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Category Archives: video games
Tremulous Sold to Microsoft
April 1, 2010 – 12:01 am
Following the recent turmoil over Nexuiz, Microsoft has tipped their hat and purchased Tremulous for the XBOX. As is to be expected, various Tremulous forks have already appeared in the wake of this terrible news.
The first out of the gate, Liberelous, has made their stance on things clear:
We would like to formally announce the arrival of Librelous – A free (GPL), fast-paced first-person / Real time strategy hybrid that works on Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Librelous is a direct successor of the Tremulous Project.
Librelous came about in the wake of recent troublesome changes to the Tremulous project, changes that have left many of the core contributors and community members feeling that the project has been mishandled. As a result, we felt the need to organize a departure to start with a clean slate.
Librelous will place focus on the things we love about Tremulous, and extend our goals to become the game that many thought Tremulous 1.2 should have been.
While technically being a direct successor of Tremulous, the Librelous project is a rethink of the Tremulous project that recognizes the community around it as its principal driving force and will restructure itself to respect that. This means that there will never be a single person with total control over the project.
TimeDoctor Dot Org is seeking an exclusive interview with Librelous team lead, Khalsa.
Tom Francis, His Gnome, and Left 4 Dead 2
March 24, 2010 – 10:47 pm
In the Dark Carnival campaign of Left 4 Dead 2, you can win a garden gnome at the fairground near the start – and there’s an achievement for carrying it all the way to the end. It is, in fact, the same goddamn gnome I carried through Episode goddamn Two, for the same goddamn reason: there was an achievement for it.
By the end of that ordeal, I prayed I’d never set eyes on his (“stupid fucking”) face again – but here he is, and here I am, and here we go.
via I Played Through Left 4 Dead 2 Holding A Goddamn Gnome, by Tom Francis.
Forest Hale interview about Nexuiz and open-source
March 23, 2010 – 3:34 pm
There is a lot of controversy and confusion about the upcoming commercial Nexuiz release for consoles, the re-licensing of the Nexuiz codebase, and what this means for the Nexuiz GPL PC release. I’ve spoken with Forest Hale (no relation to Saxton Hale), the lead developer behind DarkPlaces (the engine behind Nexuiz) about these issues:
Zachary Slater: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role with regard to DarkPlaces, GPL Nexuiz, and the new commercial version of Nexuiz?
Forest Hale: I’m a 30 year old self-taught game developer known as Forest ‘LordHavoc’ Hale living in the woods in Oregon, doing freelance game programming, with a passion for game design and technology programming.
I started the DarkPlaces engine for my Quake mod also named DarkPlaces back in early 2000, it has steadily evolved since then, being expanded with features in various directions at different times (influenced by Tenebrae, Doom3, and others).
Starting in 2002 or so I was brought onto a little indie project called Nexuiz being designed by Lee Vermeulen, which aimed to be a very simple free-for-all deathmatch game with unusual weapons and contributed art, and in 2005 it came out on Windows and Linux (x86 and x86_64) with a modest feature set, using many maps from a variety of level designers, gamecode written by me, and a menu system written by Andreas ‘Black’ Kirsch (who also contributed a great deal to the QuakeC scripting capabilities of the engine, adding Menu QC and other features) and several artists, this original team is collectively known as Alientrap.
At the time of release, Nexuiz 1.0 was licensed for a commercial release, but the license was changed to GPL to bring more attention to Lee Vermeulen’s group Alientrap in hopes of attracting more professional developers to join his organization to make future games, however it attracted many more Free Software fans than conventional game modders and Alientrap as a group mostly dissolved.
IllFonic contacted Lee Vermeulen and I about licensing their favorite game Nexuiz to bring it to a new audience on consoles, once all the paperwork was sorted out, development started on a prototype to show at GDC, during this entire time nothing could be revealed to the GPL team until all the deals were signed (stock speculators and other hazards exist in the business world, rumors can end companies), which has lead to much upset among a portion of the developer community that Nexuiz’s GPL release had gathered.
A lot has changed on the engine side since Nexuiz started, but some of the art never advanced in the GPL Nexuiz (for example the player models are still the original ones from 2005!), it’s good to see professional artists making better use of the technology in the console Nexuiz.
Zachary Slater: There are some issues involved with the GPL release of Nexuiz being re-licensed for commercial use. Could you tell us how this offer came about and what your role was with it?Forest Hale: Pretty much it comes down to the fact that the IllFonic guys like Nexuiz a lot and thought that the innovative fast paced gameplay should be introduced to a new audience on consoles, which are currently dominated by slow paced bullet-oriented shooters, and in the process they would boost awareness of the GPL game as well.
My role is that of an engine technology licensor, providing ongoing support in the form of technical assistance and additional features that I retain ownership on, for this reason the majority of features I implement will be immediately public and available to the community.
My role also includes being co-designer and lead programmer of the original non-GPL Nexuiz gamecode based on Quake sources.
Zachary Slater: Can a GPL game engine be used on consoles like the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3?Forest Hale: Not directly, however copyright holders have the right to provide other licenses on a case by case basis, in this case, id Software has a technology licensing program with reasonable prices, I am providing IllFonic with a license to my modifications and the modifications of many contributors (with whom I had to individually arrange licensing for this purpose over the years, and contributions I can not re-license I will have to remove or replace).
All my cards are on the table, as the DarkPlaces engine is developed in the open.
So IllFonic has a license from id Software for Quake engine on Sony Playstation 3 and Microsoft Xbox 360, and a license from me, which collectively allows them to use the DarkPlaces engine.
Zachary Slater: Have the contributors to the GPL version of Nexuiz been contacted and consented to have their code included in this commercial release?Forest Hale: The original plan was to contact every developer and relicense the Nexuiz 2.5.2 GPL gamecode sources for this title, to ensure authentic gameplay and return some important features to the community for the benefit of everyone.
However this gamecode relicensing attempt did not go well, with the former developers making claims of violations there was no choice but to reimplement the gamecode from scratch on non-GPL sources, as a result there will be no ongoing code contributions back to the community, and the gameplay may differ more than originally planned, this is a very unfortunate outcome but has no significant impact on development.
To make this perfectly clear – the game is being reimplemented from scratch, all they share is a name.
Zachary Slater: Is there anything else you would like to address about the GPL versions of Nexuiz, Darkplaces, and the new commercial Nexuiz?Forest Hale: This deal was made with good intentions, funding Alientrap to allow them to foster open development, funding DarkPlaces development, promoting the GPL versions of Nexuiz, and bringing a new kind of game to an untapped slice of the console gamer market.
Console games are a very closed market where GPL games can not go, publishers won’t touch them, and this was the only way to bring the Nexuiz experience to consoles.
Alientrap and IllFonic continue their best efforts to assist the community.
It is unfortunate that this well-intentioned product license has caused a fork of the GPL game, but new developers always fill the vacuum so I am looking forward to the next version of GPL Nexuiz, the release of Xonotic, and the release of the console Nexuiz.
The demoing of console Nexuiz at GDC went very well and I am enjoying the development process and player reactions, this game is turning out great.
Zachary Slater: Thanks for your time!Forest Hale: Thanks for the opportunity to clear a few things up.
Long live Quake and open development!
Nintendo 3DS
March 23, 2010 – 12:58 am
It pays to be on Twitter. Mark “Gaming Jesus” MacDonald linked this Nintendo.jp PR (emphasis theirs) early Tuesday morning via New York Times reporter Hiroko Tabuchi:
Nintendo Co., Ltd.(Minami-ward of Kyoto-city, President Satoru Iwata) will launch “N intendo 3D S”(temp) during the fiscal year ending March 2011, on which games can be enjoyed with 3D effects without the need for any special glasses.
“Nintendo 3DS”(temp) is going to be the new portable game machine to succeed “Nintendo DS series”, whose cumulative consolidated sales from Nintendo amounted to 125million units as of the end of December 2009, and will include backward compatibility so that the software for Nintendo DS series, including the ones for Nintendo DSi, can also be enjoyed.
We are planning to announce additional details at E3 show, which is scheduled to be held from June 15, 2010 at Los Angeles in the U.S.
Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem Of Hell
November 1, 2009 – 1:19 pm
TechCrunch has a great article up exposing free 2 play microtransaction abuse titled Scamville .
Critter Crunch Review: A Rainbow of Barf on your HDTV
October 8, 2009 – 6:04 pm
Capybara Games has provided me with a review copy of their first foray into the Playstation Network’s waters. A port of the original iPhone/iPod Touch release with some more content, how does this version of Critter Crunch stack up?
First off, when you boot the game you’re welcomed by Capybara’s “mascot” (so to speak) for the game: Biggs. The loveable little “critter” smiles and winks at you. Beckoning you to press start to continue into the game, or wait for the demo reel to start to show you gameplay footage. On the first boot-up, you are locked out from most of the game modes, besides “adventure mode,” for single-player.
Local and Online co-op and versus play, however, are unlocked from the get-go…
To continue on, the singleplayer “adventure” mode is your standard story mode for puzzle games. Upon starting it up, you are welcomed to a wonderfully hand-drawn 2D art cutscene explaining a few things about what the Biggsliocaucus, or “Biggs” for short, creatures do “every Spring. The male Biggs going out to eat the Crittacocephalus, or “Critters” as they are known. Their sons accompanying them to see how they’re fathers are efficient to the Critter’s eco-system while bringing food home to his family on the other side of the island.”
After that cutscene, you are on a map letting you choose (as you unlock more of them) spots to go to to find more puzzles. Starting off with the tutorial and going from there.
Gameplay-wise, the game is a basic “match three” puzzler, with a twist. You feed “two smaller critters to one bigger critter” to “make them pop.” It’s an interesting mechanic and as you ‘pop more critters” you start to fill up a “hunger gauge.” Your goal, at least in this mode is to fill up the Hunger Bar to beat the level.
Sounds easy, right? Well the game’s tutorial level even explains the challenge. You must do this while the game continues to bring more critters into the lines of the gameplay table. If a critter reaches Biggs/passes the line… like Tetris, the game will be over.
The gameplay mechanics are easy enough that even kids should be able to pick-up and enjoy Critter Crunch on the first go, with maybe with a little explanation/help from the parents for kids the age of five to eight.
There is a “food chain” mechanic where popping a critter near similar other critters will also make them pop. This seems to be a strategic advantage in having the board clear without the player being overwhelmed.
“Food chains” seem to also happen when you feed one smaller critter to a bigger critter and have that “full” bigger critter be fed to an even bigger critter. Good for speedy clearing of the board.
Like Tetris and other puzzle games, there is a “quick drop” option for Critter Crunch. Unlike those games, this “speeds the next line up” in dropping so you can pop more critters. This is achieved with the D-pad down button.
Also, funny enough your “Son, Smalls” will show up when you chain an 8-Critter pop-combo (for lack of better words). You then have the ability to “feed” your son by “barfing into his mouth” with rainbow barf. Yes, you read that right. You feed your child with rainbow barf. Unfortunately, you have to be quick about doing this, as “Smalls is impatient, so be quick about it” as the aptly named “Barfing Tutorial” mentions. Thankfully, so long as Biggs mouth is empty of Critters, you can simply go over to Smalls and press the circle button on your Dual-Shock 3 to barf/feed your son.
The twist to feeding your son is that if you do it quickly enough and “fill him up on his first visit” you will max your points out. The catch is, that by feeding your son, the critters will also drop faster as they are “attracted to the barf.”
Feeding Smalls on his first visit also means that you don’t need to have him appear again to feed him (to reach his max) again. You won’t have to feed him again for that level once he reaches his max. If he doesn’t reach his max, you can simply call him back out by gaining another 8-pop-chain.
Achievement wise: The game has two online achievements (Play and win a versus mode match, and reach level 5 in versus mode), with the rest being singleplayer. The achievements seem easy to do, in theory but in practice some of them (like “World Greatest Dad”) will be hard to master.
To move into the multiplayer: The ranked multiplayer matches are like Tetris. You match Critters to pop them to gain power-ups to screw over your opponents. Simple, but the game becomes fast and furious between both players to fill the other players play field to the point of winning. (Though, there is a hunger meter in the two player mode, maybe another way to win is by filling that up quickly. I can’t say at the time of writing.)
Graphically, the game is very pretty with hand-drawn art. I would wager to say that I think Capybara’s art-department needs a pay-raise. At 1080p (though an HDMI cable is required to reach this resolution) the game is gorgeous with the hand-drawn art. Biggs is charming in animation and the game reeks of cuteness.
Overall, the game is a nice addition to the PSN library and if you enjoy puzzle games it is easily worth the $7USD (at the time of writing) to buy. Unfortunately, I have to mention there is no color-blind option (though talking to Capybara, they are “thinking about patching it into the PS3 version”), so if you are color-blind you may have a little trouble with the game (since there are some Critters that are similar in color to other Critters).
If you aren’t completely satisfied with just the game, they are also offering some cute T-shirts at this link. Very cute T-shirts with a catchy “hey, what’s the game your advertising?” twist.
I want to thank Capybara Games for giving me the opportunity to review their game.
Hook Champ Preview
October 8, 2009 – 12:32 am
Rocketcat Games has been running a pre-release adhoc beta of Hook Champ. It is an 8-bit style side-scroller with very simple touch controls.
You’re an infamous adventurer that starts each mission by swapping out a fancy idol for a fake one, of course it never works and you’re left to run away with your treasure.
Not from a boulder, but from something that seems like a more extreme version of chain chomp from Mario’s games.
The gameplay is more like Sonic. You’ve gotta hook onto the ceiling and various other objects that stick out from the background without stopping or that fellow will eat you.
Make it through a level picking up lesser trophies along the way and you can buy some awesome new hats before heading out on your next adventure.
I’ve enjoyed it so far, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Check out the video:
When it is released Hook Champ will have a 99¢ sale, down from the normal $3 price.
Left 4 Dead 2 “Banned” In Australia
September 17, 2009 – 10:51 pm
So the word is that the gamers in Australia are effectively being “Lef t 4 Dead” when it comes to the new zombie shoot-em-up of the same name, Left 4 Dead 2.
My only question is, does this prevent them from obtaining it via Steam? Is it only banned in stores / box versions? The internet as a global media distributer may trump all, especially if the “sale” is taking place “out of the farkin’ outback”.
BEST MOD EVAR
September 17, 2009 – 2:53 pm
YouTube – RELEASE Half-Life2: All sounds replaced with my voice.
You are stupid if you don’t like this. I’m not kidding. STUPID!!!