You made it

I discovered this great game site: The Independent Gaming Source which is all about indie games. While those games really feel back-to-basics, they also feel back-to-roots; you know, what gaming really is about. 😉 While I admit to be colored by some nostalgia, it really makes you ponder what good games really are about.

Due to the size of big game companies and the money involved, refreshing game concepts are too risky to try out. But this doesn’t affect the indie game developer who has nothing to loose. So we actually shouldn’t be surprised to find some very entertaining game concepts in the indie camp, be it maybe somewhat less polished or technically advanced as its ‘commercial’ siblings.

I just played “You made it” (runs fine under linux/wine) and although the concept is so simple, I was surprised how addictive it was and how I loved the added difficulty induced by a non clearing backbuffer. 🙂

You made it

try it for yourself

Team Fortress 2

CGSociety has an interesting feature about Team Fortress 2.

The art in TF2 and the game in general is indeed quite special imo 🙂 Having played it for a few hours, I really can appreciate the game Valve put together. High usability, restricted weapon selection and funny cartoonish graphics and animations trick the player into believing that this really is an easy kids game, but nothing is less true. Well.. it actually all depends on the players 🙂

A lot of rookie players (I have the impression there are a lot, me included 😉 ) just don’t get the full potential of the game and do a brute force attack. But due to unique gameplay elements, you are forced to find better or switch tactics all the time. For example, you simply can not find a sniping spot and snipe until you are discovered, simply because after each kill, the killee (heheh =) ), is presented a nice close up snapshot of his killer!
On top of that, because the game keeps track of your kills and hangs a big fat nemesis icon above your head for the people you killed a lot, you can be reassured to spend some payback time. 😉

There does not exist such thing as a fail proof tactic, each can be countered. And this is not because of the right weapon choice, but because of the wide range of characters. It takes some time to handle each of them in an effecient way and unless in each class someone knows what he does, the team simply doesn’t work. And that’s in fact my only problem with the game, I guess. 🙂 A lot of people don’t play their class well and also don’t care “because they just wanna frag”. That’s okay, if the other team agrees with that 😉 The minute they start playing “intelligently”, they win. Of course, the game wouldn’t be called team fortress if team play wasn’t a key part of the game 😉 yet, on public servers, we all know it is sometimes hard to find the team spirit …

Half-life 2. Finally.

yes, I know my hardware is not the most recent, but so is Half-life 2. Yet, it seems I won’t manage to play it although I finally bought it! 🙂 Have a look at the following nice free disk space requirements..:
Orange box disk space requirements
/me faints 😉

even when I only want to install Portal (which I wanted to try out badly), I still need 6260 MB !!?? what have they done with that game?! it looked so nice and small (and I heard play time was not that much either ;))

Guess I’ll do have to buy that extra disk first now!

Btw, I bought it through steam, but got almost zero price benefit (given that the dollar is quite weak now) over a boxed version here in Belgium. Still, I wanted to try it and I wanted to play _now_ 😉 (I guess, after hours of downloading ;))

open source guitar hero

you(‘d) like to rock, preferably in an open source way? 🙂 Then Frets on Fire is definitely something for you!
I was amazed by the polish-factor of this project! It all looks (and sounds!) quite nice, the tutorial is simply hilarious. 🙂

The inverted keyboard approach as a surrogate guitar works surprisingly well. I think in the 9 years that I own my trusty Mitsumi keyboard, I never jammed the keys as hard as today. 😉

Tip: FoF comes with only 3 songs, but you can import songs both from Guitar Hero I & II. Also check out this community site for some extra songs.

Frets on Fire guy

Pingus

In case you didn’t know, Pingus, the open source Lemmings clone, has with its 0.7 release its first SDL port binary. Meaning, you can play it on windows too now. 🙂 I’m lame, I know 😉

As I were going to sleep, I thought I’d try out those tutorial island levels. After finishing the island I come to realise this is as far as the game is finished right now. =) That doesn’t mean the game has limited gameplay (how can an open source game have limited gameplay anyway? 😉 ). After all,

  1. there were already 22 nicely polished levels, introducing the several types of pingi (?, lol).
  2. There is a level editor. Temporarily not included, due to the SDL porting process, I guess.
  3. There are loads of ‘unofficial‘ levels which you can load manually.
  4. It took me more time than anticipated, take a look at the clock. 😉

I really love this project and I hope they keep on developing it!

P.S.: they even created a little storyline, very cute 😉

Pingus on Tutorial Island

P.P.S: I just read this interesting interview with the Pingus developer. This guy has dipped his toes in all kinds of open source games! 🙂