Thomas “T.V.” van der Velden’s Harmony is a new FPS made with the ZDoom game engine. It is 8 years in the making. 8 years… wow, that is some dedication!
The game features original graphics and music. The monsters in the game were modeled from clay figures that the author rigged with wires so that they could be animated. Overall, Harmony looks fairly drab, but the character designs certainly lend it a unique and creepy look. The music is pretty good, too – I especially like the track that’s all drums.
It’s a challenging FPS that hearkens to the early days of shareware – there’s no jumping or swimming here (there is mouse-aiming, though)! Unfortunately, the weapon selection is not as interesting as the monsters, and you’ll mostly be playing with variants of the standard Doom line-up. But the level design is good – 11 large (and I do mean large) maps make you backtrack a lot, but are intuitive and have lots of shortcuts and secrets. The item placement feels right to me, too – ammo is valuable but not too scarce.
An original and complete game based on the Doom engine doesn’t come around that often, and Harmony is an impressive effort, if somewhat rough around the edges. It’s definitely worth a look for fans of old FPS’s. Thanks, jute, for the tip.
Now this is a dream coming true right here! Stonesense (alpha) is an open source isometric visualizer for Dwarf Fortress, created by jonask and Solifuge. It can run side-by-side with the venerable roguelike/sim to provide a graphical view of the game. The sprites are being contributed by various members of the DF community.
BREAKING KOTAKU EXCLUSIVE! Natural Selection 2, the sequel to the popular multiplayer Half-Life mod, is slated for a Fall release on Steam, according to its developers. The original game blended FPS and RTS mechanics and featured two very different playable teams – the alien Kharaa and the human Frontiersmen. NS2 will maintain the same basic mechanics, but with some new features (and obviously much prettier). It’s now running on an unnamed proprietary engine, with Valve’s Source engine having been dropped due to the cost of licensing.
This is great news, as the development has been through some rough times, with its creators selling a Sudoku puzzle game to make ends meet at one point.
Posted by Guest Reviewer
Sat, 10 Jan 2009 02:13:00 GMT
[Guest review by MisterX, originally posted on TIGForums]
As few probably know about it, I’ll just introduce it a bit: Smokin’ Guns is what became of Western Quake³. The latter was a very solid and well-liked western mod for Quake 3, and it was developed by Iron Claw Interactive. As time passed, the usual thing happened – there was less and less activity on the servers and eventually the developers moved on to other things. So when the source code of Quake 3 was released, a group of die-hard fans put it upon themselves to polish the mod, iron out bugs, create new content, and, best of all, make it a stand-alone game! They achieved no less and so now, few days ago, Smokin’ Guns was finally released into the wild!
Smokin’ Guns is not the most modern shooter, but it’s one of the few Western-themed action games there are, and it’s simply the best, in my opinion. There are the normal deathmatch and team deathmatch modes, but they have a catch, as you need money to buy weapons, ammo and items whenever, wherever you like. The money is not only gained by killing, but it’s also found lying around the maps. More interestingly, there is the Bank Robbery mode, which pits one team as defenders of a bank against another trying to break it, steal money by blowing up the safe, and then escape to the train yard. The most competitive one, though, is the Duel mode, which is self-explanatory. Two men go in, one comes out – very classy.
SG is really not an innovative game, but I like it for how well it manages to capture the Wild West feeling inspired by all the famous classic movies. In most shooters rifles are the most important weapons, and the one-handed guns are merely backups. But here it’s really well-balanced, so if you want it to be all about the revolvers, have it be that way. There are a bunch of revolvers, rifles, and shotguns, and even a fancy classic Gatling gun – in my opinion they all just feel right, especially the revolvers. You can use single ones or carry two simultaneously, and you can mix them how you like it. When using two, you can also reload them individually, and one of the revolvers is reloaded one bullet at a time, which feels very nice.
Lastly, the graphics aren’t much to look at, but they have been polished from Western Quake³, and the maps tend to look quite atmospheric. The sound is a different story, though, as the weapons sound appropriately powerful, and there’s a very, very nice soundtrack which really gets you in the mood for duking it out at high noon.
It’s been a long time coming, and I’m glad I can finally play the game again online. I hope some of you will also find it interesting. So, see you online, maybe!
The ZZT is an ANSI-based game with a game editor, and that editor was probably the first important piece of game creation software. The editor wasn’t even intended as its most important feature, but its popularity eclipsed the game itself. It’s still used to create games even today.
Clysm, the author of the classic Game Maker game Seiklus, has put up a nice list of the ZZT games he recommends. You’ll need to download the ZZT runner itself to play them. I recommend trying them all out, they each have something interesting about them, and playing them is a good insight into the history of independent games (if you care about that).
Trivia: one of the games there, Rhygar, pictured above, was created by the writer of the story of Immortal Defense (long before I met him). I’ve never actually finished it, but I like how it arranges the colored text characters into almost photograph-like scenes.
EDIT: Dessgeega has created a similar list of recommended ZZT games that is worth looking into, over at The Gamer’s Quarter.
Auntie Pixelante (aka “dessgeega”) has been peppering her blog with thoughtful commentary about Super Mario Bros. ROM hacks. Now, I don’t know about you, but when I think of NES ROM hacks, I usually imagine something like this (which, I have to admit, is amusing in its own terrible way). But what Auntie P. shows us is that, at least with a game as ubiquitous as Super Mario Bros., there are some more interesting and… er, subtle remixes out there.
Enigmario replaces Koji Kondo’s music with chiptune versions of Enigma’s MCMXC a.D., a concept album from the early 90’s. It gives the game a very different feel. (Auntie’s Analysis)
Super Greyscale Brothers presents a monochrome version of SMB. There’s not too much more to say about it than that, but it’s an interesting effect.
Last but not least, The Pixel Kingdom changes every sprite in the game into a single-colored rectangle. This, and Silhouette Mario, I think, really show off how iconic and well-understood the graphics in Mario are.
In conclusion: hacks can be delightful, and Super Mario Bros. 1 remains one of the most interesting conceptual playgrounds in video games (and probably elsewhere).
To play these, you need an emulator, an ips patcher, and, for The Pixel Kingdom, Super Greyscale Brothers, and Enigmario, a clean copy of the Super Mario 1 ROM, which you may or may not find if you hunt around in this thread.
This is so unbelievably geeky and amazing. A Japanese guy creates an insanely difficult Super Mario World hack called “Kaizu Mario” and records his friend playing it. Eventually the video ends up on YouTube, under the mistranslated title “Asshole Mario,” and becomes a cult hit. Inspired by the hack, an intrepid fan in turn hacks the Super Nintendo emulator SNES9x so that he can superimpose all of his 134 attempts to beat the first stage onto a single recording (seen above), and then uses the recording to explain theories behind quantum physics.
I love it.
The hacked emulator and quantum physics are here, and the Kaizu Mario patch is here (IPS patcher required).
Dwarf Fortress player sinoth has developed a great utility called “3dwarf” that lets you rip map data from the popular Roguelike, and then view them in 3d. 3dwarf lets you explore the maps via a floating camera, and has various helpful options for viewing the map, like “height map mode,” which colors each layer based on how high it is.
Now if only there was a “dwarf mode” to let you walk through your fortress FPS-style!
When a trailer begins with the words “Awake now the sleepy artist / To an insane world of strife” and there is a vicious man cooing about finger painting in the background, you know it’s probably not going to be your average mod for Unreal Tournament 2004.
Introspect puts you in control of an insane artist named Gabriel. In the game, you’ll be exploring Gabriel’s demented psyche, a metaphorical world whose visual style is influenced by American McGee’s Alice. Despite the dark themes, the game is purportedly non-violent, and trades in the flak cannons and link guns of UT2004 for an artist’s palette, which you can use to manipulate your surroundings.
Unfortunately, I can’t play the mod, but for what is ostensibly an “arthouse” game, Introspect seems like it has some actual substance.
Joe Barr at Linux.com recently reviewed the Quake II-based Alien Arena and declared it better than the Quake III-based Tremulous which use to be ”. . . the best free software FPS game [he had] had the pleasure of playing.”
“If you’re a gamer but not familiar with Alien Arena, think of Quake III or Unreal Tournament and you won’t be far off the mark. If you’re not familiar with those icons of the first-person shooter genre, think massive, sustained, unrelenting, ankle-deep-in-blood, kill-or-be-killed carnage which can be enjoyed solo, just you against the bots on your PC, or, if your taste in killing tends toward living targets, in multiplayer mode on a network server.”
Also, here is a bit on Tremulous:
“Tremulous is basically a struggle between two teams: the humans, a species I will assume you are familiar with, and the aliens, which look like bugs and sometimes crawl along walls and ceilings. During the game, each side progresses through three stages, with advanced abilities and equipment coming in during the second and third stages. There is one major difference between the species, beyond being on different teams. Humans can upgrade their equipment. Aliens can upgrade themselves. Both species have structures peculiar to themselves.”
I haven’t tried either game, since I’m not into FPS’s, so you’ll have to tell us what you think about them and which is better in the comments. And, for the record’s sake, this is the first time Slashdot (the source) has been “officially” TIGSourced [Edit: on the new TIGSource that is], the unofficial Mac version of Tremulous is available here, and the images I used were nabbed from the games’ websites.
