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."

Comments

Better than Tremulous ?

[mikesum]

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

Re:Better than Tremulous ?

[BiggyP]

There's no way you can compare AA and Tremulous, Alien Arena is a simple and uninspiring FPS deathmatcher and always will be, Tremulous wins hands down for those with the mental capacity to play it.

Re:Better than Tremulous ?

[generic-nickname596]

Yes, I would love to hear in what ways Alien Arena surpasses Tremulous. Tremulous is one of the most interesting team action games I have ever played, far surpassing Counter-Strike and its cronies. I have never played AA, and the article is very low on details. Some of the innovations of Tremulous include wall-walking, strategy elements and a balanced two-class system reminescent of Starcraft. The aliens play like nothing you've ever tried before, except maybe that they are somewhat inspired by Alien vs. Predator. These stats are quite an opponent to match, but nothing would be better than the sorry state of Free Software gaming getting better.

A lot of the more interesting free software games are in fact based on the GPLed Quake 3 engine. There is a pattern here...maybe we could improve things by liberating more commercial gaming software? It's either that, or someone with authority has to take a lot more responsibility in designing tools for creating open-source games. I'm thinking something along the lines of procedural content generation, the major problem is creating all the models we need for a real game. There are many awesome things happening in academia on this subject right now, for example http://www.vision.ee.ethz.ch/~pmueller/wiki/CityEngine/PaperBuildings from SIGGRAPH 2006. We all agree that most free software games don't work out, right? For all the interesting aspects in Tux Racer, it isn't nearly up to the standards of commercial software, and masterpieces like Tremulous are the exception in OSS.

I'm afraid I have to go off topic for a moment. But this is a thing I have been thinking a lot about lately, and I haven't heard it discussed in here before. I promise it is highly relevant to the task at hand.

The Mozilla Foundation is swimming in money from its Firefox ad programs, and I have seen little information indicating that they are using the money for the good of the entire Free Software movement. In fact, I have heard little information at all indicating what they are doing with all of their millions, except for the obvious team of programmers that are working on Mozilla software. This is one arena where the Mozilla Foundation could be much more active in participating: donating money to ransoming out commercial software. I am certain there is a lot of valuable code out there that could do good things for the open-source gaming environment. Firefox is unique in the free software world in being able to bring in huge amounts of revenue, so in my opinion the Mozilla Foundation has an obligation to help out and be more generous with their cash reserves. Firefox is free software, and its benefits should belong to all of us. We are all on the same team here!

Any thoughts? I feel that these things aren't talked about nearly as loudly as they should be, these are all important problems to both the Free Software movement and to nerds in general. Are there any big Mozilla players in here who might have some good answers?

While the game looks interesting...

[Stuidge]

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.

Wait

[Kelz]

No warning that linux.com and /. are owned by same company?

Re:Wait

[bl8n8r]

If you know, you don't need to be told. If you don't know, you won't notice.

Re:hmm

[beardz]

Riiiight, because having access to the source makes a games soooooo much better to play.

Re:hmm

[Oktober Sunset]

getting it for free does though. Especially when you spend the money on weed and play while high.

Re:What license is it released under?

[hweimer]

docs/license.txt:

It is only permissible to distrubute the game data(models, maps, textures, sound, etc) as a whole, and with the intention of being used with Alien Arena. It is not permissible to distribute individual portions or items of the game data without express consent from COR Entertainment. [...] Under no circumstances ALIEN ARENA 2007 as a whole be sold or used for profit, without express consent from COR Entertainment.

If you want a free-as-in-speech shooter that rocks, try Nexuiz.

Re:Ok...

[ardor]

This reflects the great deficiency regarding design. XNA/MS Game Studio all have predefined stuff that gets used often. In the OSS world such presets do not exist, however. In addition, anything that does not relate to programming often just does not exist in the OSS realm. I'm talking about 2D/3D graphics artists, game designers (no, most game programmers are NOT prepared for this task), musicians, sound FX guys etc.

Many artists will make things for money ONLY. The altruistic spirit of OSS does not translate well to game art (with a few exceptions). Usually, the artists doing things for free are usually the bad ones, and the ones demanding lots of cash are the real deal. But without the latter, any game looks and sounds 1995ish, no matter how good the code is.

So, if you want GOOD game art, start donating.

Artists

[Zombie Ryushu]

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!!!

[Dersaidin]

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.

The new linux tagline

[kwabbles]

Linux: Allowing geeks to afford herb since '91

Quake Pong

[DrYak]

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).

Re:OSS games need more graphical artists

[Ilgaz]

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. PR is a huge problem too. I check Mac news, download sites every day and I had no clue a game like "Sauerbraten" exists and it can even be binary (dmg) downloaded from Sourceforge.

There is no entry on Apple Downloads or de-facto download standard site, Versiontracker too. If they submitted it to Softpedia, those guys would even review it. Using Apple downloads site for years, I know they would advertise it on front page as it is open source and uses OS X technologies.

I know it sounds lame but they should use Digg etc. like dynamic sites to advertise their game/work. One iPhone story less, would work for everyone ;)