Extreme Tux Racer
The team over at Extreme Tux Racer - the latest fork to take on the Tux Racer continuation mantle - have made their inaugral release. It's still a bedding-in period with no real major updates other than a new campaign (cup?) but hopefully it will signal the start of a new lease of life for development of a popular open source franchise.
FreeLords, the project cloning Warlords, have made their first release since changing to Java as their programming language of choice. No more dependencies (except Java, of course), automatic portability, and the promise of network play, all bode well for the future but this snapshot release isn't playable yet. However it seems their time machine works well since these announcements are from 2008 - if they have a time machine then this game is sure to succeed.
LordsAWar, a fork of discontinued FreeLords C++ codebase, has hit version 0.0.3. Whilst that sounds very small I think it's not really a reflection on the completeness (implying 3%) as the C++ FreeLords was in development for years and I think this project is just trying to gain some early momentum.
The Secret Maryo project is keeping up it's good progress with another release. Version 1.1 sees the game make more steps to being a platform game worthy of the Mario moniker that it emulates.
The OpenTyrian project came up on the freegamedev.net forums. Tyrian is an old DOS game, a vertical scrolling shooter. Those games used to be so much fun - most games did in those days. Anyway, before I digress, this is just a port of the game to C/SDL. You need the original game to play it :-( but, since it's available on most abandonware sites, that shouldn't be hard to find.
Also I note Free Gamer made its debut on Slashdot, more about that tomorrow. No, it's not so significant that it gets its own post, it just caused me to think about something I wanted to express i.e. when the first iteration of this paragraph was longer than the rest of the post put together, it became obvious it needed its own space. ;-)