Dwarf Fortress is now at version 0.31.19. DF is a real-time fantasy simulation in which the player manages a colony of industrious dwarves. While there is no way to win, per se, there are nearly infinite ways to lose. Most of these can be hilariously fun.
This forum post delineates what’s new with this release, including new animals, earthenware, and beehives!
Free Gamer has an in-depth post examining the history and current status of what was originally just Glest, a real-time strategy game effort that splintered into several projects:
After much pressing by Internet trolls and well wishers, it seems that a joining of efforts is in the offing.
Even if the efforts do merge, they may still remain separate entities. Reading through the post, there’s talk of official liasons between the projects and all sorts. It seems a bit more complicated than you might expect.
S2 Games has announced that Heroes of Newerth will have a new hero this Friday, with the assistance of an actor:
Acclaimed TV and movie actress Paula Garcés, is the persona and voice behind the new Legion hero Aluna. Seen in Clockstoppers, Harold and Kumar, and Warehouse 13, Garcés lends her beauty and talent to HoN. Aluna, of the Legion, is skillful in battle and sure to become a celebrity amongst the heroes of Newerth.
Visit the HoN Facebook page for updates on Paula Garcés and Aluna all week!
Also, a new patch was released with the following changes:
Fixed Armadon
Fixed Alchemist Bones always starting with 1 charge
Fixed the End Game Match screen so it properly references Silver Coins
Developer Jason Rohrer, who created acclaimed games such as Sleep is Death and Passage, has released Inside a Star-filled Sky, a 2D overhead perspective shooter with the unusual gameplay element of level recursion: each time you clear a level, the scope expands and you begin playing as the creature you had just been fighting inside. Ars Technica just posted their review and weren’t too impressed, but I’m interested in hearing your opinions. Post below!
Greedy Car Thieves is an overhead-perspective sandbox action game with single player and multiplayer game modes. Features:
single-player story mode where you play as both a lawman and a thug
multi-player mode with various game types: free for all, 1v1, team deathmatch, capture the flag, hunting, bombmatch, race
a lot of cars, weapons, power-ups and destructible objects that succesfully diversify the gameplay
fire to enemies while seating in a car as a passenger
precise aiming mode makes it no problem to accurately fire to enemies even from a roof (despite the fact the game exhibits an old-school top-down view)
delightful visual effects including ambient occlusion, dynamic per-pixel normal-mapped lighting, real-time dynamic shadows (cars headlights and sunlight with varying day-night cycle), water reflections, blooming and antialiasing
fast and reliable networking, based on UDP/IP protocol, minimizes game lags and provides continuous multi-player gameplay
map editor that lets players to easily create new cities with a lot of predefined objects and tiles
randomnine let us know about his adventure platformer set in… OUTER SPACE!!! Behold, Beacon!:
Beacon’s a short free-roaming platformer, in the vein of Metroid, but with a strong focus on narrative rather than upgrades. It’s been getting great feedback since launch. RockPaperShotgun called it “a lovely bit of work, with some happy platforming and a touching ending that I think might get you lot talking”.
It only takes around 15 minutes to play, which has been about as much time as I’ve been able to devote to gaming of late (doh!).
id Software has updated Quake Live with 3 new arenas for premium subscribers, a resolution to the recent hitching that has occurred when leaving the game, improvements to the Duel experience (including persistent duel queues and scoreboard fixes), and adjustments to weapon balance within Team Deathmatch. Additional release notes can be found in the announcement.
Thanks to watusimoto for letting us know that Bitfighter 015 was released, and now features two new modules, Engineer and Armor:
The backend features a new statistics framework that supports a new game results reporting page. Expect a leaderboard and achievement system to appear in upcoming releases.
There are TONS of fixes and enhancements throughout, including fixes to some longstanding bugs, and some great tools for remote server management, so please check out the full release notes on our downloads page!
Indie DB has an article delineating the most popular Minecraft mods; I’m not sure if any are incompatible with Linux at the moment, but I should be able to get through them this weekend and have a followup post.
