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Open Source FPS Game Alien Arena 2009 Released
Alienkillerrace writes "The open sourced, freeware FPS game Alien Arena 2009 has been released (Windows and Linux). The improvements to the game engine are very significant, and have surely raised the bar for free games of this genre. All surfaces in the game are now rendered using GLSL, not only improving the visual quality, but the performance as well. Interesting new effects like post-process distortions using GLSL have been implemented, as well as light volumes, better per-pixel lighting (reminiscent of UT3), and shaded water. Equally notable is that the sound system has been completely rewritten using OpenAL, allowing for effects such as Doppler, and adding Ogg Vorbis support. The game is free to play and available for download on its official website. It has a stats system and a built-in IRC client in its front-end game browser."
Seriously. I hear that argument with OSS games every time - "yeah, it might be fun", but it looks like crap". Now we have a relatively good looking game, and we get this. It's a fairly classic multiplayer FPS - if you liked Quake 3 or the UT series, you'll be enjoying it.
I find it funny no one seems to apply this argument to most commercial games lately. Most of them look glorious but are shit to play.
Not only does the installer pick the wrong folder to install in, it tries to install a spyware toolbar for IE. (What is this, 2001? Seriously, guys.)
Then when you run the game, it presents a poorly-designed dialog in which you're forced to type a username. Well, fair enough-- then you end up in something called "Galaxy." Is this the game? I thought it was an FPS! All I get is unreadable green-on-blue gibberish. (I tried to copy and paste some of the gibberish, but of course copy and paste doesn't work.)
I refresh servers, it's impossible to sort by number of players. Oh and every time you click in the window, it beeps for some reason. Now my screen blanked and I'm looking at some kind of green-screen CLI or something? I have absolutely no clue what to do here.
I've yet to see any way of changing the screen resolution, putting the game in windowed mode, setting the controls-- hell I've been at this a few minutes and I've yet to see a single 3D model!
I tried typing "Run" into the green-screen CLI-ish thing, "unknown command." So I tried typing "play", and got "use STOPSOUND". WTF!
And now I give up. Congratulations, you've made Battlefield: 2142 look like a paragon of video game quality. Hell, America's Army 3 has a better user experience, and I've yet to successfully log on to it.
Comment of the year
I played for 15-20 minutes and, for me, it isn't all that fun for one simple reason: All of the weapons take only a few shots to kill someone, at most. Usually just one or two. So, it ends up being a twitch-fest. There's enough twitch games out there already.
Half-life, now there is a game that had deathmatch down. It took a while to kill someone. There weren't a lot of insta-kill weapons. A little slower paced. The "thinking man's deathmatch" if you will.
Graphically, it is pretty nice. For an open source game, it is fantastic.
Love sees no species.