New Releases on the Horizon

There are imminent releases for OpenCity and Pingus.

OpenCity 0.0.4beta is looking a lot more playable than it's version number suggests with the TODO looking like 0.0.5 will contain most elements you'd expect in a city simulation game.

Pingus will probably be a 0.7 alpha release because the project is struggling for developers and Pingus 0.6 is getting withdrawn from distros as it needs the deprecated Clanlib 0.6 to run. It'd be nice to see a new Pingus release since the game is pretty much there, it just needs a few more levels and a tiny bit of polishing and it'll be better than the original Lemmings titles.

SuperTuxKart 0.2rc1 is available for download. There's been a lot of code activity so I'm waiting on the next rc to try it out although I think you need a good PC to play it - I've heard a few murmours that the graphics engine really needs optimising.

Enough of games that are gearing up to releases, there was a new game announced on the Linux Game Tome: Max Fighter, a 2D shooter with a strong asteroids influence. It's got nice graphics and is quite fun but the gameplay quickly becomes very repetitive and it's nowhere near as addictive as SolarWolf nor has the depth of Chromium BSU. It was also very choppy / low fps on my 1ghz laptop. In times of CPU/GPU affluence it seems that increasingly developers are caring less about optimising their games.