Rudimentary Art of Programming & Development

Batman

• Side Scroller

Spiderman

• Swinging Game

Iron Man

• Flight Test
• Drone Attack
• Armory Assault – FPS

Hulk

• Central Smashdown – Marvelkids
  
• Bad Altitude – Marvelkids

Bonus: Iron Man’s Adventure

Pirates Online is MMORPG based on Pirates of The Caribbean. This game is actually fun. Fun in a non demanding, casual but still packing lots of action. This game might actually worth spending monthly subscription.

Below are some good points about why I think this game rocks:

• The game client is fast to download (with cable connection) (+1.02).
• Pirates Online is not demanding at all in terms of graphic card (+999.99).
• There’s compelling single player story (+0.5).
• Navigation and Menu are easy to learn thanks to in-your-face-big-fat-arrow help pointers (+99.123).
• It is available on Mac (+9999999.99).
• Ship battles are sooo much fun (+15.00002).

Some of the bad thing on why it sucks:

• Free account is short, very very short. (- 10.3234)
• $15 per month might be a bit too expensive because it is not WOW (-1000,2213).

Try it, and see if you like Pirates Online.

Freecol is a turn-based strategy game inspired by the widely popular Colonization game of the 90s.

It is of course open source and definitely earned the nostalgic value of the commercial predecessor.

It is written in Java, if you are a programmer, make sure to download the source code and read it. The source code is very clean and organized. The source code could definitely be an awesome learning experience for those new in software development world.

As of today the stable version is 0.7.2.

The list as of today:

• ZSNES: A Super NES emulator. It runs on Windows, DOS, Linux, & FreeBSD. ( 15,234,160 downloads)
• VisualBoyAdvance: It is a Gameboy Emulator. It runs on All 32-bit MS Windows (95/98/NT/2000/XP), All POSIX (Linux/BSD/UNIX-like OSes), Linux, OS X, BeOS. ( 9,107,964 downloads)
• Tux Racer: It is a racing game, starring Tux the penguin. ( 2,088,083 downloads)
• Battle of Wesnoth: It is a turn-based strategy game with strong Japanese-influenced graphics. ( 1,663,510 downloads)
• OpenTTD: Open source version of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. This game is easily my favorite. ( 1,198,928 downloads)
• TORCS: The Open Race Car Simulator. Also available on Mac OS X. ( 1,080,376 downloads)
• glTron: Tron-based racing game. ( 947,379 downloads)
• Secret Maryo Chronicles: Very much like Super Mario but with lots more levels & available on almost all OSes. ( 681,365 downloads)
• Freeciv: Open source version of Civilization. ( 642,897 downloads)
• UltraStar: It’s a karaoke game. ( 581,166 downloads)
• Glest: 3D real-time strategy game, looks like original Warcraft. Only for Windows? ( 574,323 downloads)
• AssaultCube: Fun and addicting FPS game. The Cube Engine is lightning fast!! It render so fast on my built-in Intel graphic chip. ( 510,187 downloads)
• Exult: Game engine for running world’s best RPG Ultima 7. Note: gamers must supply the graphics on their own. I’ve blog about this before. ( 493,111 downloads)
• Vdrift: Drifting simulator. Available on most OSes. ( 486,321 downloads)
• UFO: Alien Invasion: I blog about this one before. ( 328,505 downloads)
• FlightGear: It’s flight simulator only for OS X? ( 273,092 downloads)
• FreeCol: Open source colonization. I talked about this one before as well. ( 252,389 downloads)

What Other people think about their favorite OSS games:

• http://akaimbatman.intelligentblogger.com/wordpress/archives/27

What is it:

Remember X-Com (in the nineties)? Yeah, this is the open source effort to recreate such nostalgic game.

Why should I download it?

Don’t be fooled by open source games, especially this one. It is kicking ass. It looks beautiful and fun to play. Not to mention various different maps and weapons.

Pros:

• Open Source X-Com, fun and free. (+32489739248)
• System Requirement is low. (+2394782398472)

Cons:

• Download size is ridiculous. (-0.0005, everyone has broadband, rite? )

Resource:

Download Page 

Update (November 26, 2007):

I am going to change my mind on this one. I hope readers don’t think that I’m wishy washy.

9 Dragons is pretty bad. It has more and more weaknesses that nullify all of the positives.

Here are the new cons:

• Its servers are unreliable, when working on really tough monster, you can get disconnected, and then die, and then got your EXP deducted.
• Yes, when you die, your EXP got deducted big time. So when you got disconnected, you just lost 2 hours worth of game time. Definitely frustrating.
• The game’s localization is not very good. But it is not a big deal since this game is basically grind machine.

There is another grind machine game called Martial Heroes. Similar flavor, similar lack of polish in localization department, but this one doesn’t crash/disconnected all that often. I will talk more about this one on separate post.

Below is my old thought:

Turns out to be not so bad after all.

This is yet another MMORPG with different twist and turns. The story is based on fictional ancient China (Ming dynasty to be exact).

True, it’s still fantasy, but at least it’s not another Tolkein-esque setting.

A friend of mine noted that the game has the look and feel of Quake 2 engine. Hmmm… he might be right. That means the system requirement won’t be all that bad.

It turns out that old Pentium 4 with Intel built-in graphic card can still run this game.

Bellow are the pros and cons about how the game played.

Pro:

• Low graphic requirement
• Different setting, different leveling up.
• Less tedious because weaker monsters don’t give experience points.
• Level grinding still exist, but because of different style of leveling up, it’s acceptable.
• Game art is different than the usual fantasy MMORPG. It’s a fresh change.
• The quests are less tedious, each doesn’t really require me to go all around the world delivering items.
• The game is 100% free, although it displays in-game advertisements.

Cons:

• System settings can only be configured inside the game, thus starting up 9dragons is quite painful for old computers.
• The game needs activeX to start using IE, not good. Furthermore…
• Game client is large (about 1GB), downloading it was painful. And on top of that, it still needs IE to start.
• Advertisement cause about 1-2 seconds lag. Well, it’s version 0.9 and it’s free… What more should I expect.

So far the positives really outweigh the negatives.

If readers do have spare time on hand, go check it out. It’s 100% free.