Posts from ‘Freeware’ Category
Running with Rifles Pre-Alpha 0.1
By: Derek Yu
On: June 22nd, 2011
At Pre-Alpha version 0.1 Running with Rifles is already a lot of fun, so I’m excited to see where it goes from here. The goal of the game is to control the map by taking key points such as the Town, the East Trench, the Airport, etc., from the opposing team. You start at one of seven ranks that determine how many of your fellow soldiers will follow you as you pass by. As a lowly private you’ll probably want to stay with a squad until you rank up (through kills), but as a captain you can lead your own squads into battle. The AI is pretty lifelike – soldiers move as a team, find cover, and bark orders at one another.
Modulaatio Games has plans to bring online multiplayer to Running with Rifles eventually, and this singleplayer-only pre-alpha seems like a great jumping off point for that. I’m already impressed by the scale of the battles, with dozens of soldiers fighting over a square kilometer of land, as well as the freedom of how you can choose to play despite there only being one player class. The addition of multiplayer and other options will only be enhancing an already decent game.
Note: Press “G” to use your grenades. They can be refilled at the ammo boxes.
Realm of the Mad God
By: Derek Yu
On: June 21st, 2011
Realm of the Mad God began life humbly, as an entry for our TIGSource Assemblee Competition. Since then, Wild Shadow Studios and Oryx, the creator of the popular dungeon tileset the game uses, have developed it into a free-to-play, browser-based, massively multiplayer action RPG. Players seek to destroy the minions of “Oryx” for a chance to duel – together – against the Mad God himself and win some fabulous loot. If you haven’t played in a while, the latest release takes RotMG out of beta and features 13 characters classes, multi-stage bosses, item shops, pets, and more. There’s even a nice sprite editor for creating and animating pixel artwork to use in the game.
WGRealms 2
By: Derek Yu
On: June 16th, 2011
What better way to celebrate (or erase the memory of) the release of Duke Nukem Forever than with a Duke Nukem 3d total conversion from 2009. Duke 3d not required! I’ll let Türbo Bröther take it from here (source):
In WGRealms 2, Duke Nukem fires homing rockets at a Cyberdemon who has a plasma rifle and when it explodes twice its body’s supply of blood and organs fly out in all directions in a glorious hommage to nineties first person shooters.
We could go on for days about its use of resources from other games but I am so over that. This is about how damn cool the game is. I thought that version 1.1 was off the hook but v1.2 attaches proximity mines to it and uses the explosion to swing through the window whilst shooting lightning and minotaurs. This is basically the game that I’ve wanted since I was sixteen. The guns are spot on, the monsters despite coming from a bunch of different games fit well with each other which is either surprising or telling of the tastes of game designers and there’s the exact amount of gore that I’ve been looking for. And the levels are huge and are very much “of the era”.
I’m talking levels that are even bigger than the levels in something like Jedi Knight which had massive levels. Seriously, you could complete three episodes of DooM in the time it takes to get through Chaos Realms alone. It can be a bit much at times but you get, like, ten save slots. Take a break, have a shower, go play some Outrun 2006 and fall asleep in the afternoon sun then get back in there and frag some more undead battle skeletons.
Watch the trailers on its Mod DB entry, look at some screenshots and if you aren’t totally pumped by the end nothing will get you in the mood. Well, maybe that minigun. Or those pipe bombs.
Stencyl
By: Derek Yu
On: May 31st, 2011
Stencyl is a newly-released, free game creation tool that comes with a suite of drag n’ drop editors to simplify the development and publishing of Flash games. There’s a big emphasis on collaboration – StencylForge and StencylTalk let you easily share resources and chat with other developers while you work on your project. For designers who are not so fond of drag n’ drop interfaces, there is a “code mode” for Stencyl’s game logic editor that can be used in conjunction with its simplified “design mode”.
The engine is based on Adam Saltsman’s Flixel library and it uses Box2d for physics. The logic editor is based off of the educational programming language Scratch.
King Arthur’s Gold Build 40
By: Derek Yu
On: May 29th, 2011
King Arthur’s Gold is a team-based, online multiplayer versus platformer that’s already lots of fun, even in beta. The game features three player classes that you can switch to at your team’s home base. The builder can dig, mine, and build all kinds of structures, including doors and catapults; the knight has a powerful melee attack and uses a shield and bombs; the archer has a long range attack. To win the game, your team has to accumulate gold through a combination of mining and pillaging.
Hit the jump for some footage of KAG in action (a couple weeks old):
Pragmatica
By: Derek Yu
On: May 16th, 2011
Pragmatica is a nifty puzzle game from HiVE, a team that includes Srehpog (Ark 22, Umbrella Adventure). The goal is simple: in each level, program robots with conditional statements so that they make their way safely to the exits. It gets a lot more challenging, however, as the game introduces hazards, switches, crates, bombs, and multiple control groups of robots to the mix. A built-in map maker lets you create and share your own levels.
TIGdb: Entry for Pragmatica
Shores of Hazeron
By: Alehkhs
On: April 23rd, 2011
Shores of Hazeron is an indie sand-box space MMO currently in Open Alpha/Beta stage, bringing to mind such media as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Trek, the Elite series, Noctis, and Spore, to list a few.
Similar to other great labor-of-love projects such as Dwarf Fortress or Noctis, Hazeron‘s current graphics, interface, and performance might not seem cutting-edge (and combined with frequent lag and server downtime threaten to drive many a newcomer away), yet the game boasts incredible features and depth. Allowing for seamless, free-form exploration and colonization of planets in a procedurally-generated universe (containing unique solar systems, planets, animals, and plants), Hazeron allows players to build up a galactic empire from humble beginnings, or join a pre-existing and established empire. Players can design and customize spaceships and space stations, take-off and land seamlessly on planets and moons, fly between stars, and both interact peacefully or wage war with other players and empires.
Touhou 13 – Ten Desires Demo
By: Derek Yu
On: April 17th, 2011
Since 2004 ZUN has released trial versions of his games at the Touhou-themed annual conventions called Reitaisai. This year, however, due to the earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, Reitaisai was postponed and the three-stage demo for Touhou 13, called “Ten Desires”, was released online for free. Like all the major games in the Touhou series, Ten Desires is a vertical danmaku shoot ’em up set in the fictional world of Gensokyo. According to ZUN, it’s easier than his previous releases and is meant to be more accessible to beginners.
In TD, you have a Trance gauge that fills up as you collect spirits, up to a maximum of three bars. If you have at least one bar filled, you will automatically enter a “trance” upon getting hit, rendering you impervious to bullets until the gauge runs out and you die. If the gauge is maxed out, you can enter the trance voluntarily and you won’t die when it ends. Spirits are worth more points while in a trance and you also do more damage.
Aside from spirits, which come in four different colors and have various properties, enemies also drop the usual red and blue items. Red items increase your firepower and blue point items raise your score. If you head to the top of the screen you can suck all of these power-ups in (point items are also worth more up there). Finally, there are bombs that can be activated at any time.
For more information, check out the game’s manual, in English. You can download the demo either from the game’s homepage (it might be very slow) or from Mediafire.
Ace of Spades Beta 0.26
By: Derek Yu
On: April 15th, 2011
Ace of Spades is a team-based online multiplayer deathmatch game that could be adequately described as “Minecraft with rifles”. It pits two teams of up to 16 against each other, with players vying to bring back a briefcase of intel from their opponents’ base to score. What makes the game so fun is the use of constructible/destructible terrain – you can easily build bunkers, trenches, tunnels, bridges, and forts with the provided tools (some clever players are even making decoys using colored blocks). Taking out the bottom blocks of a structure will send the entire thing crumbling down.
Someone put up a guide for Ace of Spades here that explains everything you need to know about playing. To join a game, simply run the installer, go to the game’s website, and click on one of the listed servers. It may take you a while to find one that works (the game will always pop-up a message to tell you if there’s a problem, so be patient).
PROTIP: Hit Ctrl after jumping to jump out of the water, otherwise you won’t make it onto the block. This is in the guide, but I know some of you will want to start playing without reading it too carefully!
Don’t Take It Personally, Babe…
By: Derek Yu
On: April 12th, 2011
Don’t Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story is a Ren’Py visual novel by Christine Love, and the spiritual sequel to Digital: A Love Story. Set in the year 2027, the novel takes place in a high school literature class and is about “the erosion of privacy, gay drama, young sexuality, and the perils of modern online life”. You play a young teacher who, unbeknownst to his seven new students, has access to all of their online communication.
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