Games Revue

0 A.D. is a free, cross-platform, under-development, 3D, historically-based, real-time strategy game.

Recently the dev team has decided to take the step to become an open source project. Making the code available as GPL and the art content available as CC-BY-SA, and encouraging external contributions.

“We’ve been working on 0 A.D. in our free time for years, and now we want to show what we’ve achieved and make it easier for more people to get involved.” says the project’s website,  wildfire games.

If this looks like something you’d like to be involved in, check them out!

If you’re REALLY REALLY old you’ll remember a really groundbreaking game for it’s time, a space exploration, combat and trading simulator called Elite which despite probably occupying less disk space than the background image in your cellphone nevertheless managed to simulate a whole galaxy and hundreds of planets by procedural methods.

This legendary status makes it a natural for open source recovery and this is what has happened

Oolite is a space sim game, inspired by Elite, powered by Objective-C and OpenGL, and designed as a small game that is easy for users to pick up, modify and expand upon. Almost every aspect of the game can be changed by using simple, free graphics packages and text editors.

Originally written for Mac OS X, and under continuous development for over four years, Oolite is available for Mac OS X (10.3.9 and higher), Windows XP and Vista, and Linux. It requires at least a 400 MHz processor, 256 MiB of memory, and a graphics card capable of accelerating OpenGL graphics.

The game and source code are offered for free under the GNU General Public License.

Download and play Oolite here!

Vega Strike is an Open Source 3D Action-Space-Sim that lets you trade, fight, and explore in a vast universe.
Vega Strike is built on top of OpenGL and runs on Win/Lin/Mac platforms. Vega Strike is currently in a playable state, but both game engine and dataset are under continued development

This isn’t exactly a game, but I’m sure you can spend a few hours playing with it regardless, Stellarium is an open source planetarium application that is actually in use in real planetariums worldwide!

It’s extremely customizeable, allowing you to add or remove features at will (Such as the earth, sky, guiding lines, stellar inf, etc) Even if you’re not into astronomy, it’s worth downloading to check it out and mess around with the sky.

Ever have trouble identifying constellations? Not any more…

You’re not limited to the view from earth either…

Educational as hell.