From the category archives:
If you play video games, you probably know the Call of Duty series of games. If you play games on the PC, you probably also know that Infinity Ward, the company behind Call of Duty, decided to leave out dedicated server support in their latest installment, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. You’ve probably complained about this, and you might even have decided that Infinity Ward isn’t getting your money at all.
Here’s why they don’t care:
Epic Games just released the Unreal Development Kit, a fully-featured SDK based on the award-winning Unreal 3 engine that powers a wide range of today’s most popular games; and it’s free for educational and non-commercial use — wow!
There are some rather heavy licensing fees once you start making money from your game — $0 (zero) up-front, and a 0% royalty on you or your company’s first $5,000 (US) in UDK related revenue, and a 25% royalty on UDK related revenue above $5,000 (US) — though, if you take into consideration that you can upgrade to the real Unreal engine licensing and skip the royalty fees once you reach fame and fortune, the Unreal Development Kit remains extremely attractive for any kind of game development.
Have a look at the list of features and the showcase, or just skip everything and grab it!
Small Worlds is the twisted, Braid-like Prince of Persia remake I never knew I wanted to play. It’s completed in roughly 15 minutes, but they are worth more than the 4-6 hours you usually spend per contemporary run-at-the-mill let’s-do-everything video game.
One of the worlds in Small Worlds
It is literally what it says it is; a game containing small worlds that you explore — with a delightfully twisted ending, too. Simple, beautiful. Play it.
The Call of Duty games are some of my favorite; not only because they’re, well, great games, but because they have more heart and brains than your average first person shooter. For me, the quotes that are shown when your character dies add a significant touch (who would have thought spontaneous history lessons could alleviate the feeling of defeat). In anticipation of the release of the next game in the series, I got nostalgic and thought I’d dig up a few:
“Aim towards the Enemy.”
— Instruction printed on US Rocket Launcher“A leader leads by example, not by force.”
— Sun Tzu“All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing.”
— Edmund Burke“All warfare is based on deception.”
— Sun Tzu“A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.”
— John F. Kennedy“Any military commander who is honest will admit he makes mistakes in the application of military power.”
— Robert McNamara“Anyone, who truly wants to go to war, has truly never been there before!”
— Larry Reeves“Any soldier worth his salt should be anti-war. And still, there are things worth fighting for.”
— General Norman Schwarzkopf“A ship without Marines is like a garment without buttons.”
— Admiral David D. Porter, USN“Cluster bombing from B-52s are very, very, accurate. The bombs are guaranteed to always hit the ground.”
— USAF Ammo Troop“Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty.”
— Ronald Reagan“Cost of a single AC-130U Gunship: $190 million”
“Cost of a single B-2 Bomber: $2.2 Billion”
“Cost of a single F-117A Nighthawk: $122 Million”
“Cost of a single F-22 Raptor: $135 million”
“Cost of a single Javelin Missile: $80,000″
“Cost of a single Tomahawk cruise Missile: $900,000″
“Diplomats are just as essential in starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it.”
— Will Rogers“Every tyrant who has lived has believed in freedom – for himself.”
— Elbert Hubbard“Five second fuses only last three seconds.”
— Infantry Journal“Freedom is not free, but the U.S. Marine Corps will pay most of your share.”
— Ned Dolan“Friendly fire – isn’t.”
— Unknown“Heroes may not be braver than anyone else. They’re just brave five minutes longer.”
— Ronald Reagan“If a man has done his best, what else is there?”
— General George S. Patton“If at first you don’t succeed, call an air strike.”
— Unknown“If the enemy is in range, so are you.”
— Infantry Journal“If the wings are traveling faster than the fuselage, it’s probably a helicopter — and therefore, unsafe.”
— Unknown“If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merits of our cause, we’d better reexamine our reasoning.”
— Robert McNamara“If you can’t remember, the claymore is pointed toward you.”
— Unknown“If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.”
— Sun Tzu“If your attack is going too well, you’re walking into an ambush.”
— Infantry Journal“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
— Albert Einstein“Incoming fire has the right of way.”
— Unknown“In the end, it was luck. We were *this* close to nuclear war, and luck prevented it.”
— Robert McNamara“In war, truth is the first casualty”
— Aeschylus“In war, you win or lose, live or die – and the difference is just an eyelash.”
— General Douglas MacArthur“It doesn’t take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle.”
— General Norman Schwarzkopf“I think that technologies are morally neutral until we apply them. It’s only when we use them for good or evil that they become good or evil.”
— William Gibson“I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must we do to do good?”
— Robert McNamara“It is fatal to enter any war without the will to win it.”
— General Douglas MacArthur“It is generally inadvisable to eject directly over the area you just bombed.”
— U.S. Air Force Marshal“Keep looking below surface appearances. Don’t shrink from doing so just because you might not like what you find.”
— Colin Powell“Let your plans be as dark and impenetrable as night, and when you move, fall like a thunderbolt.”
— Sun Tzu“Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.”
— John F. Kennedy“My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.”
— George Washington“Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”
— Abraham Lincoln“Never forget that your weapon was made by the lowest bidder.”
— Unknown“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.”
— Colin Powell“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
— Winston Churchill“Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.”
— Herbert Hoover“So long as there are men, there will be wars.”
— Albert Einstein“Some people live an entire lifetime and wonder if they have ever made a difference in the world, but the Marines don’t have that problem.”
— Ronald Reagan“Teamwork is essential, it gives them other people to shoot at.”
— Unknown“The bursting radius of a hand-grenade is always one foot greater than your jumping range.”
— Unknown“The commander in the field is always right and the rear echelon is wrong, unless proved otherwise.”
— Colin Powell“The deadliest weapon in the world is a Marine and his rifle!”
— General John J. Pershing“The indefinite combination of human infallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.”
— Robert McNamara“The more marines I have around, the better I like it.”
— General Clark, U.S. Army“The press is our chief ideological weapon.”
— Nikita Khrushchev“The real and lasting victories are those of peace, and not of war.”
— Ralph Waldo Emmerson“There are only two kinds of people that understand Marines: Marines and the enemy. Everyone else has a second-hand opinion.”
— General William Thornson“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
— Thomas Jefferson“The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.”
— Norman Schwarzkopf“The tyrant always talks as if he’s preserving the best interests of his people when he actually acts to undermine them.”
— Ramman Kenoun“The world will not accept dictatorship or domination.”
— Mikhail Gorbachev“They’ll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. Make one mistake and you’re going to destroy nations.”
— Robert McNamara“Tracers work both ways.”
— U.S. Army Ordinance“Try to look unimportant; they may be low on ammo.”
— Infantry Journal“Tyrants have always some slight shade of virtue; they support the laws before destroying them.”
— Voltaire“War does not determine who is right – only who is left”
— Burtrand Russell“War is delightful to those who have not yet experienced it.”
— Erasmus“We’re in a world in which the possibility of terrorism, married up with technology, could make us very, very sorry we didn’t act.”
— Condoleeza Rice“We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would harm us.”
— George Orwell“When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not our friend.”
— U.S. Army Training Notice“Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!”
— Nikita Khrushchev“Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.”
— Vladimir Putin“Whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword obviously never encountered automatic weapons.”
— General Douglas MacArthur“Whoever stands by a just cause cannot possibly be called a terrorist.”
— Yassar Arafat“You can make a throne of bayonets, but you cant sit on it for long.”
— Boris Yeltsin“You cant say civilization dont advance – for in every war, they kill you in a new way.”
— Will Rogers
I’m excited to see which quotes are put in the next game — more so than seeing how Infinity Ward’s no dedicated servers plan pans out.
There are the monolith video games that take a massive development and design crew several years to make. You know, those video games that will not run on your computer(tm). Titles like Call of Duty and Crysis. Then there are the indie games with an average development crew size of 1 person, the ones that do not feature state-of-the-art graphics or super-realistic physics engines but still, somehow, manage to keep you entertained for hours on end. These are great games, and they are an exceedingly rare occurrence nowadays.
Let me introduce you to a few.
Imagine Soldat combined with a link gun á la Scorpion (Mortal Kombat) and the same body layout as the Weebl characters. That’s Teeworlds. In other words: Pure awesomeness. This baby will keep you entertained for many a tee-fragging/dragging/bashing hour. Teeworlds is a perfect mix of Quake, Worms, Soldat and pie-loving. Remarkably violent whilst cute.
In comparison to Soldat, the weapons arsenal is more akin that of Quake 3, the jetpack is replaced by a Spiderman-style link gun and your primary weapon is a giant wooden hammer.
Whoever said games need to have lots of gore to be interesting? Give us tees with rocket launchers, link guns and ninjas (yes, there are ninjas) in a cartoon environment and we’re set!
Free. Available for Windows, OS X and Linux.
Website | Download
N-Game is a unique 2D puzzle/action platform game somewhat similar to Lode Runner. The main character, you, is a ninja (yes, the N is for ninja!) trapped in a world of well-meaning, inadvertently homicidal robots.
What makes this game awesome, apart of course from there being ninjas, is its slamming ragdoll physics system. Limbs flying around and about is never a bad thing.
A very frustrating, yet very fun and addictive game.
Free. Available for Windows, OS X and Linux.
Website | Download
Boing boing. Get ready to bounce up and about collecting ‘em apples. Elasto Mania, or Elma, is about apples, flowers and bikes with super-elastic wheels. Drive over a hill, plummet to the ground and recoil into the air, all while not sustaining trauma to the skull.
This was probably one of the first game to include ‘physics’ (the wheels stretch and bend). That, combined with the ability to change your facing by pressing Space makes this a game that is adept at consuming a lot of your time.
Shareware, $9.95. Available for Windows.
Website | Download (Trial)
Phun is a 2D physics sandbox. Create whatever you’d like, wherever you’d like and see what would happen in the real world. I think I’d be a genius today if I’d had this to play with as a child — there’s virtually no limit to what you can make here.
The playful synergy of science and art is novel, and makes Phun as educational as it is entertaining.
It may look like a toy, but Phun is based on highly competitive technologies for interactive multiphysics simulation, ranging from novel physical models and variational integrators to high performance numerical methods.
Free. Available for Windows, OS X and Linux.
Website | Download
Of course, the obligatory Soldat. This is a fun little 2D shooter based on games like Quake, Counter-Strike, Liero and Worms. Choose from an arsenal of weapons á la Counter-Strike and blow stuff to oblivion and beyond. And while you’re blowing stuff up, gaze in awe as the games ragdoll physics system makes the aftermath a nice show of debris tumbling down hills and bouncing off crates.
If you need to get around, your character is very fittingly equipped with a jetpack. Oh, and one of the selectable weapons is a minigun.
Free. Available for Windows and Linux (Wine).
Website | Download
Rabbits. Bells. Pigeons. Winterbells is a flash game that’s somewhat like Pinball — except you control the ball with your mouse, and there are no flippers, should you miss a bopper.
For each bell you hit, the score for each bell goes up a little. For each pigeon you hit, your current score doubles. Yes, doubles. You’ll find that if you hit a few birds, your high score quickly becomes too high to count!
The game isn’t the least bit complicated, but you’ll find it isn’t too easy keeping your focus. Very, very addictive.
Free. Available for all browsers with Flash.
Website | Play
Let’s just say the title isn’t exactly an exaggeration. This game will piss you off. Immensely. But it’s fun (generally), and that’s what matters! It’s a 2D puzzle game where the objective is to collect coins and get to the finish area without getting hit by all kinds of crap. It’s really very hard.
There is also a The Worlds Hardest Game 2, which is basically just additional levels. It can be found here.
Free. Available for all browsers with Flash.
Website | Play
I can’t let this one go unmentioned, even if it is newer than this article. This is, by far, one of the most entertaining and innovative indie game I’ve played in years.
World of Goo is a physics based puzzle / construction game. The millions of Goo Balls who live in the beautiful World of Goo don’t know that they are in a game, or that they are extremely delicious.
$20.00. Available for Windows, OS X and Linux.
Website | Demo
Praise goes to the authors of these games. They certainly deserve it; they have managed to make games so original, so enticing that top-notch physics engines and two-digit DirectX version numbers merely serve as unnecessary distractions.
Honorable mentions go to all of the text-based MUDs that still keep thousands of players entertained to this day — without any graphics.
And yes, I know I like ninjas.
My first exposure to computer programming was back when I was about 10. Some cool boys at school were playing a fantasy game with each other, all in text. They called it a “MUD“, one of the oldest genres of computer games. I grew curious and it didn’t take long before I was sat at home, emerged in textual worlds rather than the typical graphical games like Quake and Counter-Strike, both of which were wildly popular back then.
Briefly about MUDs: If you’ve never heard of or played MUDs, I strongly encourage you to give them a try. They may not have graphics, but that is exactly what gives them power. They’re like books — if you have a decent imagination, you don’t need graphics. In fact, I’d play a MUD over a game with crappy graphics any day. MUDs are also incredibly educational — if I hadn’t played MUDs, I wouldn’t be speaking nor writing English nearly as well as I do today (I’m not a native speaker), and I probably wouldn’t know much about programming either.
After a while I decided I wanted to create my own game. I downloaded a C codebase and started hacking away at the source, experimenting and learning the basics of programming (I was completely clueless before MUDs). Creating something out of nothing was no longer a fantasy, I was actually doing it.
Eventually, my little project evolved into more than just a spare-time thing and was serving a couple thousand players, admittedly not simultaneously but I was still quite impressed, and I had learned many a valuable lesson about everything from love to programming.
I took the plunge into the world of programming without reading any books on the subject. I am a person who learns best from practice, so it wasn’t all that bad. I bent, I broke and I played with the code and eventually I learned all about functions, pointers, memory management, and all the other fun feats of C. The only downside to this was that I was not learning contemporary programming languages and methods. Until recently, that has been the single biggest reason why I haven’t recommended that anyone interested in programming start out by trying to create their own MUD. MUD codebases are old… Well, most of them, anyway.
NakedMud is a modern MUD codebase whose core is still in the good old C, but everything else is accomplished using Python as an embedded scripting language. Don’t let C discourage you — if you want, you can leave the core alone, do everything in Python and only make the small, necessary changes in C. Python is incredibly easy to learn, and games are much more fun to work with than traditional learning tools, right? Could it be any better? Besides, as soon as you’re comfortable with Python, modifying C will be painless, too.
Geoff Hollis, the creator of NakedMud, describes the codebase as a clean and easy way to create your own MUD, without all the usual hassle that other codebases bring — and that’s exactly what it is. NakedMud’s source is beautifully clear and concise in comparison to other codebases, making it a perfect tool for those who want to create their own game for the first time, and have no clue how to do it from scratch. If you want to create your own game, really, use it.
I won’t go into details about NakedMud as Geoff has literally written books about it. If any of this has even remotely tickled your curiosity, I will, however, end this off by strongly recommending that you learn more on your own. Here’s a few links to get you started:
The source of the MUD I created, Shattered Dreams MUD (SDMUD), can be found here. As you can probably imagine from what I said about it being my first, it isn’t a masterpiece. If anything, studying the source of it will make you realize what makes NakedMud better than the other, old, mainstream codebases.
