Alien Arena

By: ithamore

On: October 13th, 2007

Joe Barr at Linux.com recently reviewed the Quake II-based Alien Arena and declared it better than the Quake III-based Tremulous which use to be “. . . the best free software FPS game [he had] had the pleasure of playing.”

<img src=“http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2155/1559988059_6af41e74df_m.jpg” width=“240” height=“180” hspace=10 vspace=10 align=right alt=“Alien Arena” />
From the review:

“If you’re a gamer but not familiar with Alien Arena, think of Quake III or Unreal Tournament and you won’t be far off the mark. If you’re not familiar with those icons of the first-person shooter genre, think massive, sustained, unrelenting, ankle-deep-in-blood, kill-or-be-killed carnage which can be enjoyed solo, just you against the bots on your PC, or, if your taste in killing tends toward living targets, in multiplayer mode on a network server.”

<img src=“http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2340/1559988067_9d6a32c9dc_m.jpg” width=“240” height=“180” hspace=10 vspace=10 align=right alt=“tremulous” />Also, here is a bit on Tremulous:

“Tremulous is basically a struggle between two teams: the humans, a species I will assume you are familiar with, and the aliens, which look like bugs and sometimes crawl along walls and ceilings. During the game, each side progresses through three stages, with advanced abilities and equipment coming in during the second and third stages. There is one major difference between the species, beyond being on different teams. Humans can upgrade their equipment. Aliens can upgrade themselves. Both species have structures peculiar to themselves.”

I haven’t tried either game, since I’m not into FPS’s, so you’ll have to tell us what you think about them and which is better in the comments. And, for the record’s sake, this is the first time Slashdot (the source) has been “officially” TIGSourced [Edit: on the new TIGSource that is], the unofficial Mac version of Tremulous is available here, and the images I used were nabbed from the games’ websites.