Free & Open Source Game Guide

[MrFlibble]

Hmm, no one mentioned that Bungie has released their Marathon Trilogy for free download. You can get all the original releases for Mac, the original Marathon 2 release for Windows, and the new Windows-compatible versions of both Marathon 2 and Marathon Infinity (playable through the Aleph One source port) here:

http://trilogyrelease.bungie.org/

[athanasios]

I never heard about them before. Not so popular with PC users. Seems I missed some good stuff there.

Thanks again.

[MrFlibble]

As far as I know, the Marathon series is kind of a legend of Mac video gaming. Originally, only the second instalment in the trilogy was ported to Win95, and the game wasn't generally very popular with PC users back then. Although it shares a similarity to Doom in terms of engine technology, the artistic and playing style of the Marathon games is profoundly different, featuring a very complex, sometimes quite vague storyline with lots of obscure symbolism and philosophy thrown in. An earlier Mac FPS game by the same developers, called Pathways into Darkness, is also quite different from its PC contemporaries like Wolfenstein 3-D or Doom.

Bungie, the creators of Marathon Trilogy and Pathways into Darkness, later made the Halo series of games.

[athanasios]

Some quotations from Wikipedia to fill the story:

Pathways was Bungie's third title,^[1] after their previous game, Minotaur: The Labrynths of Crete, sold around 2,500 copies. In the summer of 1992, Jones was living in dorms at the University of Chicago when he saw Wolfenstein 3D, a shooter game with three-dimensional (3D) graphics. Inspired, Jones created a rough 3D graphics engine for the Mac that simulated walls with trapezoids and rectangles.^[8] Originally, Bungie intended Pathways to be a straightforward 3D version of Minotaur, but they quickly found that the top-down perspective of their previous game did not mesh with the 3D presentation. An additional consideration was that the developers wanted to create a game that did not rely on then-rare networks and modems, an issue in marketing Minotaur.^[9] The rest of 1992 was spent tweaking the graphics engine.

Minotaur: The Labyrinths of Crete is a 1992 ...

The game's tagline was "Kill your enemies. Kill your friends' enemies. Kill your friends." This tagline has reappeared as a description in the multiplayer menu screens for some of Bungie's other games, such as Myth: The Fallen Lords and Halo 3.

[spicy]

this is the best reply in this thread ever , EA opens the doors :

http://play4free.com/

http://battlefield.play4free.com/en/home

[MrFlibble]

0 A.D. fourth alpha, codename Daedalus, was released a couple days ago.

New programming features in this release:

• Added initial prototype version of opponent AI: It can train female citizens, collect resources, build houses, farms & barracks, train soldiers & send them to the enemy civ center.
  
• Improved fog-of-war rendering.
  
• Fixed terrain texture blending.
  
• Added opt-in automatic feedback system.
  
• Fixed foundation obstruction handling.
  
• Added support for build limits.
  
• Extended animal AI: Animals like Lions, Elephants, etc. can now fight back, and some escape farther away from perceived threats.
  
• Improved driver version detection code.
  
• Various performance improvements.
  

New art and sound features in this release:

• New Naval Units: Celt Warship, Celt Merchant Ship, Celt Fishing Boat, and Greek Fishing Boat.
  
• New siege weapons: The Celts can now build battering rams from their fortresses.
  
• Bridges: Eyecandy edge pieces to use in the Atlas editor.
  
• New in-game sound effects: Including ship movement, ship selection, female citizen acknowledgment, dog bark, dog acknowledgment, wood chopping, metal ore mining, stone mining, siege weapon acknowledgment, and ram movement.
  

Room for improvement:

• There is no random map generation yet.
  
• Many unit stats are still unbalanced.
  
• Many planned gameplay features are not added yet: There is no research, no auras, no rank upgrades, no settlements and territories, etc.
  
• Many bugs and small missing features.
  
• There is no multiplayer matchmaking service. You have to connect by IP address. (More convenient ways may be implemented in the future).

[athanasios]

That's a pretty big download. Must check it when I have time. Thanks.

[MrFlibble]

1213 - a game in the style of Flashback by Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw. It also inspired a sci-fi film.

[Lord J]

I've been playing the crap out of some Dwarf Fortress lately. I actually haven't played minecraft in the last few days because of DF. Hoping I'll actually be able to make some tools at some point... I still don't exactly understand the whole process. It's such a detailed game!

[MrFlibble]

Found a nice site called Remain in Play that catalogues former commercial titles that have been officially released as freeware by copyright holders.

[athanasios]

Thanks. Some look interesting.

[MrFlibble]

This site has a very nice, and rather large, collection of free modern games:

http://www.caiman.us/

[athanasios]

I visited it a month or more ago and I totally agree.

[MrFlibble]

Red Eclipse is a new freeware FPS game on the Cube 2 Engine with quite a few innovative twists. The developers are also promising a single-player campaign, although it's still in the works. Check out the Red Eclipse Wiki for more information about the game.

[MrFlibble]

The Wargame Project is a turn-based medeival fantasy strategy in the vein of Warlords and Heroes of Might and Magic. The current release (0.7.1.809) features a single-player campaign.

[Andrew]

Thanks for the find.

A similar game I did play some was LordsAWar! which was a Warlords II clone.

[MrFlibble]

0 A.D. has reached the 5th alpha release recently, code-named Edetania. A new civilization has been added, the Iberians, and the game has received a lot of improvements regarding the AI, graphics, sounds, GUI and general performance.

Iberian building set.

As for Warlords clones, I don't remember if I mentioned Warbarons, which has very impressive graphics but is a browser-based online-only game.

[Lord J]

I don't know if this officially counts, but I've been spending an ungodly amount of time lately playing Kingdoms of Camelot on facebook.

I feel slightly ashamed by that admission. Should I?

[MrFlibble]

Never heard of it, is it some kind of flash/browser-based game?

[Lord J]

Yes. It's basically Caesar III multiplayer, with more of a fantasy/medieval feel.

[MrFlibble]

My friend is a fan of Caesar III but I've never really played the game.

[athanasios]

Played Caesar III a bit. Just like all other City building games. Nice at first, boring at the end. You play the scenarios and sandbox (or whatever it is called) once or twice and that's all.

[MrFlibble]

I've also noticed that city-building and economy-building games (Settlers and so on) tend to offer limited variety in terms of gameplay compared to other RTS type games. One of the developers of The General, a freeware turn-based strategy with some very well thought-out balance and gameplay, called The Settlers "a game for bookkeepers, not strategists". They seem to make for an excellent casual time-killers for sure though.

And BTW, check out The General, you can play either against the AI or online against human opponents, it's pretty addictive actually :) My friend introduced me to this game in the late nineties or maybe early 2000s, when it had just came out, and even though I was not much of a turn-based strategy game fan back then, I was rather immersed into it, although it does not boast beautiful graphics or any intricate plot. It's the clever strategy and balance design that makes this game "serious" and, honestly, rather hard.

[MrFlibble]

I think I haven't yet mentioned Inner Worlds, a somewhat obscure DOS platform game that has been released into public domain by the developers. It has amazingly good-looking graphics and an unusual premise of the protagonist being a young werewolf girl.

Inner Worlds Official Home Page

Inner Worlds at MobyGames

Inner Worlds Wikipedia article

Download Inner Worlds Shareware from RGB Classic Games

Download Inner Worlds Full Version from dosgames.com

Also, it's one of the early examples of web software development with team members having assembled across the world. On of the original project leaders wrote an interesting article about how they were making Inner Worlds, read it here. For example, to make a soundtrack for the game, the developers held an Internet contest :)

[Andrew]

Unfortunately, after we decided to make the game available for free, we found that the number of people downloading the game resulting in a tremendous amount of extra load on our website. This extra load resulted in our website hosting service charging us extra money each month because we went beyond our limit.

Maybe they did this in 2001 or so, but I always find it funny when there is too much traffic and can't host a file, and they don't bother with a torrent. Still see that sometimes even with new software/games today (like when they made mechwarrior torrent program for free game and it couldn't handle the traffic so people had to manually add it to their torrent programs because for whatever reason the developers thought torrents are too complicated for people and now I am rambling about nothing lalalala).