in the head and, with a suitably melon-squelching noise, it’ll drop dead. Shoot it in the arm, and you have yourself an amputee Alien. A very angry amputee Alien, spraying deadly acid from its chitinous stump, which eats through your armour and flesh.

As the article also mentions, AvP is one of the scariest games I’ve ever played, and one of the scant few that’s actually made me jump out of my skin (I HATE FACEHUGGERS. I HATE THEM!).

In a generous gesture, developer Rebellion released the source code to AvP many years ago, which Steven “relnev” Fuller subsequently ported to Linux (albeit without multiplayer support). There are no binaries available, but it’s not hard to compile the source tree. You can also still get the game itself from various vendors on Amazon.

If you’re a sci-fi/horror or first-person shooter fan, I highly recommend giving it a spin, as it still holds up well even today.

What games that pit the player against the ravenous undead hordes do you enjoy? Here are a few off the top of my head:

• DOOM! From the very first area of E1M1, you’re trading fire with armed zombies.
• Doom 3 – Along with the expansion pack, Resurrection of Evil, the early portions of the game feature former human enemies rather prominently.
• Quake 4 – Has a zombie survival level in the main campaign; there’s also this user-made level, Zombietown. There were also zombies among the rogue’s gallery in the game’s predecessor, Quake.
• Killing Floor – a total conversion for Unreal Tournament 2004 that has a cooperative multiplayer mode.
• Boxhead: The Zombie Wars – an above-par Flash game with gameplay similar to Robotron.

Edit: Thanks to the readers who pointed out these titles I missed.

• Majesty – one of the early Linux Game Publishing titles, zombies are among the creatures in the strategy game’s kingdom.
• Return to Castle Wolfenstein had rotting Saxon warriors hunting the player through catacombs.
• Neverwinter Nights’ original campaign had a zombie-infested village.
• Black Shades portrays a psychic bodyguard who must deal with zombie assassins.
• Eternal Damnation – a total conversion for Postal² (also included in the Postal Fudge Pack), because “how many mods let you punch zombies in the face with knuckle dusters?” including an actual plot.
• Penumbra: Overture includes zombie dogs.
• Myth II includes undead units, how could we forget?

The Vendetta Online news page has an update regarding recent work on the space combat MMORPG:

Sorry it’s been awhile since the last newspost. The truth is, we’ve really had our noses to the grindstone, working very hard and trying to get the game, and our various administration infrastructure, ready for marketing over this coming summer.

[...]

As always, thank you all for your support and long-suffering patience. It’s these times when we (the developers) are the most silent, that are usually the hardest on our userbase. And yet, our silence only stems from the intensity and focus being applied to the game which carries our collective hopes.

Vendetta Online has a free trial period, after which there is a monthly subscription fee.

Screenshots: [ View ] Download: [ Trial client ]

Another patch for The Battle for Wesnoth, the lauded open source fantasy-themed turn-based strategy game, has been announced by the dev team:

• New translation: Croatian.
• Updated translations: Chienese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Lithuanian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish.
• Fixed not working “Update transition” and make “Delay transition update” directly trigger an update when toggled off.
• All applicable scenarios now use the victory/defeat music on ending.
• Refreshing the gamelist in the lobby screen was optimized.
• The game server (wesnothd) was optimized to handle more players.

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

A beta version of the user-created Enemy Territory: Quake Wars map Comm Link has been released, where the GDF must fight their way into a Strogg fortress to disable their communications equipment.

According to a report mentioned in the Wine Weekly News Issue #345, the ET:QW SDK design tools rating has been changed from Garbage to Gold, thanks to the “Improved support for the .NET framework.” in Wine 0.9.59.

If you’re interested in the Quake Wars competition scene, Splash Damage posted a round-up with a focus on the ClanBase Nations Cup.

Finally, Splash Damage has some info on the next patch:

First off, 1.5 is not an official Activision release like all the previous updates (this is actually the cause of the license troubles from a few weeks back), but instead something that we here at Splash Damage are funding ourselves and working on alongside our new project. As Activision’s QA and localization departments are not available to help us out, we instead opted for an extended public beta phase to iron out any remaining kinks. The result is that things don’t always move as quickly as we’d like them to, but we are committed to getting 1.5 finished and out to you.

I can confirm that 1.5 is on our development schedule for this month and we hope to get it all wrapped up and ready for public consumption. We’ll still have to test it internally, but we hope to release the game update, the updated SDK, and the final version of the Official Competition Mod in the coming weeks so you guys will have plenty of new material to sink your teeth into.

Neverwinter Vault has announced the results of their 2007 Module of the Year competition, which ranks the year’s most acclaimed user-created content for the Dungeons and Dragons RPG Neverwinter Nights:

• Winner – The Aielund Saga Act IV – The Fall of Aielund Pt3
• Gold – Tortured Hearts II
• Silver – Towers of Dregar: Xora’s Vial
• Bronze – Sanctum of the Archmage 2: The Miracle Worker – Act I

Timothy Miller, founder of the Open Graphics Project, wrote in to the project’s mailing list with a status report on the project’s efforts to create a GPU chipset with an openly-licensed design (thanks KernelTrap):

The OGD1 design has actually been finished for a couple of months now. In that time, we’ve been chasing a chick-and-egg problem. We can take all the orders we want, but there’s as much as an 8-week lead time between when we place our order for 100 boards and when we get them so that we can test and then ship them. [...] We didn’t want to make a formal announcement for pre-orders until we solved this problem.

We have now solved the problem and are ready to take pre-orders.

The retail price is $1500, but the first 100 pre-orders will get a $100 discount.

[...]

These are pre-orders, not orders. That means the lead time is unpredictable. We don’t have a stock. We will purchase a stock based on the number of pre-orders we get. Also, this means that if we never get a large enough number of pre-orders, we will be unable to fulfill them; all pre-orders would be canceled, and no one would be charged anything.

OGD1 is for hardware hackers. This isn’t just about graphics. If all you wanted was a graphics card that worked with Free Software, we’ve had that for a long time with Matrox, for some time with Intel, and most recently and significantly with ATI.

Additional details are discussed in the e-mail, such as promotional plans.

The Linux Game Tome pointed out Empty Clip, a 2D action RPG with the following features:

• 3D hardware accelerated graphics
• Sound and music
• Over 200 different monsters
• Over 400 different items including weapons, armor, and upgrades
• 30+ hours of gameplay
• Travel through mansions, dungeons, forests, caves, cities, skyscrapers, deserts, hell, and alien worlds
• Deathmatch over TCP/IP

Screenshots: [ View ] Download: [ sourceforge.net ]

Indie game developer 2D Boy has released a new trailer for their upcoming eclectic puzzle game World of Goo, which was an award winner (Design Innovation) at the 2008 Independent Games Festival.

• Dailymotion
• Hi-res xvid
• Hi-res divx

Thanks to Nemoder for pointing out that Ryan “icculus” Gordon has posted audio from a talk he gave at the Upstate Carolina Linux Users Group about various Linux game-related topics (I’d be more specific but I haven’t had a chance to listen to it myself yet):

I’m about 30 minutes into it, after the tutorial on shell scripting.

A lot of topics got covered, and it digresses and rambles a lot. My apologies for my lack of brevity. :)

This is apparently being published on lottalinuxlinks.com‘s podcast, and Hacker Public Radio, too.

• UCLUG MP3 podcast feed
• UCLUG Ogg Vorbis podcast feed
• Direct link to MP3 of speech
• Direct Ogg Vorbis of speech

Thanks to the UCLUG for having me, and Dave Yates for publishing the talk’s audio!

ScummC is a toolset for creating adventure games that can be run with ScummVM. It is currently possible to build small games, and there’s online documentation to get you started.

Screenshots: [ View ] Download: [ dotsec.net ]

FreeGamer pointed out that FreeOrion, a multiplayer turn-based strategy game inspired by the Master of Orion series, has binaries available now:

Good news for Linux-users! Automatically built binaries of FreeOrion’s latest SVN revision are available from psitronic.de/div/FO. They will allow you to play the game without having to build it, which isn’t that easy on some distributions. Best thanks to kroddn!

There’s also an embedded gameplay video at the post.

House of Mirrors, a Java-based laser puzzle game, has had an update to add a default game pack.

Download: [ google.com ]

S2 Games has release the version 1.4.3 patch for Savage 2: A Tortured Soul, their newly-released mixed-genre fantasy-themed multiplayer game; changes include:

• Spawn portal experience value on kill from 50 to 150
• Max health for spawn portals from 300 to 1200
• Cooldown time on portals from 30 seconds to 60 seconds
• Spawn portals can now be used multiple times
• Fixed some issues with pathing
• Fixed some server and client crashes
• Interrupt will no longer damage gadgets or structures
• Siege no longer recieves a camera kick when being attacked
• Fixed some PNG format clan icons not loading properly
• Fixed issues with white unit portraits, messed up health bars and units named “NAME”
• Fixed all known issues caused by hosting a local server and then connecting to an online server
• Fixed issues with Revenant and Devourer strong attack, they have now been re-enabled
• Promotional codes can now be entered during in-game account creation
• Map rotation system has been changed, it now plays maps in a linear order, the “weight” has been changed to a percent chance a map will be played

The game client will update itself to this latest build.

edit: Version 1.4.4 is now out to fix a game exploit. Thanks to the readers who pointed this out.

Download: [ AtomicGamer - 32bit, 64bit | s2games.com ]

ESReality posted a Warsow trick video, Cutting Classes:

Tricks are performed by the one who made the warsow movements schoo ie mote as mdoo and jt-brako were in charge of respectively filters and sound editing.

Warsow is an open source multiplayer first-person shooter derived from the Quake 2 codebase which focuses on speed and trick jumps for movement physics.

EnemyTerritory.tv, a site dedicated to covering the burgeoning Enemy Territory: Quake Wars competitive scene, has launched with live shoutcast coverage of matches and archived games available to view on-demand with commentary. There’s also a tutorial for watching live matches via ETQW TV in-game.

It’s a really slick setup, and I’m even more disappointed now that I wasn’t around to play with my clan Goons in their match versus ALLCAPS!, as you can watch the match archive at the site :)