BZFlag goes Platinum

morrison writes "A little over four years after moving to SourceForge at a current rate of several hundred downloads every day, BZFlag has finally "gone platinum". With over 1,000,000 SourceForge downloads, BZFlag looks to be the third game (following Tux Racer and StepMania) to go 'sf platinum'. While this doesn't include the many tens of thousands distributed prior to the project's migration to sf.net during the SGI days, it's a momentous occasion for open source gaming regardless."

Comments

Re:Gameplay?

[cosmol]

The gameplay is addicting. Basically its all about positioning your tank. Since the tank doesn't move very fast you have to think ahead. Also the shots are pretty slow so you have to shoot out way ahead of a moving target. Newbies will get outsmarted by more experienced players, but will get enough lucky shots now and again to keep them interested in playing.

There is a lot of opportunity for team strategy, especially in CTF mode. Many server operators tweak the map/rules to yield some interesting play possibilities.

Yeah, it's fun. The graphics look like they date from the 80s because they do! Actually I turn the graphic settings down from the default.

Ah...the good old days....

[JakiChan]

When I joined SGI in 1997, BZFlag was an institution. The IT group in the MIPS Group would play it at lunch every day. Shooting your boss with something that looked like a photon torpedo (if your box had good graphics - I had a dual-proc Octane with very nice graphics) was very cool. It was a fun thing to do and felt like part of the culture there.

There was a program, at least inside of SGI, that was a sequel. You could be a plane or one of a couple of types of ground vehicles, and it had voice chat. It was fun and the graphics were better but things were pretty grim by the time I found it, and there wasn't a lot of game playing being done.