Slashdot Mirror
Half-Life As A 2D Side-Scroller?
Allen Varney writes "Why wait for Half-Life 2 when you can wait instead for Half-Life 2D? 'Codename: Gordon' is a free, fan-produced jump'n'run side-scroller adapted from the original Half-Life. It'll be done in a month, but for now there's screenshots and a two-minute gameplay video."
In this case, if the site went down, it was probably a combined Penny Arcade (who featured the project this morning) and Slashdot Games effect, since this isn't actually a mainpage post. From my very un-scientific pokings, I've noticed that a Slashdot Games-only post can generate enough traffic to kill some smaller sites, but on its own, relatively rarely smashes better-hosted webpages.
Abuse was released to the public domain when crack.com went bankrupt. You can download it and play the full version from underdogs and not even worry about stealing :)
It works on 98/XP just fine. Of course if you hate Microsoft then the source code can also be dug up with a little googling allowing someone to make a linux version.
Actually, most of Abuse was written in other languages. According to SLOCCount, 115799 lines (91.45%) ANSI C, 6792 lines (5.36%) C++, 2066 lines (1.36%) Lisp, and the rest is shell script and assembly. (I just realized I always have the Abuse source tree ready, for some obscure reason... I haven't even read much of the code =)
It had a Lisp interpreter for interpreting creature AI code / game logic / whatever, but, well... it wasn't actually that huge part of the game. It was good for writing mods.
And yes, it's probably a first commercial game to feature a Lisp interpreter... but not the first game ever to be written in Lisp. I'm pretty sure all of the games in Emacs predate it =)