Games

The release candidate of the upcoming release of SuperTuxkart, version 0.7.1, is available for download. The RC brings some significant changes from the version 0.7, released last december. The additions include - particle and weather affects, a smoother multi player setup, new shiny suburbs track, many tracks have been renamed and a lot more small changes and bug fixes.

Lock and load people, its time for a new SuperTuxKart. Yup! I am still not finished with it :). When I wrote the last post, I was playing and talking about the version(0.6.2) which was in the repositories of Ubuntu 10.10. After checking on their project homepage, I realized that the recent version 0.7 has already been out since December last year.

I never really thought a game with the name “supertuxkart” could be this good. Putting aside its the racing part, the most fun I had was blowing up a kart named “OpenBSD” with puffy driving it  while mine kart, named “Powered by GNU/Linux”, was driven by Tux. Not just these, you get to see wilber from gimp, php’s elephant, even mozilla. The idea of using open source projects’ mascots as players makes this game marvellous.

So, I finally found some time to look for more classical games’ clones on linux. After the brilliant Granatier - the Bomberman clone, I looked for mario and what do you know, there is one available. And guess what? The role of mario is played by our loving Tux, the penguin. The game is “SuperTux".

SuperTux is a clone of Super Mario Bros. One of the main thing that differs, and by differ I mean intelligently modified, is the environment. Since, the lead is played by Tux, the whole scenario is based on Antarctica.

Alien arena, one of the most prominent first-person shooting game available on Linux has released a new version - Alien Arena 2011. The most influential change in this release is the inclusion of rag doll physics using the open physics engine. In simple words, the animated sequences - death, fall etc. will look more realistic now.

Some other major changes in this release include:

Guess where did I play Quake III Arena for the first time. Not place, I am talking about the platform/Operating System. Nope! its not windows, its Linux . Surprised, right? I was too when I found this brilliant opensource version of Quake III Arena aka OpenArena.

During the good old days of console gaming(I mean in 90s), I really liked Bomberman. Once I started exploring the world of Linux games, I did a search for "bomberman" and actually found a pretty good version of it, called Granatier. The description says that its a bomberman clone, but thats not completely true. The environment is pretty different and you won't find the good old monsters trying to crush you all the time.

Had a night out with friends, the plan was to watch a lot of movies but ended up playing this awesome game from 3am until morning. And the amazing part - all of us had hardly ever played any cue games before. I never realized that a non-arcade game like this could keep me awake all night .

My whole experience with the game might look a bit false based upon the fact that I haven't played such games in real-life much, but listen to this, "Foobillard was actually suggested to me by a college friend who is a die hard fan of cue sports and a good player too". So, if a real-life player is recommending it, you have got to give it a shot.