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Freeware FPS Alien Arena 2007 Reviewed
Alienkillerrace writes "Linux.com has reviewed the brand new release of Alien Arena 2007, giving it a glowing review. 'New Alien Arena 6.10 blows away its FPS competition' claims that Alien Arena is now the very best of the freeware FPS games, surpassing even Tremulous."
Better than counterstrike?
Tremulous is a really good game. If Alien Arena 2007 better than that according to this guy, then it's at least worth checking out. /me is BruceCambellsGhost on Tremulous
This is less a review, and more a HOWTO. There's nothing there that isn't in the readme, and the only opinion is on the last line proclaiming that it is better than Tremulous. And even that has no justification.
(E-) Must try harder.
While we already have very good to excellent 3d games as Sauerbraten and Nexuiz, we still are behind commercial software companies in the graphical area. Many otherwise excellent games have poorly designed characters, maps, weapons etc. In the last two years the gap shrunk, but IMO more work is needed.
No warning that linux.com and /. are owned by same company?
I am not much of a gamer, but I *really* suck at FPSs. I'd love to see some variety in games produced for linux.
Now if only we could reuse Quake III's engine for a football game...
what about warsow !? or even wop ? i find them a lot better than Alien Arena.
Association, American, or Canadian?
Brought to you by the numbers π, e, and 0x1B.
All I found, was a "FPS for dummies" description of what FPS games are.
How to use the console? How to change key settings? What is "capture the flag"?
You know it's weekend when TFS aucks horse balls. Time to go out in teh sun, then!
I lost my sig.
Can anyone find details of the license this game is being released under? I can't, even in the SVN repos. I know the Quake II engine is GPL, but what about the rest of it?
This is not a review, more instructions on how to play the game.
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Ok, I don't truly mind that the majority of FOSS software has a geek mindset and the UIs tend to reflect and look like the UIs of the Win9x era.
However, can we ever get to the point that the 'best' horse that gets trotted out for OSS Gaming looks like the era of games released for Windows95?
It is just not possible for a high end gaming production to be FOSS?
One further sad note... I have seen games developed by newbie gaming developers that are picking up XNA and MS Game Studio and producing higher quality games in terms of playability and especially in the area of graphics/audio.
Can't we do better than your neighbors kids and his/her friends designing an XNA came in C# that runs on their PC and the XBox 360 as well?
PS. You should really have a 'review' of the game, when you write an article 'reviewing' a game, and not just a quick intro of key commands.
TFS says it's freeware, TFA says free software, TFPWS (Project WebSite) says its freeware based on free software. So, which is it?
I'm guessing, free software with proprietary artwork?
Google and all the usual suspects are not turning up any valid torrents of Alien Arena 6.10, just older versions.
Lets use bittorrent for what it's good for, all the std servers are hammered...
Thanks in advance!
that definintely looks pretty sweet.. one day I was browsing through the games in ubuntu's add/remove programs list and came across OpenArena and was thoroughly impressed.. my friends/co-workers who don't use linux or anything opensource for some weird secret reason saw me playing it one day and asked what it was.. when they heard it was free and had deathmatch capabilities, they were soon hooked and we were all doing some serious gibbing religiously once a week after the office closed.. this particular game based off the Q3 Arena engine does look pretty damn sweet for a freeware game.. i can never get tired of these damn things.. it's just fun!
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Linux Programmers have shown incredible technical skill. The issue is artists. It is very hard for F/OSS people to get art designers. Art Designers tend not to be F/OSS and not as knowlegeable to the technical side of things to help develop the beauty side of things.
Wolf:ET is the best freeware FPS released. Quite possibly the best PC game released. Also, half of the articles praise should be directed to the engine, not the game.
Don't get me wrong, personally I love articles like this. They worked hard to create a new versoin and want more people to try out the game. Getting the story posted on Slashdot helps get the word out. Considering the game is free I've got absolutely no problem with it. It's just frustrating for me that when I've submitted stories regarding new versions of Skulltag (another freeware game, which yes - also runs on linux) they've always been rejected. Is a Doom 2 port not considered cool enough these days?
After yesterday's CmdrTaco interview, it sounds like he's locked in a constant struggle with the marketing department. Perhaps this was a battle lost? Or maybe their evil mind-control rays are finally starting to work?
WTF does Warsow have to do with the GPs post?
Uh, that was in reply to the person posting about how great warsow supposedly is. Check your threshold level, you'll see that.
Alien Arena has - Real time lighting, real time shadows, bloom, reflective water, flares, per pixel lighting via bumpmapping, excellent particles and effects, shaders, etc and etc. Certainly stuff that puts it well beyond 1999 specs. Play the game before making comments on the supposed "quake 2" engine.
Linux: Allowing geeks to afford herb since '91
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
That's why id made it open source, so people could add to it. You're thinking of a mod where only the game content has changed and the engine is exactly the same. With the GPLed engine these third party developers can go in an update the engine making it more modern... and it's free. It's my opinion that game play is more important that eye candy anyhow.
/. that often.
Also, no one gives a shit why you don't read
Personally, I'm staggered by the amount of flame wars, elitism, and sheer hatred in the open source gaming community. AA has been claiming to be the best OSS FPS evar for quite some time now, which may or may not be justified. Then, there was the time some sauerbraten admins deliberately took down the default listserver, in order to lock out the noobs. There's also the infamous Ogre vs. CrystalSpace wars, as well as some obscure faggotry between two Tron clones. I've also been hearing dark rumors about renegade admins in PlaneShift.
Seriously, when will all this bitterness end?
Controls: 5 pts.
Graphics: 5 pts.
Sound: 3 pts.
Music: 2 pts.
Story: 5 pts.
Multiplayer (if applicable): 5 pts.
Runs on Linux: 50,000 pts.
Comment of the year
I just downloaded Alien Arena to check it out and it seems to want to install some sort of web browser toolbar and make something called "crawler" my default search provider...
What kind of BS is this?
According to their privacy policy they want to assign me a UID and record the date/time/browser/ip/content of all my web searches on their servers in florida.
I am staying with Nexuiz.
It'll end when the jealousy and bitterness ends I guess. Witness this story. Alien Arena gets good review, makes headline news, and what do you see? People posting about how such and such game is better and putting a link to it. It *is* pretty sad, and quite a shame really.
There's line of "football" Quake mods called Quake Pong by the way.
The goal of the game is to push around a huge steel ball into the opponents goal, hitting it with ballistic weapons to give it kinetic energy.
URLs :
Original QPong mod for Quake II. (Had wquite a few laughs with that one)
Newer QPong Arena mod for Quake 3. (Didn't test it).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
it also has the same bland saturated colors, blurry textures and other annoyances (10fps netcode, obfuscated hud) from quake2. Brilliant
Give it a rest Cheapalert.
Dude, the story that YOU posted unnecessarily quotes, "Alien Arena is now the very best of the freeware FPS games, surpassing even Tremulous."
The vast majority of this "jealously and bitterness" is created by you. If I were you I'd spend some more time working on the game rather than promoting it. Then it will perhaps get judged on merit rather than by proxy via vacuous articles such as this.
You know, I expected this kind of bitterness from Leilie/Hsien-ko, but you? I really didn't think you'd go there. First off, let's get something straight here. When Tremulous was reviewed by this same guy last year, you didn't see *me* posting links to Alien Arena and trashing Trem. Since day one, I have had to deal with this type of thing, with an enormous ammount of negativity thrown at me. Every single time Alien Arena got any kind of press, the communities for other games came out of the woodwork and started posting links to their games and trashing this one. Nothing has changed. Now Alien Arena gets a review that certainly ruffles some feathers out there, and maybe understandably so in the Tremulous crowd, and all I've seen all over the net is immediate posts about how much Alien Arena sucks and doesn't deserve being written about(making me wonder if they even tried this version of the game). Of course this happened the last release too when we reached the front page of Digg. I find it pathetic. I've put up with alot of crap from other game communities, so lets not get started on "who started what". As far as how much I work on the game, you have no idea how much I work on it. Maybe the 400 commits to SVN in the last 3 months or so would give you a clue. I suggest you browse it. http://svn.icculus.org/alienarena
Who is being bitter? It's not me. I don't really understand why you don't get this. It's utterly hypocritical to go complaining about other people posting links to whatever games they like when YOUR post to a GLOBAL website PUBLICLY denounces one particular game in favour of your own. Now this doesn't really bother me in itself, I just find it a bit rich that you apparently want some kind of moratorium on other people posting their own thoughts on whatever game they like, when you're seemingly allowed to say whatever you like.
"When Tremulous was reviewed by this same guy last year, you didn't see *me* posting links to Alien Arena and trashing Trem."
Is the insinuation here that I have been trashing Alien Arena? I certainly don't remember doing so, maybe you can point it out. The only people that are making judgemental comments here are the players themselves; these are the people that you're ultimately trying to appease. If you're not satisfying them, you need to address their concerns, rather than criticising and blaming other developers.
And another thing. You have a pretty strong victim complex going on there. You seem to think that it's only Alien Arena which gets criticism. Look at any other news posting for any other game and you'll find the same repetitive drone of "this game sucks! X is much better!". Get over it, that's just the way it is. By complaining about this phenomenon, you do yourself no favours. You're not engendering yourself toward the players and especially not to other developers. Just let it wash over you and concentrate on making the game better.
I wasn't singling you out as someone who posted criticism, and I never said Alien Arena was alone it getting it. As far as players coming and criticizing, that is perfectly fine. That's not what I was referring to, and I think you know it.
Also, where does the article *denounce* Tremulous or any other game? Joe Barr saying he now considers Alien Arena to be the best of the freeware FPS games and mentions he now likes it better than Tremulous is *hardly* what I would call an endightment of your game.
Finding promotional screenshots such as this doesn't indicate to me that you're really taking on board anything I've said.
Oh well, have a nice day.
...but it just makes my screen go crazy when I launch it. Maybe great, definitely buggy.
Timbo, I have never had a problem with you in the past. There is no need to start some "war" over a game review. That is *not* some promotional shot, and I had nothing to do with it. In fact as I saw, it was a "joke" shot posted on an Anti-Alien Arena thread on your forums. Please get your story straight before flaming, thank you.
I'm not trying to start a war or flaming. I'm trying to point out why people react to you the way they do in the hope that you'll stop making such a pillock of yourself in future. I don't think it's working.
Take some of your own advice then - concentrate on Tremulous(which btw I think is a great game and have always had the utmost respect for the work that went into it) and stop worrying about what goes on with Alien Arena. As far as people reacting badly to me, well it appears it's just you and Cheapalert/Leilei/hsein-ko that have the issues with me personally. If you want to discuss this privately in email, then please let's, because this public pissing contest has gone too far IMO.
> Take some of your own advice then - concentrate on Tremulous
What makes you think I'm not?
> If you want to discuss this privately in email, then please let's, because this public pissing contest has gone too far IMO.
If you say things in public they should stay in public.
That makes it worth of Slashdot is the Linux tie in. It's an average shooter with a bunch of gameplay mutations. Nothing outstanding or different enough to make it stand above the rest.
When both sides drop dead or are lynched by the rest of us who just want to play something decent. AA ain't it from my experience with behavior to much early nineties when it didn't lockup my machine(just tried it). Actually doom on slackware played better even then and I've been running into this same quality problem more often than not.
It's nice to see some of the free lance game developers, are leaning towards the not to picky pixel shaders and bloom effects. Makes it easier on the average consumer to load up and frag. You'll start seeing the chase for the ultimate video card killer start to slow down alittle with the newest release of Call of Duty 4, right up there with Oblivion's graphical engine, but with 3rd the requirements. Call that money in the bank.
yeah # of svn commits is the best way to calculate amount of work
Huh? I... I don't know that...Aaaaarrrgggghhhhh!
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I find that most small gaming communities are full elitism and multiple sides trying to pull a game in a certain direction. In subspace/continuum people fight over standard vie rules and trench war game play. Investigating the Myth2 sites, there looked like a huge flame war between playmyth and marious. Reading Mount & Blade forums older posters are all over new guys when they suggest something off the "holy vision" of the game.
In the big games, each side has enough people that the two "cultures" don't mix. When the game gets small, people butt heads all the time, and one guy will have enough pull to wreck the game for 100's of other people when he is having PMS one day. Stuff like "Hey guys, some 12 year old said hurtful things to me. Nobody appreciates me, I am a god, therefore, deleted all the artwork I created for the game, k tnx bye".
The small projects are the best and worst of the gaming community at the same time. It seems like it is just human nature for things to end up this way.