The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (3DS)

     Here is the review for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D for the Nintendo 3DS as promised. Now I currently at work so I will post pictures of the game today or tomorrow.

Gameplay:
     Well as you might have all guessed this is a remake of the original Ocarina of Time for the N64. Now some people think that this is "just a port". Well actually it's not, what I love about the remake is it's an actual remake. What I mean by that is they updated the graphics for the 3DS so it looks much better. The animations for link and several other characters have been redone so it looks somewhat real and very smooth. The environments have been redone as well making it look simply stunning. OoT runs the same as the console version. You collect 3 medallions become and adult, awaken all of the 7 sages, save Zelda, own Ganondorf. Obviously it's the same story but they made the experience so much better. For example they added it so you simply press on button from the item menu and assign it to the button immediately. This makes the water temple a lot of toleralable as in you can instantly equip the iron boots on the fly. They added a gyro feature for the 3DS where you can move the 3DS (not the stick) to aim with the bow or slingshot. Now this feature works well with the 3D but it can be very annoying when using the equipment. Luckliy you are able to disable this feature. I know I did. When you beat the very enjoyable campaign you unlock a new mode for the more advanced players called Master Quest. Now this was introduced with the gamecube anniversary addition. What Master Quest is, is you simply start a new game but EVERYTHING is in reverse from the original gameplay. What I mean is when you start the game the great deku tree is to the right.....well now it is on the left side of Kokiri. It makes advanced players a bit more confused in some of the dungeons adding it that extra challenge. Luckily that is not all Master Quest offers. The enemies do double damage and the dungeons all have new and more difficult challenges to them. The bosses are still fairly easy. Remember this mode can only be unlocked when you beat the game once. The remake relives some of your childhood memories as a gamer. I loved it and I am so glad it was remade. You can now experience the legend in glorious 3D, which I will talk about in the next section.

The Interface.

Rating: 9.5/10

Graphics:
     Well as I stated above everything was redone. The animations, the graphics and the environmental graphics as well. It looks so much better and runs so much smoother than the original. We'll get to the 3D in a moment. I find by them redoing all of the graphics it really makes the experience that much more enjoyable. There is a couple of flaws that I noticed with the graphical update while playing through. Some of the backgrounds in the environments have not been redone and still look like the flat old 2D background as in the original. One other thing is the stairs still don't really look like stairs but the flat lined surface it was in the original. But these 2 things do not bother me at all as I believe it's the gameplay that makes the games not the graphics. Now the 3D in this game is spectacular. I know the launch games for the 3DS didn't have the greatest 3D effects as in as soon as you move the DS or move your head it takes a moment to find the 3D again. No not this game. I love as you run through the forest with the 3D on you see the little specs floating around you and it actually looks like they are flying right at you and gives you a relaxed feeling. Another thing I loved about the 3D was some of the cutscenes and the new enviroment looks. One example is at the beginning of the game where you are talking to the Great Deku Tree. When you have the 3D on for that scene it is amazing. Link is standing in the foreground as your talking to the Deku tree while he is in the back. It is a great dynamic view. Another one of my favorites regarding the 3D is when you run across the bridge in the forest to get the rupees and speak with the girl. If you have the camera angled just right with the 3D enabled you can see the entire forest and it looks amazing in 3D. Overall the graphics and especially the 3D in this game are truly breath taking.

Before and After Images.

Rating: 9.5/10

Audio:
     The audio in this game has always been great. This game has simply one of the best soundtracks in gaming history. It is truly amazing how Nintendo spent the time with the soundtrack. All of the great songs from the original are in the remake but it sounds so much better. From playing your ocarina to roaming in Gerudo Valley (my personal favorite) you can relisten to all of the orignal music. This is one of my favorite things in OoT is listening to the music. If you took the advantage of buying OoT on release then you were qualified for a the entire soundtrack of the game. I know I got my 60 free songs! The audio for the monsters and the bosses are all redone as well. The sounds are all really impressive as always.

The Soundtrack!

Rating: 10/10

Conclusion:
    This is better than the remake. They updated the graphics, the menus, the animations, the audio....basically everything. They even added a Master Quest to the game which offers a great challenge to the game for the advanced players. I highly recommend everyone gets this game....you will NOT be dissapointed I promise. Relive your childhood and experience the beauty of OoT. Enjoy and thanks for reading!

Overal Rating: 9.5/10

Zelda Review coming in a few hours!

My OoT review for the 3DS will be posted in a few hours. I finished it at work but the servers are slow tonight so I could not post it. Stay tuned!!

Flightgear 2.4 plus something cuddly and something fishy

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's... wait, yes, it's a plane. The quintessential FOSS flight simulator gets updated, Flightgear 2.4 (announcement) has been released.

The FlightGear development team is proud to announce the release of version 2.4.0 of its free open source flight simulation program. FlightGear 2.4.0 reflects over one and a half years of development and incorporates several new and exciting features, as well as numerous bug fixes.

The feature list in the announcement is impressive. A summary won't do the release announcement justice (although in parts it is a bit dumbed down, but that's OK, not all of us are au fait with regards to computer game development). Still, here's an attempt:

• Realistic weather simulation, phenomena includes are fog layers that are limited in altitude, cold fronts, thermals, cloud formation in updraft winds along mountain ridges, and many, many more.


• Enhanced graphics including highly realistic mountain surfaces, 3-dimensional cityscapes, water moves realistically and sunlight is reflected from its surface.


• Many improved planes/models and additional cockpit systems - a choice of nearly 500 different aircraft, from historical to bleeding edge, from ultra-lights to the ultimate flying heavy metal.

Still no combat (see open source flight combat article) but I think that's probably a bit off topic for Flightgear.

The Flightgear project has reached what I call "critical mass" in that it no longer depends on a few active developers to maintain progress. A thriving contributor community outgrows the original development crew and it becomes owned by the community. Usually when a project attains critical mass, development accelerates massively. There are more people contributing to Flightgear than has ever been the case, it is flying. Pun intended.

In fact I can't think of many other FOSS games that have attained "critical mass" status. Battle for Wesnoth of course. Possibly Freeciv and OpenTTD (I wish they'd rename that). Some projects got close but never quite made it, such as Glest and Vega Strike. Others are knocking on the door, such as Pioneer, Speed Dreams, 0AD. (If I am being dozy and missing any such projects, point out in the comments!) The vast majority of projects never get close and usually only are actively developed as long as their originators / principle supporters are motivated.

What could be cuddly? Plee the Bear 0.6 has been released (announcement, forum thread). It features the first big boss. It is a very nice looking game with a lot of potential, and seems great for a younger player.

And the something fishy? Avid readers, those worth their salt, people who are true followers of the blog, those who will enter through the gates of St Peter before all others, they will know I am a big fan of Fish Fillets NG. Somebody has made a clone called, imaginatively, Fish Fillets Clone (screenshots). Whilst I don't like that it is an outright clone, I do like that it uses vector graphics. I think there's promise there.

I'm sure I'm forgetting something. Oh, yeah, hiiii to my Cuban female fanbase!

Planets are a nice thing...

...but make us FreeGamer blog-authors lazy, as all the news are already in our awesome game and development planets :p

New to the feeds is our revision control planet, for those news-freaks that want to keep up to date even if it is just a change in punctuation of the readme file :p



It is btw interesting to see on this planet how much changes happen in the Xonotic SVN, while to the outward observer the project seems to be moving only slowly forward.

However, recently they released an auto-builds update script, which makes it much easier to keep up with their development builds (which seems to be the preferred version for them now in general, but things can break from time to time). Oh and for the lulz: a "my little pony" mod recently surfaced for Xonotic also :p



Next on the list? Ahh yes, Stunt Rally version 1.2 got released:

Stunt Rally 1.2

Changes include (amongst other stuff) a new split-screen and a ghost car rally mode.



Other things to mention? Mage is a open-source MTG client, but not as nice looking as Wagic. But it might convince you with other features (of which Mage has a lot ;) ).

Unknown Horizons has a nice news update with all the improvements Google's Summer of Code gave them and the Zod engine is set out to improve the multiplayer part of the (back then really nice) game Z (using the unfree media from the original it seems).

Super Street Fighter 4: 3D Edition (Yes it's dead at work)

Hey everyone as promised here is the SSF4 review for 3DS. Now this one will not have any screenshots but I will add them later on.

Gameplay:
SSF4 on the 3DS is the exact same for the console and PC versions. But they did add a couple of new things such as the Dynamic View which is great for 3D Battles which is also a mode in the game. They also added a couple of new titles meant for some of the 3DS features like the streetpass feature. At first I was sort of worried about how this game will play out on the 3DS compared to the console and PC versions. It is actually pretty good. As in every Street Fighter you have your basic modes such as Arcade, and versus. Arcade plays the same, you fight other characters till you reach your rival and then Seth and if you accomplish certain goals during arcade you can fight Akuma or Gouken. What I love about arcade is when you beat it with any one of the 35 characters that this game has to offer you unlock titles for you player card. Unlocking all 35 character titles takes time and if a lot of fun that is if you don't cheat and play on easiest :P.

Another mode that you can play is versus. It is your standard versus mode where you can fight a friend or a CPU. There is also a 3D versus mode as well for the 3D lovers. They also added online battles which is a great addition for the 3DS. Sure it can be laggy online but if you get someone in your region it isn't so bad and can be loads of fun and competitive. When you win you earn Battle Points (BP) and Power Points (PP). When you lose you will slowly lose them. The more Battle Points you earn the higher your rank will increase. Power points are just for show. What I love about SS4 in general is you can unlock additional titles and battle icons when completing certain challenges. They even added a medals section which is like achievements.

Another mode is the Challenge mode whee you can destroy a car or bash barrels for those bonus stages. There is also a trial mode which has roughly 20 stages for each character which challenges you to try and complete their different moves and combos. They also added a mode for the 3DS which allows you to collect figurines. You can enter cheat codes to unlock additonal figurines and you can collect additional figurines by using the StreetPass feature. Overall the gameplay is the same as any other SF4 game but they always seem to keep it fun and add just enough features to keep it fun.

Rating: 9/10

Graphics:
The graphics for SSF4 on the 3DS is pretty impressive. It is almost if not the same as the console versions. Now obviously they added the 3D to the game which makes it even cooler. Now the 3D doesn't really work when your playing in normally due to moving the 3DS often from wailing on the buttons. This is why the added the Dynamic View to the game. This allows you to enable the 3D on the game and it works better for the game. It is always fun having Ryu's hadoken coming at your face. Overall the 3D is nicely done, not perfect but pretty close.

Moving away from the 3D, the game has kept the exact same style of art from the console versions which I think is a good thing because it works so well with the game. The art is great looking, the environments look great and the character models and moves also look great. A great looking game for a great handheld console.

Rating: 9/10

Audio:
The audio in the game is the same as always. The music sounds the same, the voices sound the same. The quality is great. I know the 3DS's speakers aren't the greatest but the sound in game is really well done. I always love hearing the characters yell their Ultimate Moves. The voice acting is very well done and hearing Ryu yell "Mentsu Hadoken!!" just gets you pumped because you know it's going to hurt.

Rating: 9/10

Conclusion:
In conclusion the game is very well done and so much fun. It is a good time waster and is a blast when your playing online. Even if you aren't an online type of person you will still enjoy it because there is lots to do. A fantastic addition to the 3DS and fighting genre. Long live Street Fighter.

Overall Rating: 9/10

Pick it up!!

Sorry for the loooonnnnggggg break

Hey everyone. Just wanted to apologize for the inactiveness. I have been very busy with work and haven't had the funds to grab me some new games to review. So what I am going to do is I am going to start reviewing older games as well as the new ones. I will be doing new reviews, a lot but I would also love to do reviews on past games as well. I have thought about it (currently typing this out at work) and I will be posting a list underneath in what games I will be reviewing in order. Stay tuned!

Review List:
Super Street Fighter 4: 3D Edition (3DS)
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D (3DS)
Age of Empires Online
Ninety Nine Nights 2
Splinter Cell Conviction (Currently Playing)

This is the list as of right now. I promise these will al be up shortly. I will be adding more games in the genre of F2P like Dragon Nest as an example. Thanks everyone!

PyWeek 13 (And PyWeek 12 Winners)

It's time PyWeek #13 soon!



The dates of this challenge are are 00:00 UTC 2011-09-11 to 00:00 UTC 2011-09-18.

Timetable
Friday 2011/08/12	Registration underway
Sunday 2011/09/04	Theme voting commences
Sunday 2011/09/11	Challenge start
Sunday 2011/09/18	Challenge end, judging begins
Sunday 2011/10/02	Judging closes, winners announced

Check out PyWeek 12's winners by the way:

Loopback: Asteroids + Tower defense. Retro Look. Permissive code license.

Loopback - PyWeek #12 Team Winner

Lemming: Enough Plumbers + Canabalt??? Hand-drawn horrible ;). Permissive code license.

Video: PyWeek #12: Lemming Speed Run

The PyWeek guys seem to have figured out the license part of game prototyping well: Lemming for example contains a list of all used art pieces' urls and licenses. Neat!


PS: Ludum Dare got 600-1 entries last weekend.

BZFlag Tournament hosted by Ohava Open Computers

BZFlag

There will be a tournament of the CTF game BZFlag.

When: September 30th, at 5pm EST

Where: Online(?)

How: Visit ohava.com/gametourney for sign-up.

Prize: An Ohava OpenBook BE awarded to the MVP of the winning team. More prizes will be given to all of the winning team's members.

News Shorts

OpenPatrician is a not-yet-playable free implementation in Java of Ascaron's classic The Patrician and The Patrician 2. There are some assets but unfortunately the project's default license is a noncommercial one.

OpenMW is moving forward: new blog look, renderer is being refractored, inventory being implemented, record saving too.

Alex the Allegator was part-ported to HTML5 using the melonJS library. I'm #9 on the high score at time of post! :D

DusteD, maker of Wizznic! is not dead.

Blendswap now has a slim set of rules for contributors and texture licenses are annoying.

Bandit Racer is a car racing and combat game in HTML5, built with GameJS. Comes with track editor and pretty UI. An earlier version multiplayer mode, which will probably come back sooner or later

Keeping up a tradition...

Yes, I post only seldom, but when I do it I keep up the good old tradition of mixing totally unrelated projects in one big post :p



So where to start today? Ahh yes:



The puzzle type game Berusky 2 was recently FOSSified (code and art GPL) as pointed out in our forums (but I have to admit I saw it first on LGDB). And as out great founder was quick to point out, it follows the great tradition of the first part with was also released under the terms of the GPL.



In totally unrelated news, Lips of Suna version 0.5 got released last week, with a bunch of nice graphical and game-play improvements (change log and discussion here).



For those living behind a rock, Lips of Suna is a crazy mix of Minecraft, slightly adult themed anime and a more classic RPG. Definitly worth a try, even though still under heavy development!



Hmm and now a quick run-down of other (I'd say less important) news:

Q3 Rally (now stand alone with the ioQuake3 engine) is nearing another release and OpenXcom is making good progress in the "battlescape" AI. In WarZone2100 land, you can now test the cool new models with a test mod (is supposed to work with the latest snapshot release). The fork of the W:ET, OpenWolf is also progressing with a fix of the Mod support (while the more ambitious ET:Xreal seems to have gone in a hiatus again), and while talking about id software source-code, I have started this small anticipatory id tech 4 project which needs contributors ;)



The end.



Oh wait, did we ever mention the source release of Cities3D (a Setters of Catan like game)?

On OpenGameArt 2 and FreeSound 2

This is old news: OpenGameArt 2 launched and with it an improved interface for browsing and submitting freely licensed game art. Testing, feedback and submissions welcome of course. :)

OpenGameArt 2 submission form

FreeSound is also moving forward, away from FTP-submissions, away from CC-Sampling+, although it seems that noncommercial licenses will be supported. A beta of the new site is open for public testing!

FreeSound 2 submission form - the upload button is flash...

A very curious feature is the "bulk license change", which is what you see first when logging into FreeSound 2:

FreeSound Bulk License Change

If you're a FreeSound contributor, please log into the new site and select CC0 or CC-BY.

I finally got hold of a video of OpenGameArt's admin BartK talking about his site at Libre Graphics Meeting May 2011:

Video: OpenGameArt's founder about the site

Does any of these submission forms scare you away? Did you notice an obvious interface design mistake? Got any libre art sharing news to spread? Let us know in the comments!

Open Source in Humble Indie Bundle #3: Haaf's Game Engine (HGE)

HGE's Particle Editor

The proprietary games sale Humble Indie Bundle has a tradition of including open source engine releases.

In all of the other humble bundles there has always been at least one game that opened its source (in #2 it was revenge of the titans. in #1 it was penumbra, lugaru, aquaria and gish).

- Fer C.

Bundle #3 is soon over and the *nix port of the Windows-only zlib-licensed engine HGE has been now released as open source as well. It is the engine used by Hammerfight from the Bundle. Visit the pages: hge, hge-unix.

The non-free BASS audio library was replaced with OpenAL.

The hge-unix readme states "10 I don't know anything about the Windows version of HGE.", which might mean that developers have to juggle two engine versions and audio libraries if they want to support the three main platforms. Or hge-unix needs to be ported back to windows systems.

You can read more about the port in the blog post HGE comes to Mac and Linux by Ryan Gordon aka icculus. Or perhaps watch his talk about Linux/open source gaming (again?).

LinWarrior r19+

LinWarrior r19+ Test Video

I tested and recorded the latest LinWarrior git revision (a few changes since release19). Some of the new features in r19 and after include:

• Atmospheric daytime setting


• New units (Flopsy, Scorpion and Tank)


• Cockpit frame in first-person view


• Trees, trees, trees

The LinWarrior engine is still being developed, for example mechs are still hardcoded rather than configured in textfiles right now.

PS: A video of actual gameplay, rather than just testing the controls. Unfortunately no sound but 1920x1200 resolution...

Playing LinWarrior r19+ [mute]

Cubosphere: First Beta

Cubosphere 0.1 Beta testing video

The first beta release of Cubosphere is available.

The game reminds of irrlamb and Neverball but is in fact a tile-based puzzle, rather than a free-physics/precision game. It has a simple level editor and 18 visual/audible styles to chose from. Some features of the 200+ levels are lasers, frying blocks, teleporters, switches, elevators and enemies.

Some random FPS engine news

Fast games for slow summer news weeks... but actually some of these news are a bit older already also :p

To start out... yes RedEclipse got a (smaller) new release a few days ago, codenamed Supernova (Version 1.1). The release notes can be found in our/their forums, but it plays as great as before (except for the annoying hit sound :p ). Edit: game-play video from one of our forum users.

Noteworthy news related to that (albeit not strictly FOSS related): RedEclipse also got included into Desura now (Moddb's indie friendly answer to Steam, even with an upcoming Linux port). To avoid complains in the comments... I mention this here even though it is a closed source game distribution platform, simply because it can be a great way to promote (and maybe even sell?) FOSS games, and if we would finally be able to attract the modding community (which is largely represented on Moddb) to work with FOSS engines instead, it would be win-win for everyone involved.

Despite its unfree content War§ow is also worth a look now and then. According to their somewhat recent blog entries they have made great progress in speeding up the Quake2 based renderer, and plan to include a matchmaking and statistics system in the maybe not so distant 0.7 release. It's actually a pity that the engine isn't used for other projects, and given that it is Quake2 based, it could probably be ported to mobile platforms like Android rather quickly (since there is a full and fast Quake2 Java port).

Talking about mobile platforms... the engine behind Xonotic (formerly Nexuiz) Darkplaces, seems to have gotten an iOS port judging by a quick look at the very recent new source release. No news post about the most recent changes, but slightly older news tell us about a much higher frame rate then before :) Would be nice if Xonotic would see another Beta release soon also ;)

Oh and I know I will get flamed for this again (e.g. for mentioning a commercial game on this blog; but I stand by my opinion that commercial isn't != FOSS), but the Darkplaces based and GPLed source-code containing SteelStorm: Burning Retribution, has been added as a free bonus to the latest HumbleBundle (at the time of writing this, with still 5 days remaining to get this "pay what you want" indie-game-bundle including some really nice games all running on Linux). Just to quickly mention... no news about source releases from that source this time (but they added all of the games from the 2nd bundle if you pay above average)... but given the somewhat lukewarm source releases last time (not really FOSS) I guess that is not a big loss :-/

Hmm what else? World of Padman was somewhat recently updated, and its engine ioQuake3 is moving to a modularized renderer.

AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST (hot news coming in while I am writing this)... John Carmack just confirmed in his keynote on this year's QuakeCon, that the Doom3 source code will be released this year (probably shortly after the Rage release scheduled early October)... which will be a really nice addition to the FOSS engine pool (finally a somewhat modern single player FPS engine). I am especially looking forward to see some of the existing high quality Doom3 mods to go stand alone, and maybe even FOSS!