Kazashi's blog

In the same vein as previous Humble Indie Bundles, for the next fortnight there will be another bundle of games on sale. This time all the offerings are from Finnish developer Frozenbyte:

Trine: a side-scrolling platformer where you switch between three different characters to solve puzzles.
Shadowgrounds: a top-down shooter – blow up monster and aliens on a spooky space colony.
Shadowgrounds Survivor: more of the same.
Splot: this is….. actually I’m not sure. It’s a pre-order for what looks to be a side-scrolling adventure in a cute cartoon style.
Jack Claw: this was going to be a top-down action game, using a giant claw to throw objects and crush enemies, but was cancelled. The game source code and assets are being released, allowing the wider community to finish making it.

Again, charities Child’s Play and Electronic Frontier Foundation will be worthy recipients of a portion of sales, and all games feature Windows/Mac/Linux versions. As an added bonus, these games can be redeemed on Steam, Desura and OnLive, so set your own price and get playing!

Morning all.

I’m just looking for a quick show of hands (and maybe some discussion) from people who either have a copy of, or would be interested in playing, Unreal Tournament 2004.

Why do I ask now? I’ve had it installed for years, and jump in every now and then to play against the built-in bots (which is a good deal of fun in itself), but figure it would be nicer to have people to play with. It’s cross-platform, comes with a variety of game modes, and can be had for US$10 from Good Old Games (which can also be made to run natively in Linux), or as part of a bundle on Steam.

Any takers?

Edit: if you’d like to check it out before laying down some money, check out the demos at a place like this: http://games.on.net/filelist.php?app=76&menu=5 – it looks like GameArena is running a demo server to boot (plus 5 regular ones) in case people aren’t sure what to expect.

There have been some major updates to The Humble Indie Bundle today. I’ll leave the original post here, and new information will follow down below.

As of this posting there are less than 14 hours left to go get a copy of The Humble Indie Bundle. To be precise, the offer finishes at 6am (AEST) tomorrow morning (being 12 May 2010…. to be precise….). Thanks to those IPX members who contributed and received their bundles of joy, those who haven’t now have until tomorrow morning to contribute to the $850,000+ that has so far been raised for the developers, the EFF, and Child’s Play charity.

Is there a goal to reach? The developers have stated that if the magical $1,000,000 mark is reached, all the games will be made open source, meaning even more platforms can be reached, and more modifcations can be made (can you say, ninja turtles in Lugaru?).

Big thanks to my fellow Linux users, who have reached into their pockets so deeply to represent themselves, contributing an average of over $14 per purchase, desperate that we are for good quality games.

To further sweeten the deal, a new game has been donated to the bundle. Samorost 2 is an adventure/puzzle game with some stunning surrealistic artwork.

One last note: people have been pirating this bundle. If I find that any IPX members have done so, there will be consequences. There is simply no excuse.

As of this morning, the bundle had reached the $1 million mark! Not only does this mean that the games will be made open source, it means they have also extended the offer by another 4 days.

What does open sourcing mean? It means that the underlying source code from which the games are built is now (or shortly) available to download and modify. The game still has to be paid for, but now people are free to port it to a host of other platforms and make improvements. The same kind of thing which has happened to Quake 1/2/3 etc. and allowed games like Padman to be developed.

So, if you haven’t yet, get paying, get playing. If you don’t have access to Paypal, Google Checkout, Amazon.com or a credit/debit card and still want in on this deal, let me know and we can work something out.

Something that may have slipped under some radars recently was the announcement that 2D Boy are celebrating the 1st birthday of their hit game World of Goo. To celebrate this, they have implemented (and extended until 25th October) a limited time offer where you can pay what YOU want to pay for the game.

Why should you take heed of this? World of Goo is a well presented and fun little physics-oriented game, made by an indie company and available on many different platforms (Linux, OSX, Wii, _windows). If you’re still feeling stingy about paying $1 for a game, watch the videos or grab the demo and try for yourself.

And if that doesn’t convince you to take a look, I’ll invoke Rule #13.

2D Boy: http://2dboy.com/
World of Goo (with special offer): http://www.2dboy.com/games.php

This morning I was directed to a forum thread on the ETQW community site, you yourself can read it here:

http://community.enemyterritory.com/forums/showthread.php?t=16355

Today the general public can see what a fool this guy is. I’m referring to Neg, a member of Clan Nesreca. He has previously shown his immaturity online, to IPX and other clans – simply put he is a racist little kid. In this thread he defends his racism by claiming that it’s ok because it’s on the Internet. There is some factual basis to that, studies have shown that due to the relative anonymity of the Internet people will adopt a more aggressive persona, and become more willing to insult other people than in real life. But….