Release Changelog Bullets: Los, SaR2, HoA, NatR

Lips of Suna - 0.4.0

• Lots of sound effects.
• Master server and server browser.
• Climbing over obstacles.
• Merchants and trading.
• Attacks can be charged by holding the attack button.
• Projectiles and sword swings have speed lines.
• Controls can be customized in-game.
• Basic blood effects and beheading.
• More flexible map generation algorithm.
• Improved aer female, android female and kraken models.
• New items: crossbow, musket, revolver, barrel, bookcase, dewspring leaf, fruit.
• New spells: berserk, dig, firewall, light, travel.
• New quests: Brigands, Mining Guild, Sword on the Stone.

Search and Rescue II - 2.3.0

• Copyrighted Guadarrama scenery textures replaced with public domain ones in order to avoid licensing problems
• Small bugixes
• OpenSuse packages have been updated as well

Hero of Allacrost - June 2011 Unstable Release

• Two brand new maps with many scripted events that develop the beginning plot of the main story
• Enter/exit sequences in battle to smooth the transition from map exploration to battle execution
• Better display of battle damage and status indicator text and images
• Receiving damage causes a brief stun on the stamina bar, allowing you to delay opponents actions slightly
• New skills available to use, some of which can target an entire party
• Attack points have specific stat modifiers (for defense and evasion)
• Targeting certain attack points may invoke status effects. For example, targeting legs to reduce agility
• Enemy's are no longer "leveled up" to match the party's strength
• If the player loses a battle, they have the option to restart the battle from the beginning, taking a penalty on XP/drunes earned upon victory
• Two new enemies to fight, one of which is a boss-type

Nikki and the Robots - 0.3 + 0.3.1

• Prettier on-screen display elements
• Editor bug fixed
• Slowdown bug fixed on many systems

A bunch of updates

Very creative headline, I know... but news of various games were piling up in my "should post about it on FreeGamer" link-list... yet I never really felt like actually writing an article about. So some of it might be old news... but hey at least it hasn't been featured here AFAIK.

So, where to start?

Maybe with some nice puzzle games: Rezerwar is a pretty nice mixture of a pipes game and some sort of tetris, and it was even created using only open-source software. Another pipes game is Cooldown, which might be worth to check out, too. Graphically a bit more advanced is Octaspire: Crates, a block movement type game or something like that ;) But see for yourself:

Octaspire:Crates Tutorial

A non puzzle game worth checking out are Hero of Allacrost (a 2D RPG), which recently had it's DEMO 1.0 release. Another, albeit 3D RPG (engine) is DNT (DccNiTghtmare), which is set in a "satirical post-apocalyptical world".

If you are following the development of the promising turn based colony game Unknown Horizons (aka the artist formerly known as OpenAnno), their new development blog might be of interest. Oh and did I mention that FreeCol also got a bunch of updates lately?

Very neat is also the recent release of FreeOrion, a turn based space colonization game. It still lacks some important features to be really playable (combat and diplomacy), but otherwise it is already a pretty good looking game:

FreeOrion

Another game currently heavily updated game (engine) is OSARE, which aims to be a fully featured base to build Diablo like story lines/games with. An already slightly outdated (v0.08, newest v0.09) shows what can be done already:

OSARE loot drops

Another interesting project I came across lately is the Darkplaces based Blood Omicide, which is of course sadly based on copyrighted material. Overdose, a recently already mentioned open-source "in engine but not in media" (and even the engine code has yet to be released) game has recently shown some rather nice enemy model screen-shots. Furthermore their newest video is quite amazing in regards to the light rendering.

A game-engine and the games based on it that is probably vastly under-reported here on FreeGamer, is the Spring RTS engine. I guess it might be due to my dislike of Total Annihilation like RTS, but there is actually one (with public domain licensed media) that strays from that kind of RTS concept: Kernel Panic puts you right inside of a PC, and has quite a bit of nice uncommon game modi that break up the usual RTS grind.

Kernel Panic promo

I guess that's all for today... my link-list is not yet completely empty, but the rest will have to wait for another day ;)