GamniX

More than one year has gone by since we released Wesnoth 1.2. To thank you for more than 2,100,000 downloads via sourceforge.net, we now proudly present Wesnoth 1.4. You can look at the (translated) release notes to get an idea about what has changed since 1.2. For those who just want to play, the new release is available for download. This stable release is compatible with the release candidates for 1.4. If you have any comments, we would be happy to hear them in the forum thread dedicated to this release. We hope there are no bugs left, but if you find any, report them.
We are also looking for help in several areas, so that many other releases of similar caliber can follow this one. We are especially looking for translators, graphic artists (sprite, portraits, terrain, story images), music composers (a background in classical composition, and good equipment required), sound artists (for special effects), authors (writing/maintaining campaigns, creating content like unit descriptions, improving the ingame help) and, of course, coders. If you want to participate in developing Wesnoth, just have a look at the forum or visit us in the IRC channel #wesnoth-dev at irc.freenode.net.

The new PlaneShift version 0.4.00 (Steel Blue) has been released! Many thanks to everyone who contributed to make this possible! To connect you need a new client (no upgrade from 0.3.020 possible). Only windows and linux versions are available for the moment, MacOSX will follow shortly.
You can read a detailed list of changes here.

We are CaninoStudios, a development group destined to make videogames under the free software philosophy. We are writing you to make a presentation of our latest release “Nimuh, searching for the andalusian treasure”.

We made a previous release (a 2D shooter) that was relatively successfully, but this time we chose to make a project more oriented to education and acknowledge of our land, Andalusia.
“Nimuh” has been released under the Creative Commons license.

Read more at LinuX-gamers.net

COR Entertainment, LLC announces the release of Alien Arena 2008, a freeware, opensourced FPS!

This game is the followup to the critically acclaimed Alien Arena 2007, and features nearly all new game media, gameplay improvements, and a client that has been signifigantly upgraded for improved visual effects as well as major optimizations that greatly improve the fluidity and performance.

Alien Arena 2008 also offers a change to it’s overall theme, moving towards a slightler darker, more serious tone, while still retaining a good bit of it’s retro style, creating an interesting marriage between classic and modern sci-fi. This resulted in completely new player models, many new weapon models and textures, and seventeen, yes, seventeen new levels! The transformation is nothing short of remarkable.

There are major improvements in weapon effects, per-pixel lighting, texture resolution, and resource usage, as well as the addition of a cross platform server browser, FUSE. Weapons have been tweaked for better balance, and movement has been enhanced with the addition of dodging abilities. Alien Arena 2008 will run on Windows and Linux, and the OSX/Mac port will be released in one week.

What are you waiting for? Get Alien Arena 2008 now!

It is often mentioned that many games are not available on Linux. While several big titles are indeed missing such Linux ports, the Open Source community itself produced some impressive titles. Here is a short list together with some promo videos.

Most of the Linux Distributions out there are shipped with the set of games included in GNOME or KDE. These games are nice for short breaks, but not comparable with big, hour consuming games sold by the big publishers. However, the Open Source community stepped up there to deliver its own products, and many of them are not only interesting, but simply impressive. Also, there is a game for almost every taste available.

Read more at /home/liquidat

Independent game developer KarjaSoft announces the Linux version of Spandex Force, a tongue-in-cheek puzzle game with RPG elements.

Spandex Force is a superhero-themed puzzle game that lets the player create his or her own hero to clean up the crime-infested town of Vigilance Valley. The game features many different kinds of minigames, including, but not limited to match-3 battles in which common criminals and wacky supervillains must be defeated. The battles are similar to those of last year’s hit game Puzzle Quest, but feature superpowers rather than magical spells.

Read more at developmag

Bos Wars 2.5 has been released. Beautiful particle explosions are the highlight. I couldn’t find screenshots of this online yet. I downloaded and had a very brief go. It seems to be the standard RTS fare, reminiscent of the classic C&C games. I’m not sure whether I just completely missed it, but the game lacks a story element, something that personally I really look for in this type of game. Bos Wars itself isn’t sufficiently spectacular or innovative that it can be just a multiplayer RTS and attract a lot of plaudits.

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Globulation2 0.9.2 is also available for download (changelog). Globulation2, like Boswars, also now has a particle engine although they are using it more for smoke/damage effects. There is also plenty of stability, optimization, and networking improvements in this release. A new feature of the 0.9.x releases is a much improved AI called Nicowar. Whilst looking for information on changes I spotted that they now have a full time programmer working on the game. It should be interesting to see where it goes. However, I do have one reservation.

Read more at Free Gamer

Since the release of Nexuiz 1.0 in 2005, we have been tracking its progress as one of the leading open-source first person shooters. With time, this fast-pace game has picked up a nice level of artificial intelligence for its in-game bots, engine optimizations, single-player campaign missions, and a variety of technical advancements. Nexuiz has always been one of the leading open-source first person shooter games, and with the release of Nexuiz 2.4 yesterday it reaffirms that you don’t need to be a major game studio — or a game studio at all — to develop a quality title and even for being a free software game it has impressive graphics. With the graphical settings near maximized, a GeForce 8600GT on a quad-core system was brought to its knees by this free software (and free content) game.

Read more at Phoronix