I came across an interesting Ubuntu forum thread the other day - where I posted this on May 26th 2006:
This thread has inspired me to do something:
http://freegamer.blogspot.com/
Fascinating. It's come a long way since then! :-)
The big news of today is probably the Secret Maryo Chronicles 1.0 release. It's an intriguing project and is gaining some very nice vector-based graphics. I'm still not convinced they have replaced all the ripped graphics and sounds that were in the previous version (0.99.7) nor addressed the gameplay defficiencies I felt were present - the feel of the game wasn't quite right - there is no acceleration, you are either running or not running, making it hard to control the character. It is still an ongoing project and importantly it's a playable game with a fair amount of levels and decent graphics so is worth checking out. It's definitely close to being an open source game that makes people go, "Oooh, nice!" ;-)
Finity Flight II is an open source overhead 2D shooter which several episodes to play and is available for both Linux and Windows. I gave it a shot - it had nice graphics but the gameplay was mystifying to me. I struggled to shoot or be shot unless I was stationary. All artwork and code is available under GPL. It's intriguing and the author has obviously put a lot of effort into it, and has a few other games available.
AlphaShooter is a sci-fi first person shooter. Whilst it may never become a fully fledged game in it's own right, the author has put it online and continues to work on it it the hope that it will be useful as an example on how to get started in computer graphics and games development.
Back to the shadows to plot the expansion of my Free Gamer empire... ;-)