Cereal Monopoly

I'm the Microsoft of my kitchen. Nobody gets in on my cereal without there being trouble - I invoke my landlord status. But if my cereal is out, I'm having some of yours if you live here. So today I ate some of my housemates shredded wheat. That stuff tastes like paper - who in their right mind would like the taste of that? This, of course, is why we have such a variety of games. To some people, some games are boring and pointless, but to others they are the ultimate form of fun.

One of the things I love about Sauerbraten is that it empowers people to create really amazing looking maps like this without that much effort. Instead of spending hours trying to manipulate abstract file contents or fighting map editors, you can just build it as you see it rapidly. It's like the IDE of map making tools and games.

I overly built up one Dungeon Master inspired FOSS game, but another that is very actively developed and looking very, very promising is the Java Classic RPG project. The development blog makes for an interesting read as well as a good way of updating the community on the progress of the game and I encourage other FOSS game developers to indulge in a similar practise.

The Privateer Gemini Gold 1.02 final release is out. Improved ship models, higher resolution base graphics, and improved game balance are the highlights of over a year's worth of development since the 1.01 release. It really is a good game, and it's Free and Open Sourec Software and available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. So, download it already! :-D

That game should be very popular. I'm hoping as a consequence of this, Vega Strike will get more attention. Actually there has been some excellent work by a new developer who took on the task of cleaning up the VS codebase. Today his branch got merged into SVN head. The two threads tracking his work (here and here) make for interesting reading if you like following development. The benefits should be a more stable and memory efficient VS release in the future, plus quicker compile times and better usage of common libraries which were previously being manually maintained in SVN by the VS developers.

I probably don't need to talk about the latest Alien Arena release, so I won't.