M.A.R.S. - A Ridiculous Shooter

Can a game that has "ridiculous" in the title be bad? No. It can not!

M.A.R.S. - A Ridiculous Shooter

Even though I'm no fan of the multiplayer (zero-)gravity-shooter genre, I enjoy playing M.A.R.S., which features AI enemies and wingmen, various weapon types, upgrades and a pretty cool game mode, where a huge cannon will shoot at the planet of the enemy team of whoever is holding the remote to it. I also think it's darn pretty.

BAM!

M.A.R.S. uses shaders (but does not require them). The game menu is well-made in both look and feel too. The media license is not specified. Code is GPLed. M.A.R.S. runs on Lin/Win (get it here) and uses the SFML library (2.0, I had to get it from SVN).

BOOM!

If you want to help the project out, you can do so by translating it. English and German translations are available so far. Since SFML 2 has recently been ported to OS X, it probably would be welcome if someone could provide a build as well.

A little bit of everything

Long time no see!
Before you look at the pictures: I can only recommend following the FGD Game Planet and Dev Planet. That is all ;).

Games

CONS

CONS is a NOOB FRIENDLY!!! roguelike written in Lisp. It is 'friendly' because the amount of possible actions is low and they are all tooltip-explained in the main window. I also like the color scheme and simple look. Follow the developer on his blog. I know I do.

Xenowar

Xenowar is a simple-gfx squad tactics game and it runs on Windows and Android. Didn't try it yet.

skunks is a "3D game with cars, stunts and software rendering, based on Open Dynamics Engine" by Matei Petrescu, who also brought us simple3d/simcar.

Contests

SDLTutorials.com is hosting a little top-down car racing game contest (runs until 31. Dec)

Game On 2010 is an open web game contest started by Mozilla Labs. Deadline: January 11, 2011. [Rules]

Assets

OpenGameArt is getting bigger and bigger and nicer and nicer and their forums cover more and more topics. Hopefully one day they (the forums) will have a better usable design :) (this probably depends mostly on Drupal and Drupal extensions).

BlendSwap on the other hand is not getting that much attention as I imagined it would after finally introducing free licenses.

UFO:AI license statistics

UFO:AI wants to legalize it! They seek freely-licensed textures and images to replace their "license unknown" files. And they have statistics and graphs! Also their latest news cover changes to their level editor in screenshot form.

Engines

Burster is bringing Blender into the browser. Not stable.

jMonkeyEngine's team is working towards a visual SDK. They recently released alpha 3.

The developer 2D LWJGL engine Slick is making first Steps of porting to Android. Meanwhile the developer of Android platformer Replica Island blogs about development for that platform.

SDL Multi-touch, gestures and android port are some features added during Google Summer of Code. [source]

PixelLight [videos] is a new, LGPL3-licensed 3D engine on the block.

• In development since 2002 (released in August 2010)
• Runs on Windows and Linux, a prototype for mobile devices exists
• The free libraries ODE (physics) and OpenAL (sound) are supported

Well, screw this...

We need contributors, contributors, contributors to misquote a famous internet meme ;)
So if you want to be a new author writing wacky (or wicked) articles here on FreeGamer, contact us! Don't let this Blog die! And hey it's a good excuse to be lazy and not work on actual open-source games :D

FOSS game news

So what kind of gaming related news have piled up in my list during the last month (yes it has been nearly a month since goat's post :( )?

Freeroid recently got a major update, bringing it up to version 0.14. Another major update was given to us by the great Hedgewars team, so who needs worms if he can have hedgehogs? They also make better splashes under my car...*hust*.

Forget what I just said, FreeGamer minion! Concentrate on the news I bring regarding the the FOSS MMORPG Ryzom. You might remember that this game has gone free as in freedom (but not as in beer) some time ago, and besides various improvements, it now resulted in a working Linux client. So go and try out their free 21 day trial if you are on Linux (you better be ;) ).

Older Ryzom Linux vid

On the FPS side of things I have both good and bad news: First the bad ones... the very promising project Axis Revenge has closed down again for unspecified reasons. Some of their stuff will be going towards the also very nice looking Xreal based Weaver project. But no, that wasn't the good news yet... I recently came across another promising project based on the Cube2 engine, called CLONE, a rather funny name given that they want to make a CS like game ;) Not much to see yet, but the guys involved seem quite dedicated and experienced. So lets wait and see.

Hmm... what else? Ahh yes, the creator of the great AlienArena recently showed up in our forums to give us a peak at a new trailer for the upcoming AlienArena2011:

AlienArena 2011 trailer

Another Cube2 /Syntensity based project I am currently closely following, is CubeCreate. It tries to become a really polished FOSS game engine and distribution platform, and so far I like their approach (like LUA scripting).

Oh year, for the RTS fans... the new Warzone2100 3.0 Beta looks rather nice, and also has a test build with an improved netcode now. Personally I can't wait to see the Art-Revolution models integrated however. So watch this space for updates on that!

I guess that's it for tonight, hope you all stay a loyal readers even though the blog has slowed down a lot lately. And please... consider contributing as explained in the beginning!

Fable III

Alright time for Fable 3!

First of all fable is one of my most favorite series of all time. But I will still give my honest review.

Gameplay:
- The gameplay in Fable III is solid. The mechanics are totally different then from Fable I and II. What I mean by that is experience. You know longer gain experience in the game. The only type of experience currency you get is for guild seals. You spend these guild seals to upgrade your weapons and magic. It is also used for buying new spells and expression and abilities to marry, buy, sell, rent, etc.... Now your goal in Fable III is to become king of Albion and save all your people from an even greater threat than your brother. There are a lot of things I like about this game. The Co-op is much better, your can go into partnerships with people over live to get more gold, you can marry one another, have a family, do quests, and the best part is that you don't have to use a preset character, you bring your own character into your friends world. In Fable II and I you had an inventory where you can use items and change clothes. That is gone, well not totally they just made it better. When you press start you get teleported to your Sanctuary where you are able to view your xbox live friends, status, change clothes, make-up, tattoo's, color's, you can view your trophies and achievements, any gifts sent you to from an xbox live person gets put on the gift shelf, and you can also travel and change your weaponry and spells. Fable III's world is much bigger than Fable II. My only complaint is the slow loading times and graphical jitters.

9/10


Graphics:
- The graphics in-game are very well done. Some of the character models look to cheesy but the environment details are phenomenal. The cinematic graphics are even better, almost looks like your watching a movie. The enchantments and detail on the weapons and armor are also very well done. There are some graphical errors though just like in any other game, but they aren't that noticeable and will not change the gameplay what so ever.

9/10


Audio:
- The audio is also excellent in this game. The sound track is excellent, the voice acting is great, and the background sounds are very well done as well. The only issue I have with the audio is something you have to turn your TV up loud to hear what they are saying then when the talking is over it's loud from the music or combat.

9/10


Overall Score:
9/10