Bulletstorm

Gameplay:
Bulletstorm is very unique and different than any other FPS. Now Epic games is the creator of Bulletstorm, therefore, it is running on the Unreal Engine and is very similar to the Unreal series. What makes this game different from the Unreal games is the fact that you "kill with skill". What I mean by that is if you kill an enemy with a skill kill you get points for it. In the campaign there is an in game currency which allows you to buy ammo, charges, ammo upgrades and charge upgrades. Charges are basically ammo for the guns secondary shots. For example if you have the shotgun and press "RB" opposite button of the leash you are able to switch to the shotguns secondary shot with unleashes a supersonic wave which vaporizes enemies. There are over 130 different kinds of kills which will earn you more points. Each gun has it's own list of skill kills including environmental skill kills which can all be accessed pressing the "back" or "select" button. The game can be fairly short depending on the difficulty you are on. I beat the game on normal in about 5 hours.If you play on a harder difficulty and try to find all of the news bots and whiskey bottles then it will take you much longer. During the campaign there are some pretty cool quick time events. If you hit the correct buttons, depending on your reaction time, you are rewarded with a large amount of points, but if you do not hit the buttons at all your action will still process but you will not be rewarded with any points.

Right in the face!

Now the only problems I had with the game was that most of the vulgar language was completely unnecessary. The language did not bother me at all, it was just too much and overused at some points in the game. Some of it is hilarious and used at just the right moments but most of it is overused. Another problem I had was it was a little bit to short and some stuff just happened was to fast. The story is good but stuff happened to quickly and the game was too short.

Overall:
9/10

Graphics:
The game like I said earlier is run on the Unreal Engine as the graphics are very well done and the environments are absolutely breathtaking especially when you are walking up towards the water dam. The visual effects in the environment are well done as well as in the water effects, background environment (ie. nature, animals, etc...). I also really enjoyed the visuals of the guns. When you use the big guns it actually looks like it hurts. When you activate the guns secondary your screen and controller will vibrate giving you that feeling of power. The enemies are really cool as well and are all very unique. The animations, art style, and animations as well as special effects are nicely one as well.

Damn he's big!

The only bad thing I can think of is during some of the cut scenes where Trishka's hair would randomly flip in the air which catches you off guard. Some of the cut scenes also have a lag or drop in FPS issue where it rarely gets choppy. Also there is a rare and not noticeable cut scene where the animations look cheesy.

Overall:

9/10

Audio:

The audio in Bulletstorm is exceptional and is very well done. Lets start with the music. What I really enjoyed about the music is that it gets your adrenaline pumped especially when your in a big battle or big moment in the game. When these events happen in the game the music will pick up and has a metal sound to it where it is fast paced just to give you that "Epic" feeling.

The voice acting in Bulletstorm is very well done as well. Gray which is the main character almost sounds like Jack Nicholas. Not much to say about the voice acting but that it sounds great. The enemies don't really talk but some of their screams sound scary as in when they yell or chase after you....RUN!!! Even the sound of the enemies exploding or being ripped to shreds sounds gruesome yet is very satisfying because you killed them "with skill".

Overall:

9/10

Conclusion:

Overall Bulletstorm is a must get game but please consider the ESRB rating, M for Mature. I say this because this game has already gotten enough of the media on their backs because parents cannot control their kids. Bulletstorm is a very fast paced and wild game. The kills are gruesome, fun, funny, and very satisfying. When you beat the game make sure you go and beat Echo Mode as well. If you are a fan of the Unreal games or even an over the top FPS fan, go and please pick this game up.

Overall Game Rating:

9/10

When three became two - Glests Uniting!

So, to all those familiar with the Glest project...

Not familiar? Glest is a popular 3D RTS that wowed the Free gaming scene with it's high quality graphics and polished gameplay back when it was released in 2006.

...it has evolved into 3 distinct codebases, with differing features:

• Glest
  The original Glest, which is barely developed any more and suffers from significant issues that will likely never get addressed, and lacks many features compared to the continuations.
• Glest: Advanced Engine aka GlestAE
  A community-led continuation of Glest by adding features and rewriting significant portions of the Glest codebase.
• Mega Glest
  With frustrations growing about the lack of stability of early GlestAE work, and the length of time between releases, a prolific modder started to add key features such as improved multiplayer, a 'mega pack' of mods (which inspired the name), and port useful changes back from GlestAE - the result was MegaGlest.

For some good videas of both forks, go to player UltiFD's youtube channel.

My impression of the different development approaches for MegaGlest and GlestAE is that MegaGlest development is driven by a "whatever works" mentality to make rapid improvements and bring more features to players. GlestAE development seems to be based on a much longer term outlook, with most work being fairly significant in nature and few basic improvements.

Where are they now

Both MegaGlest and GlestAE have remained much lower profile than perhaps the efforts of the developers have deserved. Whilst Glest remains popular, and enjoys many downloads due to high Internet profile, there is no mention of MegaGlest and GlestAE on the homepage and only people diving into the forum will discover them.

Lacking features and stability, players who fall away after trying Glest may have stuck around if they encounter MegaGlest or GlestAE, but they are unlikely to ever try them. Hopefully this will change now MegaGlest has an amazing website and will start to gain an Internet profile of its own.

Another issue is the increasing amount of time spent porting improvements between the two forks.

A further issue is that, since GlestAE has features that MegaGlest doesn't (and, to a lesser degree, vice versa), there is an increasing divergence in the modding communities.

Glest forms to join forces?

Well, the story may yet have a happy ending. After a brutal conflict, with bloodshed, riots, toppled dictators, eathquakes and... wait, I'm looking at the wrong screen...

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.

There's even a distant hope that the resultant efforts of the GlestAE/MegaGlest merger may result in Glest 4.0 if the community finally takes over the now-abandoned Glest project.

In Other Glest News

Glest forks (MegaGlest, at leasT) now can have cliffs! This opens up a lot of possibilities when it comes to map design and gives the game a bit of vertical depth, making it look cooler (in my opinion - and I am incredibly cool).

Somebody with a peculiar middle name is making a fully-3D Glest-inspired game called GlestNG - it will use Glest assets but otherwise be completed written from scratch using Ogre3D. Will it ever become playable? Who knows, but it's intriguing nonetheless. So just when two forks merge, another project arises to take the spare seat. Hah!

A completely cool mod Annex Conquer The World (moddb) has been teasingly dangled in front of us, with acclaims already including: "Easily the best Glest mod since the original Magitech!!"

Let's hope it gets released as Free software! ;-)

Engines of War: Not dead!

I made the mistake of writing the Spring DOTA-like game Engines of War off as dead the other day; I could not have been more wrong. In case you are unfamiliar with the term DOTA-like, the gameplay basically consists of controlling a single hero "Engine" unit and battling waves of AI controlled units, as well as opposing player controlled Engines.

They released a playable alpha a couple of weeks back with a very un-TA like UI and gameplay (take that Julius :P). So yeah, check it out!

Lugaru animations, maps and skeletons are free (ShareAlike)

Remember when we talked about Lugaru getting ripped?

I just got reply (twice) from Wolfire that the licensing information described in this file is correct. [first ticket (img) | second ticket (img)]. Probably the permission was given in private conversation or in the hidden Wolfire forum.

I'm so glad they did license hard-to-recreate data as open content! Hopefully some completely free/open source project will come out of this. (There are many more steps/files to go though.)

Dev-corner: m64's Development Lessons and Agile in Free Open Source Game Development

In his first Lessons from Bulletstorm post, m64 talks about the importance of Level Design, Editors, Core Gameplay and Mechanics Tweaking for open source games (although most is general gamedev related).

First, a disclaimer – Bulletstorm is a big, single-player heavy, action game. If your game is different, the observations might not apply. Some observations are shaped by how Unreal Engine 3 works and might not be easily applicable to games created with other engines. Some might be difficult to apply due to technical limitations of an Open Source process – like having to exchange data through the Internet. Without any further ado, here goes.

Speaking of development: PARPG is doing an Agile/Scrum-style one-month sprint. This means that the whole team is working towards a handful of goals and that there are 30-minutes progress and planning reports twice a week [announcement]. The main theme of this development month is "Player Character Creation".

I'm currently contributing as UI designer on the project and am very motivated by the feeling of 'single-mind development' - the knowledge that man people from different spheres work on one main task at a time. It's great to know that not only I finish a design task but that it's going to be working in-game soon.

One of the mockups I produced during the sprint [more mockups]

Please note that this is not a one man's work. I actually created no part of this image but only drew some lines and moved around existing images by other artists! See this file for a list of the work in the mockup.

Do you consider m64's suggestions relevant to free game dev? Are there any principles/structures you have seen in foss game projects that improved development? What do you think of applying Scrum to open source games?

Space Combat

Space combat tutorial [MUTE (couldn't record audio on win)]

Space Combat is a low-end 3d space shooter/simulator and holds promise through it's low-entry-curve tutorial*, which features computer voice. The voice is obviously-generated, although I couldn't find out what software was used.

Asteroid Field in Space Combat

Space Combat runs on Windows (couldn't run it using Wine unfortunately [Linux port request here]).

The project has two positions to be filled:

Mission designer

• Missions (and campaigns) are XML-files that contain lists of objects and scripts. You can also create own AI-scripts.

3D Modeller

• The game is in need of 3d objects for space ships, stations, objects...

This makes me wonder: can any developer report success at using SF.net's Help Wanted system? (Even for getting art creators on board? :) ) Or do you perhaps know of other such listings projects could use?

*I didn't get much further yet ^^

FAR Colony Funding & Kambi Engine Donations (Is it possible to make money with open source games?)

The "Is it possible to make money" thread was revived recently. And then two projects I follow announced new funding-'features':

FAR Colony (First Autonomous Remote Colony) is "a game of exploration and space colonization being held in the 23th century". An 8 bit funding page was created [announcement] for it recently. The target is $800 in 109 days. A note at the bottom says:

Of course this project will continue to progress even if my goals aren't reached, it will be more slowly and limited without but will stay alive !

This makes me wonder: how to motivate donations towards open source games (besides making a good game ;) ).

Kambi (VRML) Engine has introduced a fundry.com page for project pledges, feature pledges and donations [announcement]. Fundry.com looks interesting and like an easy way to play the 'donation game', a concept I talked about long ago. Fundry currently accepts paypal only.

The only other open source game project to use fundry.com is the Construct SDK. Fundry has no API yet and writes "Contact us to let us know how you would use it." I think perhaps a Trac integration should be neat..

On a related note: sound specialists can earn $200 on this swamp sound task for Wesnoth.

Purity

A long time ago, on the old FreeGameDev forum, I heard of Purity; an original game based on the idTech3 engine.

Recently, I was wondering what the project had become, and with the help of a few people on the irc channel, we managed to find the website, unfortunately, it appears the development stopped two years ago.

But the game is pretty cool, let me explain you what makes it interesting:

In Purity, there are no enemies! The enemy is the map, and you have to get you to the end.

In order to do that, you have 4 weapons:

-The PULS attack : a red rocket.

It allows you to activate red switches, and it allows you to jump. Right, in purity, you have no "jump button". You wanna jump? Shoot your feet, and you'll be sent in the air.

There is no lives or damage in purity, so it is not a big deal to shoot right between your feet.

You can also shoot the walls while you're in the air to project yourself higher. People who know DeFrag won't be surprised by this technique.

-The TRASE attack : a blue laser (Allows you to activate blue switches).

This laser works a bit like a hook : you can drag yourself to blue surfaces.

You can also repulse yourself from some other special blue surfaces.

-The BOM attack : a green grenade (Allows you to activate green switches).

This grenade implodes rather than explodes : if you are in the range of the grenade when it explodes, you'll be dragged to the center, and when the explosion finishes, you'll keep that speed, so you can use the BOM attack to project you to a other place.

There are also special surfaces where the grenade sticks.

-The SPHEER attack : a white shield (Allows you to activate white switches).

The SPHEER attack allows you to bounce like a bouncing ball.

Activating the SPHEER attack while you are running makes you dash, which permits you to jump over some short holes.

Combinations :

combination of bom+trase

And what makes Purity really great is that you can combine these attacks:

-Shooting a BOM attack with a TRASE attack makes it explode

-Activating the SPHEER in the range of a BOM attack makes it explode

-Using the TRASE attack on a PULS attack drags you to the rocket, basically letting you fly (I think this combo should be less powerful, maybe even removed, to make the puzzle game interesting)

-Activating the SPHEER while catching up a PULS attack makes it explode and projects you in the air

What still needs to be done in Purity:

-Audio needs to be redone, sounds are horrible and there is no music (though there is one really good in the video on their website)

-Some graphic effort could be made : some surfaces aren't really pretty.

-MAPS! Purity only has the 8 maps that train you to use the weapons and their combinations. Other maps available are training grounds with no end, just for practise.

Try and beat this!

So, I beg mappers here, please do some puzzle maps for Purity, it's all it lacks to be a great FOSS game!

PS : If you are an archlinux user, I made an aur package that allow you to install it easily in /opt : http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=46512

Developer Interview: Jared "Deraj" (Radius Engine/Avoision/Falling Blocks Game 2)

Avoision & FBG2

Avoision and Falling Blocks Game 2 were reviewed 5 weeks ago in the Simple & Polished post and I got curious about the perspective of a small-foss-games developer (the interviews we have had so far were rather with big project developers). Their developer Jared "Deraj" agreed to a short interview.


Hey Jared! Where are you from? How's the weather? What do you do in life?

I'm from Washington (USA). Right now, it's cloudy outside, but somewhat warm (considering it's winter here).

I work in software development for a large technology company.

Did you create Radius Engine as a first step towards a game you want to make or was it more of a programming exercise? What is the next step? Adding engine features?

The Radius Engine as it exists today is indeed a stepping stone towards my eventual goal of creating an extensible scrolling shooter ("shoot 'em up"). Avoision and Falling Block Game were both games I wanted to create, but they were also both attempts at ensuring that the Radius Engine has the features I'll need down the road.

Additionally, the entire process was a great learning experience for me (e.g. I had never really written audio mixing or collision detection code before).

Did you ever contribute to any foss game projects?

Other than the ones FOSS games I've created, I think my only (very minor) contributions have been to a (formerly?) defunct emulator many years ago. Does moral support count? :)

Sure does! Ever heard of LÖVE? It's a 2D Lua-based game engine. Did the knowledge of LÖVE affect Radius engine development in any way?

Unfortunately, I had not heard of LÖVE back when I started working on this project (originally in 2003, but then I started over in 2008), but it looks like a great engine with a permissive license, simple programming language (Lua), and comprehensive feature set.

Having recently completed two games using a simple OpenGL+SDL+Lua game engine (Avoision and Falling Block Game), I can safely say that LÖVE sounds like a great idea for a game engine (and one that I need to look at more closely).

What are the chances of you abandoning Radius and becoming a LOVE2D developer? (Completely hypothetical :) )

Heh, interesting question. Given that I haven't had the time to fully dig into LOVE2D, that's a tough call to make. I'll certainly look into that since it looks like LOVE2D is fairly mature already.

How come Avoision and FBG2 have such smooth controls? Lucky shot or days of tweaking?

Both :)

Do you have a laid out plan for making progress towards your shmup project?

I have goals in mind (namely extensibility/modding), but only a very rough plan. Since I'm mostly doing this for fun, I tend to work on whatever seems fun/interesting at the time.

Soo... how about a sneak peak?

Screenshots are really all I have at the moment. I try to participate in Screenshot Saturday each week. You can watch my progress on Twitter (#RadiusEngine).

Jared's super secret shmup WIP screens

Got any questions to Jared aka Deraj? Ask them in the comments, perhaps he'll answer! :)


Also, this link will let you browse all the interviews on Free Gamer so far.

OpenMW 0.9 and DungeonHack Progress

OpenMW 0.9 is now available for download. Features:

• Exterior cells - loading, unloading and management
• Character Creation GUI
• Character creation
• Make cell names case insensitive when doing internal lookups
• Music player
• NPCs rendering

No screenshots I'm afraid!

DH concept art from the "clothing the Estonian" thread

DungeonHack will have a new software architecture [git repo], estimated to be showcased very soon. [announcement]

I noticed that both projects have a "Contributions Wanted" link which leads to their milestone/roadmap tickets (on a wiki page) [dh/owm]. I get the feeling it's time to start using trac, as does PARPG for example. :)

ProFlightSimulator: Commercial FlightGear Fork (Weak)

ProFlightSimulator ad on Free Gamer

A reader pointed out a hilarious coincidence: an ad of ProFlightSimulator, a fork of FlightGear on top of the Ripping-off open engine games post.

ProFlightSimulator is an open source stand alone Flight Simulator. As always disclosed this is a split / branch from the FlightGear community and has been set up for a very specific reason. It's different from FG due to the many major changes to the game.

This info is placed in Disclaimer/Terms/IsThisFlightgear?.

The text "Source code available in members area" is part of a background image in the footer of their homepage. There is also a .7z file containing "Source code of these images, content and files" (244MB - For a list of the file's content see here).

Why PFS is not FlightGear

The FlightGear team is aware of the for-pay forks and wrote a FlightGear-Professional explanation of the situation.

I have an ethical problem with there not being a "for every (final) purchase, we donate $1 to the FlightGear project" commitment. Maybe the improvements/code changes are at least useful to the FlightGear project, if any of the devs went through the trouble of buying PFS.

Ripping off Open-Source-Engine Games: Lugaru

Lugaru is a proprietary game. The Lugaru source code was released under GPL. The Lugaru game data was released under a "freely redistributed for non commercial purposes" license. Here's an explanation by Wolfire but it's basically just like Quake, only that the Quake game data was never released for free and never with the engine code and that they used a zip file, not a repository.

Recently, scammers sold the game Lugaru on Apple's App Store. They had this to say:

"we have every legal right to market and sell the software"

"the license we were granted allows for non-exclusive redistribution of the source code or the compiled product, modified or unmodified, for a fee or free of charge."

Wolfire wrote a blog post when they found out about this and another one when the cloned product was finally taken down.

The implication, according to Wolfire:

"While released source code in no way makes it legal to sell someone else's game, it is apparently enough to make scammers think they could get away with it, and that may be enough to discourage other developers from risking it."

STK on ebay

SuperTuxKart is the project I first knew about is being sold by third parties although I can't find any discussions on that topi any more (see comments for info from their side). SuperTux' archives contain a bit of reading material about what problems they had.

ILLUSION MAGE!!! THIS IS NOT BLENDER!!

Blender is also having problems with scammers. (Thanks to Peragro Tempus for the info)

Quite a few foss software on ebay too. This seller seems to be specialized in selling foss games and apps while trying to hide their name. Assuming all they do is sell open source software for $6.65, then they earned $14,277.55 in at least 2147 sales since November 2009 (about $950/month). That'd be kind of lame.

Side note: I just found a Lugaru fork, which claims the animation data is CC-BY-SA'd, which according to file size (didn't do a diff check) is the original data. The original Lugaru repository's license file states no such thing.

I wonder though, would have Lugaru's incident have happened, if they did not put code and data in the same repository? What do you think? And do you know of more incidents of this kind?

LanPower's FOSS Games USB Stick

The following is a guest post by the president of the French language gaming community LanPower [fr-en translation] which distributes game compilations.

Gamekey 2 games

The LanPower association is a French group of network game players. We contribute to Free Open Source ("libre") games by producing CD/USB compilations of games: "LanPower Games CDs" and "Gamekey".

The Gamekeys are composed of portables games. These compilations are for Windows but all the games also exist under Linux.

The last series are compatible with Linux thanks to Wine. Thus the Gamekey light serie 2 is the first compilation of portable and free open source games to be compatible with both Windows and Linux (as well as MacOS X and Solaris).

Links:

• Our web site
• Description of the Gamekey Light Series 2 (english)

We intend to translate the Gamekey and the other compilations in several languages if we find the time or get translation help or donations.
An international (5 languages) version is in progress, and should be out in May.

Enjoy

contact : asso [dot] lanpower [at] free [dot] fr

What do you think of such downloadable game packages? Ever used one? Ever wished for one so you don't have to research/download games individually?

FreeGameDev Wiki phpBB integration, propaganda & contributions

 

FGD Forum + Wiki

As an anti-spam and pro-convenience measure, you can now log into the FGD Wiki using your FGD Forum phpBB account!

Please test this and comment on this post or start a thread if there are any inconveniences. :)

We're interested in a major re-structuring of the wiki by the way, suggestions are welcome.

Have you found the Free Gamer Blogger in you yet?

Join us...

By the way, you might not have noticed it but we also welcome guest posts! See this thread for information.

Propaganda time!

And if you feel like spreading the word about our community a little, you're welcome to use these gfx/templates.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm Review

Gameplay:

Cataclysm brings two brand new races to the game. The two new races are the Worgen and the Goblins. Worgens are alliance and the Goblins are for the horde. As a Worgen you will start defending the city of Gilneas from the Forsaken led by Sylvanas. When you reach level 6 and do a certain quest you will be able to turn into a worgen, when the area is complete you can switch between worgen and human whenever you want but as soon as you enter combat you automatically turn into a worgen. Goblins also have a new starting area as well. You start off on some islands and is a great addition to the lore. A new secondary profession has been added as well known as Archaeology. You go around azeroth surveying certain areas to find hidden artifacts. The higher it is the more rewarding the artifacts become. The new instances are very well done, they provide a nice challenge unlike the previous expansion. You will be able to use new currency to buy your level 85 gear. This currency is called Justice points from heroics and Valor points from the raids. The quests are very fun with a lot of cut scenes. Some of the cut scenes are a little to much. For example in Uldum a level 83 zone after every couple of quests there is a new cut scene, can be annoying but most of them are full of cool information. New skills have been added obviously for every class, and the talent trees also got a new make over as well. The raiding experience is great again like back in Burning Crusade. The boss fights are unique and provide a nice challenge for the core players. The raids are Blackwing Descent, Bastion of Twilight, Throne of Four Winds, and Baradin Hold. There are many new additions to the game where you can now fly in azeroth, all of azeroth has been revamped, and the quests have all been revamped as well with new ones added to each area. Each dungeon has quests at every entrance with some nice XP, money and usually loot. Cataclysm is a fantastic addition to the World of Warcraft series and looks very promising in the future patches. A recommended purchase for any MMO and WoW fan.

Overall: 9.5/10

Graphics:

The updated visuals came out as soon as the pre patch came out. This all started with the water effects and then the sunlight effects as well as the shadow effects. The water got the biggest update in Cataclysm. The water now looks very realistic and interacts with your character. What I mean by that is when you walk in the water the ripples move to your character. The sun shines on the water and you are able to see your reflection in the water as well. They updated the shadow effects to not be a little dot underneath your character but an actual shadow of your body. When you enter the Cataclysm areas you can instantly tell the visuals have been update for those areas.

Overall: 9.5/10 

Audio:

As soon as the pre patch to Cataclysm came out all of azeroth changed as well as the in game music. Each zone got a revamp on the environment and the music. The most noticeable changes are in areas like Stranglethorn Vale. Personally I find the music to be much better, and each area sounds unique. Most places still have the classic music in it but with new music and sounds added to it. Overall it provides a new and exciting experience.

Overall: 10/10 

Overall Rating: 9.5/10

PonySiege

It isn't nearly fluffy enough... missing that horn on its forehead... and it's not riding on rainbows... This should be fixed

-lenir



What I'm trying to say there is (obviously) that FreeSiege (git repo here | screens here) is looking for help updating the assets (and they're looking for an awesome horse I think).

So if you know any freely licensed one.. can and want to model one yourself.. or perhaps want to improve the pony (see quote above).. here's the thread to go to. :)



In other news: GameKit 2 is now available on the Blender wiki.

Xenowar: Minimalist Squad Tactics (Android/Windows)

Xenowar

Xenowar is simple turn-based squad tactics. It had one or two recent releases. Gameplay is not at all as deep as UFO:AI goes but quicker to get started with and fun too.

I tested it on a friend's HTC Wildfire [spec]: it was quite laggy and either the screen is too small or my fingers are too big. :) Or maybe I just lack touch-screen-experience.

Please excuse this laggy and kind-of-broken recording..

Dragonball Raging Blast 2 Review

Time for another review! Sorry for the lack of reviews, been extremely busy. Time to get on track! Anyway this is a review for Dragonball Raging Blast 2. Enjoy!

Gameplay:

Well where to get started. DBRB2 is a very enjoyable game when it comes to fighting games. I personally am a huge DBZ fan so obviously I'm going to love that game, but I will base this review on a non fan perspective. DBRB2 has a wide variety of characters to play, more than the first one. in DBRB2 there is no story mode. The mode is known as "Galaxy Mode" which is really neat in my opinion. Every single character in DBRB2 has their very own galaxy you can play. Each galaxy has about 5+ fights. You can rush through the game is just beat each characters main missions in their galaxy or try for 100% completion of every characters galaxy. If you rush through it, it will still take some time to beat all of them. When you complete certain people's galaxies you unlock other character galaxies as well as hidden roads. What I mean by hidden roads is say you beat the last mission for Goku, you will unlock an alternate mission for gohan, teen gohan, etc... It basically means if a characters galaxy is linked with another characters then you will unlock sub mission known as "hidden roads". Now there are a TON of unlockables in this game. From concept art, to characters, to soundtracks, moves, costumes, accessories, voice clips, etc... There are A LOT! One of the new modes they added is called "Battle Zone". It's basically missions and when you have beaten the battle zones then you unlock ultimate zones which are much harder fights. The online play is better, a lot less lag and a lot of titles to unlock. Yes there are a lot of move spammers online like the other previous games. But what fighting game does not have those type of people? Overall this is a good fighting game to play with your buds or alone beating galaxy mode. The controls are really good and the combos are fun. They also added a raging blast mode, when you fully charge up with your ki press "RB" on the 360 controller and you will enter raging soul. This basically makes you faster, stronger and pull of longer combos. 

Overall: 8/10

Graphics:

The graphics are much better compared to the first one. The auras and detailing on the environment and characters are much better than DBRB1. They are very pretty. The super attacks look much better as well such as the Kamehameha. Overall all of the graphics got a nice upgrade.

Overall: 9/10

Audio:

The music choice is very well done in this game. Many new soundtracks have been added and are all pretty decent. The voice acting is kind of off on some of the characters. The voices for Jeice, Frieza, and kid gohan are all different voice actors and sound terrible. The other characters are great. The combat audio is good as well, when you hit with a big attack or big combo it sounds like it hurts.

Overall: 8/10

Overall Rating: 8.5/10

Open Web Games, GameOn and Construct 2

(edit: Construct 2 is going Closed Source, I'll either edit out this part or keep it for reference, but don't get your hopes up when reading this)

Scirra Construct is one of the few FOSS competitors to the proprietary GameMaker 2D game development suite (Gluon, Enigma and Game-Editor being the others). Unfortunately, the system has been limited to Windows since its inception due to relying on DirectX fiddlies, however, that has all changed...

Construct 0.x Showreel

Yesterday the long awaited Construct 2 project released a public alpha. No longer are Construct games chained to Windows; instead, games can be exported to HTML (5) which is pretty much on the opposite spectrum of platform-lockin.

Construct 0.x Interface

Now, one significant problem is that the editor isn't cross platform, and relies on a Windows GUI lib. However, seeing as the games are now cross platform, maybe the FOSS gaming community can show their appreciation by helping with the porting process? "Game Maker" like software is something that really lowers the bar of entry into game development, and Construct 2 fits that bill.

Jump on their forums if you're interested!

Why HTML (5)?

So, some people might ask why Scirra is targeting this rather new platform. I'm most probably mistaken, but I have a sneaking suspicion that Construct 2 is the first "HTML 5 Game IDE", and definitely the only Open Source one. Among the Free Gamer blog team, we have a couple of writers who don't approve of the web being used as a game platform (you know who you are), personally I find it rather promising. The fact that open web tech is immensely cross platform, and has an ease-of-delivery that is second to none, I can only see benefits to developing and embracing it further.

Mozilla seems to have gone that route; they recently hosted the "Game On" competition where developers entered games that utilize open web tech; and FOSS web games won 2 of the categories ("Best Webbiness" and "Most Fun")!

Don't write HTML 5 games off to 2 dimensions either, someone recently posted a rather simple but fun 3D RPG game utilizing WebGL on OpenGameArt the other day,  it's rather cool :) Also don't forget about the Quake 2 WebGL port! (remember, these require a WebGL enabled browser, such as Chrome/ium and Firefox 4)

OpenDungeons Progress

OpenDungeons, a long-time Freegamedev project has been through a lot of changes since it started on the Freegamedev forums, going through a lead-dev swap and a major re-write. In the years since we last mentioned them, they've actually produced something playable: lots of new code and artwork has been contributed by a small but dedicated team of contributors and it has been shaping up to be an exemplary FOSS game.

There's still lots of work that needs doing though: loads of creatures that need concept art, models and scripting, room tiles that need textures and models, and game design work that needs finalizing. There's a lot of ideas floating around on the forums that need art and implementation

With all the work that's gone into the project, they're busy readying up another release. Unfortunately they've had a bit of trouble with ubuntu/debian packaging (and linux packaging in general), so if anyone out there would like to give them a hand, it would really be a boost to the foss gaming world :)

RTS: The Romans VS. the Greek (+Chinese)

I take it my comments regarding the Spring RTS engine were not taken so well... so I will present some (in my opinion) much better and less messy to setup RTS games ;)

One, I really like to come back to is Glest! The previously featured version/fork of that game, Megaglest (Edit: Now links to their awesome new webpage, how did I miss this ;) ), just released another version (3.4.0) with quite a lot of new features.

Newest Megaglest gameplay

It now got a new build-in IRC client for multiplayer chatting, can transfer missing files from the server (useful for all those custom maps you can find ;) ), some performance and stability improvements as well as the usual assortment of new maps and map-themes. Ah and to come back to the headline: A new faction, the Romans were added ;)

The Contestant

Of course, adding Romans to the game is poaching in an other's territory... that of the Greeks ;) So lets have a look at the recent developments in 0 A.D.:

New 0 A.D. gameplay

They are progressing quickly, and the game is surprisingly playable already, given it's early beta status. But you can still help them out even if you are not a real artist or a programmer:
Their previously mentioned donation drive is still running, and they are also having some sort of competition for creating a nice video trailer of the game.

The support crew

So who is going to win the battle about the Mediterranean? Well I fear the Greeks just got support by the fleet of the Chinese Emperor:

A mod team going by the name of Scion Development is making great progress in implementing a Chinese faction into 0 A.D.; Check out their development thread here. Oh and no worries, after some initial license confusion, they seem to have decided to go for a fully FOSS compatible media license :) Edit: Well it seems like they are still not quite sure, so I can't guarantee that they will go completely FOSS... lets hope they don't go for one of those atrocious CC-ND/NC licenses.

Contact: Tactical Squad RTS

Another game from the well of innovation that is the SpringRTS community, Contact aims to be an Open-Source squad based RTS. It uses models from the DOTA-like attempt "Engines of War" which unfortunately never really got anywhere, other than a couple of nice mechs.

The Contact team released a beta on the 25 Dec last year, so it's not exactly breaking news, but the project is still moving forward and could use a couple of eyes if anyone is interested in it.

Forum Thread with more screenies