Changes in Hardwar development

Possible Hardwar main menu scene

Hardwar is a long-term project to remake the 1998 Hardwar - a science fiction flight simulation game. There have been two recent changes:

The code hosting switched from Launchpad's bazaar to GitHub.

The in-game editor was dropped and instead Ogitor will be used. While in-game editing is awesome, I'm glad that a general tool is being used and time is being saved.

Ogitor 0.3

Ogitor is a Plug-In based WYSIWYG editor environment for OGRE.

OGRE is on a hunt for illogic in its API as a preparation for releasing 1.8 and every coder is invited!

Remorse - a Phenomenal Game

When looking at stuff like the Ubuntu forums, full of I-love-my-Windows-games posters crying about how WINE and Cedega don't run World of Warcraft perfectly, it's very easy to glance at something and dismiss it as commercial. Fortunately, I gave this thread a second look.

Remorse demo

Remorse is the first game project by Phenomena Games, a group of enthusiasts who have created the Existence 2.0 engine which supports all kinds of fancy things (shaders, physics etc). There are some impressive screenshots and videos - the motionblur effect video is delicious.

Remorse is primarily going to be a single player game, good news in the FPS genre that is swamped with deathmatch games. Anyway, they seem to have a few people working on it and hopefully a bit of exposure might get them a few more contributors. It looks like it has lots of potential.

I mentioned Project Open a few days ago, a place to consolidate efforts to get copyright holders to release abandonware / freeware titles under an open source license. There's a fascinating thread on Hardwar by forum member andrew. It transpires that when the UK company that owned the copryrights became insolvent, the copyright passed onto The Crown - sadly not the Queen of England but the formal entity that covers the land. Anyway, it's good to see him making progress.

Some Classic Game Remakes

I came across the Hardwar project the other day, a contemporary remake of the classic game. No visible progress but plenty of ambition and a cute website. We shall see if it gets anywhere.

A remake that has made some good progress is Game of Bases, putting a modern spin on a Commodore 64 classic Flash Attack. Control 4 tanks, protect your base, and take out your opponents.

I mentioned FlowFlowMania the other day, a Pipe Mania remake. Since then there have been a few updates - 0.5 was announced on Freshmeat although not on the FlowFlowMania site at the time of writing.

Gno3dtet

Blockout was the original 3D tetris. Gno3Dtet (aka 3D Tetris) is a remake that looks very similar to the original in terms of the tile graphics.

Beware, for I have known more than one person be addicted to that game to the point it adversely affected their degrees!

Not a remake, nor open source, but the Flash adventure game "The Terrific Menace of the Invaders from Audio Galaxy" (I'm not typing that again!) is reminiscent of the Lucasarts classic Day of the Tentacle (these days playable using ScummVM). It is, of course, free to play.

Shadow of the Beast 3D

Remember Shadow of the Beast? I loved that game, and the follow up (Shadow of the Beast II, of course). Somebody started remaking it in 3D! Sadly it doesn't seem to be headed anywhere (last updated 2 years ago) but I live in hope.

(Y'know, I swear I'd mentioned that last one before but Google says I haven't and I'm not reading 100 posts to see if I did!)

I'll finish off with a Super Mario remake. Since the Secret Maryo developers only provide source packages for Linux, I created some Secret Maryo 0.99.5 packages for Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (might work on Dapper Drake). Enjoy!

Music tip:

Franke, Neumann - Criss Source (Titan Remix)