My Favourite Day Of The Year

Well, not really, I never enjoy reading rubbish people try to make up to be funny. Honestly, if I want a laugh, I'll go to a comedy store. Anyhow...

World of Padman. 3D, Toy Story esque setting and freeware. It's a deathmatch game but comes with bots, it runs on Linux and Windows, looks fantastic, and even has a promo trailer. Released today, surely this is not an April Fool's as it is too elaborate. Or maybe it is just a promotion for a commercial game, released as freeware for today only? Who knows. This is why I don't like April 1st. Anyway, download it and see. It's not open source though.

I've been whining about a lack of good platform games, but I found a few on GetDeb.

The Goonies

I came across The Goonies just after posting on Friday. It's a remake of a classic NES game, but with better graphics and sound. It's quite tricky to play but a good time waster.

Then I tried to play Magicor which looks fun, but it crashed on my Feisty Fawn setup. There's a tip for getting it to run in the comments on GetDeb but I only just saw that now.

Looking at the list though, there's quite a few platform games. There's Nikwi, which I've mentioned before. There's Secret Maryo which is enjoying sustained development and increasingly nice graphics. Of course we have SuperTux, and there's Fuzzy Adventure which was looking promising although development seems to have stagnated. Still, my point is there's options.

Since it's a Sunday and I'm feeling lazy, I'm just going to give a general non-electro music tip. (I'm too partied out to listen to electro right now.)

So... music tip: Goldfrapp

Lastly a few people have commented to me directly that the games list is a bit broken. I know it is. I'm slowly fixing it and restoring it to it's former glory, but even better. Only I can't do it offline because I'm not that clued up on how Blogger works, so I have to fiddle with it live.

All I'll say is that I have grand plans [or delusions of grandure] for turning this into an award winning blog. So I either just made a glamourous prediction or made myself look foolish. Who cares? ;-)

Niwki Deluxe

These days my conscience starts playing up when I don't update FG. Here I am, sat at work, fretting over not having posting an update for a few days. I may have to change format to just blog about things as and when I encounter them rather than building up entries... still, I'm digressing.

Nikwi Deluxe

Nikwi Deluxe, by Slashstone, is now available under the GPL. This cute 2D platformer is very old school but still well done. It's also a bit silly [you collect sweets, birds poo on you, etc] and therefore suitable for kids, but still isn't easy to don't let the "kids" tag prevent those mega tough macho men amongst you from checking it out. I even made my own screenshot of it, coincidentally of the level where I gave up because it was too hard.

Sadly it is a Windows only game but should work on WINE. Perhaps now it is GPL somebody will port it? Edit - there appears to be a Linux binary. Thanks Mr Anonymous for the tip.

The latest VDrift release seems to have been the critical mass one. Now the community is building and creating content for the game. There's a cool 69 Dodge Charcher which should be in the next release, as well as a parking lot for practicing drifting. It's really nice to see VDrift flourishing after the open source racing scene suffered a serious setback a few years back when Racer became closed source.

Warzone 2.0.4 is now ready. I hope this fixes any problems people may have exprerienced with it. The guys working on Warzone are fans-turned-developers so are learning all the time - things should get smoother with each release.

Finally, the commercial Freelancer has spawned an ambitious fan project, Openlancer. It will no doubt take years to complete and be freeware, but for fans of Freelancer it's worth following. (I only mentioned this because I got Freelancer and Freespace2 confused so thought it may be a fork before I realised my mistake.)