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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."
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.
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?
Linux: Allowing geeks to afford herb since '91
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.