Session Report, in which we try Dominion Prosperity

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: Dominion/Prosperity, Settlers of Catan.

We enjoy Prosperity. Our two games (Dominion and Settlers) take a long, long time.

DHL's tracking service claims that one of my packages couldn't be delivered, even though I work from home and was home all day. And the other package, sent at the same time, is apparently on a plane over the Mediterranean, and has been since Dec 23.

Remembering and discovering some adventure and role playing games

Blood and Iron menu

Blood and Iron "is a dark low fantasy tactical RPG where you attempt to lead a mercenary company to fame and fortune." This sounds like a Mount & Blade demake [EDIT] but it's not!

• Dark low fantasy theme 
• You play the owner of a mercenary company, the characters on the battlefield are just employees 
• Your goal is to make your mercenary company the most famous one in history, and to complete various special challenges (achievements) 
• Yes, you really won't save the world this time 
• Tactical (actual combat) and strategic (resource management) layer 
• Turn-based, of course 
• Ironman only, no girlie man reloading whenever something goes wrong here 
• Yes, when characters die they are gone - forever 

It is written in SDL and supposed to be portable.

So far (the project is one day old at time of writing) there is only a win32 binary (runs on linux using wine) available for download which features an incomplete menu and low-pixel art.. I would love to see this project ripen.

Pages of Adventure dialog

Pages of Adventure is a lovely "puzzle adventure in a strange world" which so far features one puzzle. I tested the game on Arch Linux.

Game testers are wanted for the SVN version of the game, different resolutions need to be tested for example. Testers and people who can recommend game/map/dialog editors for tile-based rpg/adventure games, please report to the PoA thread on our forums!


Dawn RPG makes progress. They use MediaWiki for posting news, which makes following development not too comfortable. SumWars is progressing as well. Both games have gained new team members and released new versions.


Hmm.. remember Hero of Allacrost, Silver Tree and Adonthell, FLARE, Arkhart, Radakan and PARPG ? I wonder how many open source non-roguelike role-playing or adventure games are out there and how many are playable and how many are finished..

Too Many Magic Cards

I have 5,695 magic cards, not including basic, non-foil lands and a handful of foreign language cards. That's about 4,000 too many cards for my needs. I'm offering them for sale first to my game group, and then to my readers and the Israeli public, and then to whomever.

Take a look. The quality ranges from very good to acceptable; I tossed out the unplayable cards, but a dozen or so of the remaining cards have noticeable corner bends, and around a quarter of the cards have whitened edges from use. I probably mislabeled some of the cards by the wrong expansion, but not many. Ask if you need to know.

Anyone interested in picking up any cards that my game group doesn't is welcome to email me.

Secret Santa

Rachel's luggage finally arrived, so I got my first secret santa gift which was mailed to her in the states: Canal Mania. The other secret santa gift is supposedly in transit, but it's been in transit for a month. Hoping it shows up eventually.

I also got Dominion Prosperity, Glory to Rome, and Gosu, which I bought for myself. And, on the way from Amazon.de, are Shipyard, Carson City, and Tobago. I would have added Die Handler and maybe Blox, but I had to face the fact that no one in my game group was going to play these with me. Several other games I wanted either weren't available on Amazon.de or couldn't be combined with their cheap international flat rate shipping. They'll just have to wait for another season.

Lastly, I got the game I need to ship to someone else in Israel as their Secret Santa. Somewhere along the way (or at the original point of purchase) one of the box cover corners split, which is a shame. Tikal is a fine game, however, so hopefully it won't matter.

Yehuda

Happy Aðfangadagskvöld!

Three more days, 688 more US Dollars pledged to the Portrait Marathon and we get art video tutorials (so spread a little word, why don'tcha? ;) ):

Fantasy Portrait Marathon pledge progress

OGA's presents

There has been a *LOT* of giving on OGA lately, two fully rigged 3d character models for example.

Another present: IOFORMS' (aka iosketch) first alpha release is being prepared.

Please let us know in the comments if you notice are any special present-ish foss game releases. :)

Session Report, in which it's Just Me and Gili

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: 1955, Schotten Totten x 2, Race for the Galaxy.

Games are sometimes better when you play then with the correct rules; then again, sometimes they're not.

Merry pagan solstice to all of you who celebrate it.

News Avalanche!

Zero-K:

Zero-K is the reboot of Spring RTS game Complete Annihilation, with aims to distance itself from the TA IP that has plagued Spring games, and just generally be better in every way :)

It comes with a revamped UI, multiple specialist commander units to play as, and a single faction instead of the traditional 2. The team is also providing a set of web services such as map and mission lists to enhance the experience, and maybe we'll even see the resurgence of Planet Wars, the awesome persistent galactic RTS that was running a while back

IrrRPG Builder

IrrRPG Builder looks like a promising 3D RPG IDE. So far, it features a terrain editor, drag and drop object placement, and scriptable using Lua.

There's a set of tutorials to get you started, and comes with enough content to play around with; the scriptable object system along with template scripts make it really beginner friendly. The built-in script validator could use a bit of work (doesn't detect undefined functions yet, which crashes the game) and adding some sort of api refference along with autocompletion would really make it a fully fledged IDE :)

Ryzom:

We've been giving Ryzom quite a bit of love recently, with their Linux native client and all, but they just announced an In-game competition for a Linux netbook and got accepted for the Google Code-In initiative. Here's hoping they have lots of success!

Warlock's Gauntlet:

Warlock's Gauntlet is a highly polished Gauntlet/Diablo/Hack'nSlash mashup. A nice interface, smooth gameplay and lots of spells make this a very nice find.(Thanks archl from the comments :) It even has co-op!

Egoboo

The Egoboo team just released their version 2.8.1 beta, it adds randomized loot, special effects and lots of bugfixes. Check it out!

FreedroidRPG

Freedroid recently had their website redesigned(aww I liked the old one :(), and also released version 0.14 which included the Summer of Code work. This added better randomized dungeons, a better interface for the level editor and replaced magical weapons with a more sci-fi addon system (the last addition was done by Nekotaku from Lips of Suna, which also had a release recently :)

An early Xmas?

Not very X-mas like at my current place of residence, but there are just so many good things coming to the FreeGamer enthusiast right now! But I am short on time and on a crappy internet connection... so only text for you guys tonight :p

So, as a follow up the the recently mentioned Alpha 0.3 release of 0AD and their donation drive, UbuntuGamer has now published a pretty nice interview with one of the 0AD contributors.

Their donation drive is also still running, so if you have some money to spare, head over here. They are still a long way from the target, so don't be shy :)

ZeroBallistics 2.0

So why is there an early X-mas? Well I just got the hot news that there has been a 2.0 release of the ZeroBallistics FOSS game!!! Definity some nice new features, but have a look at their release announcement yourself here.

War§ow 0.6 and AlienArena2011

Two pretty big releases also, but since I always get snubbed a bit for mentioning these games with non-FOSS media around here I will make it short: War§ow 0.6 (BIG and very nice release) and AlienArena2011 (now with ODE physics for rag-dolls).

Session Report, in which we try Navegador and love it

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: 1955 x 2, Navegador, Louis XIV, Schotten Totten, Bridge.

1955 is on kickstarter, a game prototype. I think of the game as 1960-lite; of you like 1960 and want a shorter version, get this.

We love Navegador. I must get a copy for the group asap.

Shabbat Gaming

We had our good friends David and Sharron over, and we were all invited for dinner to reps of a local synagogue also happened to be my fourth cousin. Her husband had brought back a bunch of dice from China where he had learned how to play Liar's Dice (I thought that Liar's Dice was a slightly different game, but I was mistaken). He and David and I played most of a game, and he lost badly.

The next day, I taught Tal's friend Toby how to play Settlers of Catan. Tal and David and Sharron's son Yoni joined us, and we had some rollicking fun. After lunch I taught Sharron and Yoni how to play Shotten Totten (getting all of the bonus cards wrong) and they played twice while David, Nadine, Mace, and I played bridge.

And what did you do this weekend?

From Open to Free, visual programming, new SumWars RPG and Berlin game dev summoning

FLARE logo

OSARE is now FLARE. From an OGA tread:

I sent an email to Richard Stallman asking if he's interested in supporting Justin Nichol's Creative Commons Fantasy Portrait Project.

He pointed out that the difference between "open source" and "free" or "free/libre" and noted this:

"However, if you decide to describe it "free" or "free/libre" instead of "open source", then I would be honored to participate."

Stallman's lectures are what convinced me in the first place to use the GPL for my work, and to be interested in copyleft licenses in general. I'm quite honored that he answered my email at all, and I agree with his reasoning.

IOSKETCH visual programming

IOSKETCH is a cross-platform visual authoring tool for games. It is written in Common Lisp.

Summoning Wars 0.5.3
The new version

SumWars 0.5.3 is out:

• Upgrade to Ogre 1.7 and CEGUI 0.7
• More art and story content
• Russian translation

See the arrow?

There's a little meeting this Saturday for making little games in Berlin. Artists, programmers, designers and whatnot are welcome! We speak English. Wir sprechen Deutsch. At least one speaks Spanish, at least one speaks Russian.

You might want to bring a multiple outlet strip (don't forget your converter if you need one).

Berlin Game Developers Meet-Up #5 on Facebook.
Where:   Cafe Osswald
When:    Saturday, December 18 from 11:00 am to 7:00 pm

Lithosphere - awesome visual procedural 3d terrain map generator with shaders

Forget my last post about terrain generators! I'm just going to let the screen/video talk for themselves.

Lithosphere is a GPU driven terrain generator. It allows you to create and export material textures and heightmaps intended for use in realtime graphics applications.

All terrain algorithms are implemented as GLSL fragment shaders operating on floating point textures. This allows realtime modification of the terrain. A graph of nodes is evaluated in order to arrive at the terrain output.

License: AGPL

Requirement: 32bit python2.6 (:|), a modern graphics card

Tested on: Windows, Linux

The creator's blog might be of interest to you as well. The last few articles cover OpenGL and HTML5/JavaScript Canvas.

Portrait Marathon got $1500, could use $1500 more :)

The fantasy portrait marathon reached first base. I just wanted to let you know. Remember, that if it reaches $3000 ($9000!!!/3), we will get a massive instructional video!

Game Notes

I gave each of my brothers' families a copy of Jungle Speed for Hanukkah. It's currently very popular among Israeli teenagers and children.

We didn't have game night this week, owing to Hanukkah, Rachel leaving for Toronto/Boston for two weeks, and Rachel and I taking a trip up north for Limmud Galil - she taught and learned, I worked. I brought a few games with me just in case the social opportunity presented itself, but it didn't.

I sent my Netrunner collection with Rachel to Toronto; it will be picked up by someone who bought it from me (at a steal, I think). Of the other games I wanted to sell off, Binyamin of my local group bought eight of them. Rachel will bring back a few games I bought (Dominion: Prosperity, Glory to Rome, Gosu, whatever my BGG Secret Santa sent me, and a game I have to send to someone in Israel as TDT's Secret Santa).

Last shabbat I played with my downstairs neighbors' guests' kids. We played Cranium Whoonu. Each player takes a turn to be judge. The other players play a card with an item or activity that they think the judge will like. The judge arranges the items according to likes most to likes least. The players receive points for having guessed well.

Then, oddly, each player passes half their cards to a player on their left, which means that you may know later as a judge who played what. I didn't actually look at the rules, so maybe the kids added that one themselves.

After that nonsense, I ran upstairs and brought down For Sale, which none of them had heard of naturally. We played twice, and one of them wanted to go buy it.

This shabbat I went to my mom's in Beit Shemesh. After lunch I played Parade with my hostess and her 20 year old daughter. They got it quickly and liked it. I won.

Later in the afternoon I played Scrabble with my mom. I had a bingo, and I thought I was doing much better than she was anyway, but discounting the bingo I only beat her by 20 points. Hmmm.

Fantasy Portrait Marathon Update and Reddit Game Jam #4 in a few hours!

Justin added new possible targets to his freely-licensed fantasy portraits project for OSARE and OGA:

$1500

by December 28th

30 portraits

$2000

by December 28th

35 portraits

$3000

by December 28th

35 portraits + a full length instructional video showing the painting process for the collection

I sure hope we can arrange this gift of Justin's video to ourselves..
You can spread the word on fsdaily and reddit.

In other news: there's a 48h game jam STARTING TODAY! Here's the IRC channel, here are the rules. I recommend github and love2d!

Contributing to FPSs, RPGs and other games by sharing thoughts and spreading words

I* joined PARPG to work on game interaction (controls and GUI). This decision was made after taking a look at some projects and talking with their members about what tasks are available. Now I want to tell you about the 'open source jobs' available out there.

Radakan (RPG) is currently a solo project that uses the Python 3D engine Panda3D. Project lead Taldor would like help with the game design, GUI design, Writing (dialog & quests) and content creation (creating and converting models, managing the content pipeline). Warning: Radakan's website is currently down, best way to get in contact is irc.freenode.net#radakan.

CubeCreate (FPS + Editor) will be a Lua-driven Sauerbraten-based engine. It could use some design help for editor accessibility improvements and thoughts on asset management (model/texture import) while the developers port to Lua.

0 AD (RTS) has a a well-compiled list of tasks.

Megaglest (RTS) would like to have somebody find more players for the game. In my humble opinion it could use the help of an audio designer to take a look at some files' volume levels as well. :) A re-work of their homepage is being discussed as well.

Ryzom (MMORPG) still needs to port the world editor but also would be interested in designers to work on a 3D editor.

LinWarrior3D (Mech Action) will soon have a new release. There might be a git repository soon. I got a list of possible tasks:

• Homepage enhancing, either with Drupal or static (portions of the website should have the feeling of you-are-in-the-world rather than you-are-reading-the-website). There needs to be resemblance to the current homepage for keeping identity.
• The HUD-Displays could use an overhaul.
• Concepts for a world setting, places, factions for (GTA-like) emerging gameplay - to enhance and populate the game world.
• Concepting a tutorial at the current state of interaction

Suggestions, problem/bug reports, performance reports and fan-mail are always welcome with LW3D. Contributors should be aware that LW3D is a slow-paced "lifetime" project. :)

*remember, this is a collaborative blog, I'm one of currently 4 posters :)

Quoting releases: Bitfighter, Love2d, OpenClonk

Bitfighter

There's a new version of the retro-style multiplayer top-down action game Bitfighter and a well-readable changelog:

This version features new Soccer rules, and a verified user name system protected by your forums password. Many other improvements, including important stability fixes and enhancements for all platforms.

love2d 0.7 no-game-screen

LÖVE 0.7 "Game Slave" has finally been released! This is a Lua 2D game engine also known as "love2d". Oh, and it's on Indie DB. Oh, and Indie DB allows to sort engines by license!

Framebuffers, for rendering to places other than the screen. Threads, for true multithreaded programming. New callbacks, like love.quit and love.focus. A text-origin change from lower- to upper-left. And about a million different bugs have been squashed!

You'll find games and toys and demos to try out in this forum and you can give my stupid little game a try too.

"The Guardians of Windmills" OpenClonk scenario

OpenClonk 1.0 hass been released and I just noticed that I love how their main page contains all the info important to people who don't know the project.

This milestone focuses on some fast paced melees, races and a few experimental scenarios to choose from. All scenarios are meant to be played multiplayer through the internet. It features completely new controls, a new HUD and many weapons and tools to choose from. Also included are four tutorials that guide new players and veteran clonkers through the new controls.

I feel like giving OpenClonk a try soon and hope the tutorials are any good. Here's a game description, if you never took a closer look at the project like me.

OpenClonk is a free multiplayer action game where you control clonks, small but witty and nimble humanoid beings. The game is mainly about mining, settling and fast-paced melees. OpenClonk is also not just a game but also a versatile 2D game engine that offers countless possibilites to make your own mods.

Freely Licensed Fantasy Portraits Financing!

The style

Open-art artist Justin Nichol intends to create 30 freely licensed portraits (or more) in the style you see above. I support his Fantasy Portrait Marathon for 3 purposes:

1. Allow an open source enthusiast artist to continue his studies
2. Provide portraits for  the excellent slash-and-hack OSARE
3. Add a quality set of art to OpenGameArt for use in various games

The cash

$1500, Dec 28

The target

Targeted is a backing of $1500 until end of 2010. At time of posting, $580 (38.6%) have been already pledged (7 backers).

The artist

Other works by Justin

Justin Nichol is attending the Concept Design Academy in Pasadena, Ca. He contributed art to PARPG and OGA. He has a portfolio.

The portraits

• GIMP will be used for drawing the portraits
• Backers will be able to determine the faces they pay for (check the right sidebar of the project page for details)
• The portraits will be CC-BY-SA/GPL dual-licensed for maximum copyleft compatibility

I can only say: invest in this one! And spread the word too, for example on reddit.

Session Report, in which Nadine wins a lot and we try 5 player Power Grid Benelux

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: Dominion Intrigue/Seaside, Power Grid - Benelux, Phoenicia, Bridge.

First play of Benelux. We inflict Phoenicia on some newbies.

M.A.R.S. - A Ridiculous Shooter

Can a game that has "ridiculous" in the title be bad? No. It can not!

M.A.R.S. - A Ridiculous Shooter

Even though I'm no fan of the multiplayer (zero-)gravity-shooter genre, I enjoy playing M.A.R.S., which features AI enemies and wingmen, various weapon types, upgrades and a pretty cool game mode, where a huge cannon will shoot at the planet of the enemy team of whoever is holding the remote to it. I also think it's darn pretty.

BAM!

M.A.R.S. uses shaders (but does not require them). The game menu is well-made in both look and feel too. The media license is not specified. Code is GPLed. M.A.R.S. runs on Lin/Win (get it here) and uses the SFML library (2.0, I had to get it from SVN).

BOOM!

If you want to help the project out, you can do so by translating it. English and German translations are available so far. Since SFML 2 has recently been ported to OS X, it probably would be welcome if someone could provide a build as well.

A little bit of everything

Long time no see!
Before you look at the pictures: I can only recommend following the FGD Game Planet and Dev Planet. That is all ;).

Games

CONS

CONS is a NOOB FRIENDLY!!! roguelike written in Lisp. It is 'friendly' because the amount of possible actions is low and they are all tooltip-explained in the main window. I also like the color scheme and simple look. Follow the developer on his blog. I know I do.

Xenowar

Xenowar is a simple-gfx squad tactics game and it runs on Windows and Android. Didn't try it yet.

skunks is a "3D game with cars, stunts and software rendering, based on Open Dynamics Engine" by Matei Petrescu, who also brought us simple3d/simcar.

Contests

SDLTutorials.com is hosting a little top-down car racing game contest (runs until 31. Dec)

Game On 2010 is an open web game contest started by Mozilla Labs. Deadline: January 11, 2011. [Rules]

Assets

OpenGameArt is getting bigger and bigger and nicer and nicer and their forums cover more and more topics. Hopefully one day they (the forums) will have a better usable design :) (this probably depends mostly on Drupal and Drupal extensions).

BlendSwap on the other hand is not getting that much attention as I imagined it would after finally introducing free licenses.

UFO:AI license statistics

UFO:AI wants to legalize it! They seek freely-licensed textures and images to replace their "license unknown" files. And they have statistics and graphs! Also their latest news cover changes to their level editor in screenshot form.

Engines

Burster is bringing Blender into the browser. Not stable.

jMonkeyEngine's team is working towards a visual SDK. They recently released alpha 3.

The developer 2D LWJGL engine Slick is making first Steps of porting to Android. Meanwhile the developer of Android platformer Replica Island blogs about development for that platform.

SDL Multi-touch, gestures and android port are some features added during Google Summer of Code. [source]

PixelLight [videos] is a new, LGPL3-licensed 3D engine on the block.

• In development since 2002 (released in August 2010)
• Runs on Windows and Linux, a prototype for mobile devices exists
• The free libraries ODE (physics) and OpenAL (sound) are supported

Session Report, in which we play a close game of Age of Empires III

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: Parade, Age of Empires III, Vegas Showdown, Bridge.

We had a nice, close game of Age of Empires III.

Earlier in the week, Rachel and I played Scrabble. Rachel was tired, but still beat me 322 to 314. She had only two scores in the 200s, jumping from 199 to 224 to 261 to 304.

Do You Need Game Expansions?

Some game expansions are worth buying, and some are not. Before buying, consider:

- How frequently you play the base game

The less frequently, the less you require an expansion.

- How often you have already played the base game

If you don't play the game frequently now because you're tired of it, but you played it to death when it first came out, an expansion might rekindle interest in the game.

- How rich is the game play experience of the base game?

A game that's already wildly imaginative and plays differently each time doesn't necessarily need an expansion.

- How much game play the expansion adds

The price should be proportional to the change in the game play.

- How disruptive the expansion is to the base game

Does it offer more options, or does it entirely change the game mechanisms? More options is good if you like the base game but need more to keep it stimulating. New and changed mechanisms means a new game, which you must want to choose to play in place of playing the base game.

All of these questions lead to the ultimate question: how often will this actually hit the table? My track record for expansions varies wildly:

Age of Steam, Power Grid, etc. (maps): Train and other connection games that don't come with a randomized board setup can use expansion maps. These don't hit the table often in my group, so a few expansion maps is sufficient for us. Beyond that is a waste.

Agricola: Agricola comes pre-packaged with expansions, including the various decks. It needs no further expansions. I have successfully avoided them.

Alea Treasure Chest: This is a box with small expansions for seven Alea games, of which I own six of them. We use to play a lot of Puerto Rico, and I created my own expansion buildings for it, so I was open to playing the Nobles expansion. It's good, and will probably come out again.

I haven't tried the other expansions yet, but I suspect we will get to them. We don't play the other games all that often, so I don't know how often the expansion will come out even if the base game does ... unless the expansion significantly improves the game. In which case we will no longer play the base game without the expansion.

Apples to Apples: If you play often, additional cards can be fun. However, A2A is designed well, so that you don't really need expansion cards. No two hands are the same.

Blue Moon: I didn't find the base game all that interesting. I didn't try the expansions, but I doubt that you can play the base game too often without them.

Carcassonne: The standalone games such as Hunters and Gatherers and The City don't need - and don't have - expansions (there's a very small tile expansion for H&G). The base game required some expansions to spruce up some imbalances in the scoring. I don't know much about them, however.

Chess: Changing anything in Chess means playing a different game; Chess is Chess. Chess means memorizing openings and very specific evaluation strategies. Any and all expansions to Chess are simply abstract games played on a Chess-like board with similar rules to Chess. I prefer the variants.

Cosmic Encounter: Cosmic was built to have expansions, since the game is designed to be wild and full of surprises. The more the merrier. However, I don't like several of the expansions, notably the ones that disrupt the game play (moons, variable hexes, ...).

Cuba: The designer sent me a few tile expansions to the game. I don't play frequently enough to judge these. They don't disrupt the game, but I wouldn't have gone out of my way to buy them, either.

Dominion: Dominion is already a fantastic game, and several of the expansions are fantastic, if slightly-less balanced. There comes a point, however, when you have enough already to make every game different; at that point, the only reason to buy expansions is for the same reason you buy packs of Magic cards: you want a particular card. Don't do it. Pick two expansions and no more.

I'm going to violate what I just said by buying Prosperity; however, I could easily give up Seaside.

El Grande: I tried the King and Intriguant variant several times. The concept wasn't inherently bad, but some of the cards were annoying, and wouldn't you know it, every player played on of those cards at least once a round. In the base game, those cards can only come up once or twice. So I banned those cards in the variant.

Turns out that we simple didn't play El Grande enough to warrant the expansion at all.

Homesteaders: An amazing game space which I haven't come close to exhausting. But I think there's room for a set of expansion buildings. Just one.

Magic: the Gathering: This game, as all TCGs, is built around the concept of expansions. Luckily, making some cards rare meant making other cards common, and thus worthless. You can pick up thousands of "worthless" cards for a song, after which you don't need any more expansions.

The Pillars of the Earth: I bought the expansion, and the group played it once. We don't play the game enough to warrant it. Actually, I've grown sour on the master building drawing mechanism, so, unless this expansion fixes that, I probably won't be playing it.

Power Grid (deck): Unlike the maps mentioned above, the deck provides variant plants to acquire during the game. While it did, it had hardly any noticeable effect on the game.

Puerto Rico: I've already created half a dozen expansions to this game, and they keep the game from going stale.

Setters of Catan: The expansions to this game were a mix of additional options (Seafarers) to disruptive (Cities and Knights). I like C&K, but it's a different game, which doesn't come out all that much anymore (we played it to death). I didn't think Seafarers was worth the money, after playing it once. The 5-6 player expansions made the game long and cumbersome.


What's the moral of this post? While the Tribune expansion looks tempting, I don't need it.

Session Report, in which we play La Citta for 4 hours

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: Nile, La Citta.

Yeah, four hours for La Citta. We enjoyed it, thought we also remembered its (non-fatal) flaws.

This shabbat we said farewell (again) to our friends Bill and Shirley who are going back to the US for a year. Nadine hosted 21 people for shabbat lunch, after which we played.

I taught Homesteaders to Cliff, Mace, and Adam. Still one of my favorite games. The final scores were me 63, Mace 43, Adam 41, Cliff 34 (or something like that), but the others still really liked the game. Though I won by a landslide, I still feel like I'm not playing anywhere near optimally. I took both 10 point buildings, though I took five debt to do so; I only managed to pay off two of those debt at the end of the game.

Other games played include Castle Panic, Race for the Galaxy, and Ticket to Ride.

Well, screw this...

We need contributors, contributors, contributors to misquote a famous internet meme ;)
So if you want to be a new author writing wacky (or wicked) articles here on FreeGamer, contact us! Don't let this Blog die! And hey it's a good excuse to be lazy and not work on actual open-source games :D

FOSS game news

So what kind of gaming related news have piled up in my list during the last month (yes it has been nearly a month since goat's post :( )?

Freeroid recently got a major update, bringing it up to version 0.14. Another major update was given to us by the great Hedgewars team, so who needs worms if he can have hedgehogs? They also make better splashes under my car...*hust*.

Forget what I just said, FreeGamer minion! Concentrate on the news I bring regarding the the FOSS MMORPG Ryzom. You might remember that this game has gone free as in freedom (but not as in beer) some time ago, and besides various improvements, it now resulted in a working Linux client. So go and try out their free 21 day trial if you are on Linux (you better be ;) ).

Older Ryzom Linux vid

On the FPS side of things I have both good and bad news: First the bad ones... the very promising project Axis Revenge has closed down again for unspecified reasons. Some of their stuff will be going towards the also very nice looking Xreal based Weaver project. But no, that wasn't the good news yet... I recently came across another promising project based on the Cube2 engine, called CLONE, a rather funny name given that they want to make a CS like game ;) Not much to see yet, but the guys involved seem quite dedicated and experienced. So lets wait and see.

Hmm... what else? Ahh yes, the creator of the great AlienArena recently showed up in our forums to give us a peak at a new trailer for the upcoming AlienArena2011:

AlienArena 2011 trailer

Another Cube2 /Syntensity based project I am currently closely following, is CubeCreate. It tries to become a really polished FOSS game engine and distribution platform, and so far I like their approach (like LUA scripting).

Oh year, for the RTS fans... the new Warzone2100 3.0 Beta looks rather nice, and also has a test build with an improved netcode now. Personally I can't wait to see the Art-Revolution models integrated however. So watch this space for updates on that!

I guess that's it for tonight, hope you all stay a loyal readers even though the blog has slowed down a lot lately. And please... consider contributing as explained in the beginning!

Movie Reivews: Scott Pilgrim, Social Network, The American

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: This is probably the best movie of the year. It's utterly charming, original, captivating, stylish, quirky, and relevant. The acting, storyline, direction, effects, and production are all fantastic. The movie is quotable, sometimes hysterically so, from beginning to end.

The movie is a straightforward presentation of the graphic novel of the same name by Bryan Lee O'Malley. Michael Cera plays Scott Pilgrim, a 21 year old dating 17 year old Knives Chao but who sees - in his dreams and then in real life - a funky girl closer to his age named Ramona Flowers. To win Ramona, not only does he have to ditch Knives life a man, he has to fight Ramona's seven evil ex-boyfriends. In the movie and book, this is done physically in video game fashion; in both, this transparently represents the not-too-deep metaphor that people have to overcome past relationship crap before they can move into a healthy one.

The movie is not for everyone, just like The Breakfast Club was not for everyone; it's geared to a young generation, immersed in modern culture. It's not incredibly deep. But oh, man, is it entertaining.

Entering movie quotes legends: "We are Sex Bob-Omb and we are here to make you think about death and get sad and stuff."

The Social Network: For a movie about a hacker and the lawsuits he defends against after creating a successful website, the movie is surprisingly appealing and accessible to the general public. I suspect that hackers and their ilk will find that their sympathies lie more with the protagonist of the movie than do members of the general public.

I heard that the movie was a negative portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg, but aside from social awkwardness and conning his friend and initial backer out of his rightful share of the company, Jesse Eisenberg's Mark is a hacker hero. The Winkelvoss's, Harvard students who ask Mark to create a website for them but provide him no code or design - just an idea - and yet end up extorting him out of $65 million when Mark "steals" their idea, raise no sympathies at all. Their claims, as seen in the film, appear to be entirely ludicrous. At best they should receive $650.00 for breach of contract, or something.

The story is told as flashbacks from the two lawsuits he faces. Acting and direction are good. Women don't have much of a role to play in the movie, other than as eye candy. The script takes you from the night that Mark creates a girl comparison site called Facemash to the night Facebook cracks 1,000,000 registered users.

Mostly I learned how big a role that Napster's Sean Parker played in Facebook's development. It was a fun movie, for Facebook fans.

The American: Like the last two George Clooney movies I've seen - Up in the Air and Michael Clayton - this movie is a straightforward drama without any high pretensions. All three felt short, like adaptations of short stories. All were well acted, tightly shot and directed, clean and cold. Clooney plays loners on the edge of society and barely cracks a smile in any of them; when he does, it's usually in response to irony.

In The American, Jack is a guy who can craft precise weapons, which he does for a nefarious contact. He tends to have a problem forming relationships, sometimes having to kill people who get close to him if he suspects that they are trying to kill him (which turns out to be the case, occasionally).

He wants out, and you know what that means. He's going to have trouble with his contact. A simple thriller, with good acting and direction, an appealing prostitute, and well done. And that's about it.

TEDx Talpiot

TEDx is a locally-organized conference based on, and with the blessing of, the TED project. TED's rules for TEDx are that the event not be for profit, not promote any political, national, or religious agenda, and that it stick to the premise of "ideas worth spreading".

TEDx Talpiot, held yesterday evening at Hebrew University on Mount Scopus, was a successful and enjoyable event. Around 300 or so people heard six speakers and two musical interludes, all but one of which ranged from good to great. None of the speakers were as mind-blowing or jaw-dropping as the best lectures you can find on TED.com; but, after all, those are the best of the best, so that was to be expected.

The event was partially sponsored by ROI Community, which gathers Jewish innovators, and Leadel, which does the same.

Organization

The organization was good, especially considering that the event was free. I assume that the food was donated, as they had cookies, drinks, and a catered bagel meal for everyone. Sweet.

Every attendee had a personal QR code on the back of their name tag, which, when passed very carefully in front of a smart phone with the appropriate software from Mobalic.com, loaded the owner's information into the phone. These were harder to use than the software maker would have you believe; the phone and tag had to be held still and at just the right distance; not as good as RFID. But they worked.

The sound, lights, and projection had occasional snafu's. Nothing cataclysmic. Wifi didn't work inside the hall.

Everything started and finished on time, and the speakers stuck to their time frame, for the most part.

The Content

Read the abstracts

1. Eti Katz (he): Something about visual learning.

My Hebrew is not very good, so I had some trouble understanding Eti's talk, but it looked good.

Essentially, different children have different ways of understanding the world. We must teach them each according to their understanding. She presented pictures of people outlines with different, funky pictures in them, and went on to explain each case of a child and his or her relationship to it.

While interesting, I couldn't see anything remarkable about the content; then again, I may have missed it. The presentation was fine, but also unremarkable.


2. Zvia Agur (en): Virtual patients

This speech was allegedly about the development of a personalized, virtual patient, used to test the effectiveness of drugs on a patient before administrating a course. That would have been interesting on its own. However, this was covered only in the last few minutes of the speech.

What the speech was actually about was freakin' bizarre.

Zvia said that swings have frequencies, and that pushing harder doesn't make the swing go back and forth at a higher frequency, only at a faster speed and higher height. If you push at the same frequency, the swing swings higher; if you push against the frequency, the swing slows. So far, so good.

Then she dropped this one: A population's size has a frequency that can be contrasted against the frequency of disasters that befall it. If the frequencies match, the population thrives. Otherwise, the population falls. What????

From there, she went on to say that the same applies to cell growth in an organism. And that this mathematical frequency theory can be used to time the application of chemotherapy to the rhythm of healthy cell growth: the frequency matches the growth of healthy cells in the body, which means that the healthy cells will continue to grow well, but works against the frequency of cancer's cell growth, which means the cancer cells will suffer.

She said that her experiments have proved a double survival rate using this theory. But it was hard to get funding in an academic or medical institution due to skepticism. So she and some others have developed their own research company and pharmaceutical company to test and develop these.

In the process, they have developed a virtual cancer patient. They extracted information from a patient with aggressive cancer. They used their math to design the virtual patient. Used virtual treatment models to treat the virtual patient. Tripled frequency of one of the drugs. The patient improved for some time.

I had no idea where she was going, and she didn't back up what she was talking about, so disses to her confusing presentation. But the content was certainly fascinating.


3. [someone] Lipshitz

Played piano. Tchaikovsky

A fantastic piece played by a fantastic musician.


4. Prof Avshalom Elitzur (en): Beauty of Quantum Design

An introduction to quantum theory, concentrating on how the observer works.

Light = waves, but only when the photons are not observed closely. Talked about the Mach-Zehnder Interferometer. If you shoot photons one at a time, it works. But shoot the photons and observe them, it doesn't work!

An application: the Elitzur-Vaidman bomb testing experiment. Test a bomb without having to explode it.

Another weird thing: Two particles, one up and one down. Judge whether a particle is entangled with another gives you some yes and some no; but even when the particles not entangled, they are, by forcing them both to either be entangled or not.

I wasn't sure how much of this was revolutionary, but it was interesting. Presentation was ok. Most people didn't understand him, and he didn't present any compelling universal benefit for his research.


5. Dr. Oren Harman (en): Evolution of altruism

Where does kindness come from? Some animals appear to have evolved to behave to their own detriment. For instance, an antelope that jumps up and down when they see a lion, sacrificing themselves so that the rest of the herd can escape. Certain bees and amoeba. Etc.

Types of altruism:

- Nepotism: I.e. survival of the genes. W.D. Hamilton.
- Reciprocation: Which invokes game theory. Robert Trivers.
- Group selection: Group evolution sometimes trumps personal evolution. (several people)

What is the relationship between biological altruism (I lose something to give you something) vs psychological altruism (the intent matters). All still under research. Several false leads.

The story of George Price (Oren summarized the book he wrote about him). George ran away from his life and then published a seminal paper in Nature without any background in the field. Claimed that psych altruism is always selfish in nature. Then tried to argue against his own findings by being overly altruistic with his life, to prove that spirit triumphs biology. Failed and committed suicide.

An interesting but not revolutionary talk, very well presented.


6. emotiv - TED TV presentation

This was simply a video presentation of Tan Lee and her mental headset. Available on TED.

A great presentation, but I don't know why they showed it here.


7. Maurit Beeri (en): Fixing babies is more than medicine

Healthy babies today, and in the past, all develop at roughly the same pace. Modern technology doesn't make them grab or walk any faster. They don't need specialized playthings.

Kittens raised in darkness until five months never developed sight in the brain. More generally, developing children need many different stimulation, not a small set of the right ones.

Babies can survive adverse early conditions so long as they get love and stimulation eventually, but within a certain time window. Babies' early reflexes must be replaced by learned patterns to fill the same needs. Otherwise, if still young, they need pediatric rehabilitation and specialized playthings. If the window of opportunity is closed, they may never acquire the skills. A baby fed through a gastro tube may learn to eat if the tube is taken out before a certain age, but not after that.

It's not enough to fix physical problems without considering the neurological and psychological effects.

Interesting content, adequate presentation

8. Musical interlude

A dude played a Chabad melody on a saxophone. All of two or three minutes.


9. Joseph Dadoune (he): Film, architecture, desert.

A truly awful presentation by a likely talented artist who might have done some good work, but I couldn't sit still while he talked endlessly about himself. I heard from those who stayed until the end that it didn't get any better. He showed a picture of a house.


Overall, it was a great event, one that I hope will be repeated. I assume the videos of the presentations will make their way online, eventually.

Pictures From Sukkot Games Day

It's been a while since I've dumped my memory chip, I see...


Agricola


Agricola


Agricola


Agricola



Shachar and Mace


Mr. Jack


Mr. Jack: Jon and Michael


Agricola: Shachar, Mace, and Elijah


Homesteaders visits Agricola


Agricola: Shachar and Mace


Homesteaders: Jon and Oren


Jon


Homesteaders


Homesteaders visits Agricola


Puerto Rico: Yardena and Mace


Puerto Rico: Mace, Rachel, and Oren


Antike: Shachar


Antike: Elijah and Michael


Antike: Shachar

Session Report, in which we play El Grande for 3.5 Hours and the New Player Wins

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: Yinsh, El Grande, Puerto Rico with nobles expansion.

First play and thoughts for the Puerto Rico nobles expansion.

Yehuda

Session Report, in which we try San Fransisco

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: Dominion/Intrigue/Seaside, R-Eco, Settlers of Catan, Tigris and Euphrates, Mr. Jack, San Fransisco.

We get T&E on the table after an absence, and we try San Fransisco for the first time, with some trepidation.

Guest post: 7 Tips For Improving Your Chess Game

The following is a guest post:

Chess is not your typical board game, as not much is left to chance except maybe when your opponent "chances" to do something stupid. Becoming a skilled player involves an ability to devise a strategy (with adequate back-up plans) and some capacity for anticipating your opponent's next moves. The more you play and study the tactics of skilled players, the better you will become at developing your own unique strategies. A few best practices, however, are well-known and can be applied by any amateur player who wishes to take steps to improve their game.

1.) Don't underestimate the power of your pawns. These little guys are a great protective measure for your king, and work great in chains for organizing an attack. However, they're close to worthless when they're isolated from each other on the board or if a chain of them is blocking powerful players, like your bishops and rooks. It's usually a good practice to build inverted V chains of pawns rather than going for V-shaped chains, which are weaker. Try to maintain the pawns in the middle of the board, while remembering to open up chains for your power players.

2.) Get your knights in the middle when the board is still crowded so they can wreak more havoc against your opponent. Too many novice players leave their knights close to the sidelines where they have a more limited range of motion from which to make their L-shaped attack.

3.) Remember that bishops and rooks are much more useful in an endgame scenario than a knight or a pawn because they can cross vast distances if need be on the open board. If you're forced to sacrifice a knight or a bishop early into a game, sacrifice a knight.

4.) Don't take the queen too far out too soon. She may pack a punch, but she's also your most valuable asset.

5.) Castle your king early. This will help protect you from an early checkmate.

6.) Attack invisibly. In other words, your opponent is more likely to anticipate an attack from the piece you move. Attacking invisibly often means you move a piece merely to free up another of your pieces to attack on the next move. Your opponent is less likely to organize a defense for the invisible attack and you are more likely to capture the piece you're after.

7.) Sometimes offense is the best defense. When you're cornered and a piece of yours is about to be taken, see if you can position yourself to capture a more valuable piece from your opponent. Your opponent will then face the decision of whether to rescue his or her own piece or proceed to take your piece as originally planned.

This guest post is contributed by Angelita Williams, who writes on the topics of college courses. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: angelita.williams7 @gmail.com.

Amazon Welcomes You to the 16th Century

Four Games and a Funeral

We had Abraham and Sara over for the weekend. At the same time, Nadine invited several local gamers for a gamers' lunch. So the weekend was filled with games.

Tichu

Friday night after dinner, Abraham and I played against Nadine and Sara. Sara had played two hands prior to tonight's game, and she was iffy on the game. She got into it tonight and enjoyed it.

I'm seen as a better Tichu player in these parts, so Nadine joked that her team would only need 500 points to win while we needed 1000. We took a commanding lead with me making two Tichus and a double down hand, starting us off at 540 to 60. Soon it was 810 to 90.

Then a strange thing happened. Nadine, who has probably only called Tichu two times ever, called Tichu three times straight. In the first two hands, she and Sara went double down both times, giving them +600 points. Now it was 810 to 690. Unfortunately, she missed her third Tichu (I had almost called it, but I was lacking one round's control). I then had an embarrassingly good hand, with all four aces, two kings, two queens, and the Dragon. In the final two rounds, we finished them off.

Antike

Emily and Eitan had never played this, and I was happy to teach them. Abraham and Bill joined us. Abraham has a history of aggression in this game that does not actually lead to his winning.

I ended up as Greece in the middle of the board and first player. I nearly always start with gold or marble, but this time I started with iron to see what would happen. Since it was a five player game, I was a little more concerned with space. Everyone diversified nicely over the next few rounds (Emily and Bill shadowed each other for a while).

This is another game at which I tend to do well, sometimes winning by three or four points. In this game I was sweating a lot harder. The Know-hows were shared by all the players and the others were keeping pace with me. At one point, I was one point behind. Oh no! Luckily, not for too long.

I pulled ahead by building a third temple and leaping two levels in sailing (for one point), which made my massive fleet now in range of several temples. I would have left conquering a temple for the final point I needed, but Abraham built too many ships too close to me, and I didn't trust him not to attack me. I took out most of his ships and one of his temples. After that I only needed one more point to win and I didn't care what the others did to my cities. I was one or two rounds from winning in either of several different paths. The others could have delayed me if they had made a concerted effort, but that would have left the field open at random to any of the other players and they still could not necessarily have gained two points before I got my last. Scores: 7 to 5, 5, 4, 4.

Castle Panic

I didn't play this, so I can't tell you about it. However I head Nadine enjoying herself. She apparently likes cooperative games. Castle Panic can be played as straight cooperative, cooperative with a single winner, or one against the rest, so it offers some flexibility with regards to taste.

Trias

Played after shabbat with Abraham and Sara. This is a game that Abraham and I like, but the others don't so much.

Abraham appeared to be pulling away rather sharply with the intermediary points. It was hard, but I managed to cut some of his islands off from him. Although I could see that Sara and I were on larger islands near the end, I feared that it wouldn't be enough to catch him.

In the end, however, we all ended up with 30 points. Abraham won on the tie, for having used less dinosaurs.

The Funeral

I'm pretty sure that there were several hundred people there, and by several I don't mean 2 or 3, more like 6 or 7. We packed the hesped hall, out into the parking lot,. People stood outside around the sides of the building trying to hear through the windows.

The hespeds didn't start until 10:15 or so, and several Rabbis, friends, and relatives spoke. Frankly, I think three hespeds is sufficient, and could have done without a few of them. The most important were the first - a young Rabbi who knew RivkA well (forgot his name) - and her brother, father, and husband. Moshe (the husband) spoke with a mix of anger, grief, shock, and loss. You had to have had a hard heart not to have been shedding tears by the end. He could have gone on for some time, too.

Near the very end, someone - I think responsible for the funeral hall, but possibly a member of another funeral party - accosted us to tell us that we're taking too long and have to leave. Apparently another funeral was scheduled for 10:30, and it was now already 11:20. As it was late, crowded, and threatening to rain, I didn't stay for the actual burial.

I must have seen 1/3 of the people I've ever met from my twenty years in Israel at that funeral. From every walk of life, from every disparate circle, from current friends and acquaintances to people I haven't seen in ten years. And we couldn't really socialize. It was like a room full of random Facebook friends.

RIP RivkA Mattitya

(image source)

RivkA Mattitya, a friend and fellow blogger died this morning after a long battle with cancer.

RivkA was an ebullient, warm, caring person, fervently in love with Israel and Judaism, and a bat-torah. She was also a loving friend, mother, wife, sister, and daughter. I know, because I've met her friends, children, husband, sister, and mother.

I remember RivkA from 1991, shortly after I made aliyah. We, along with another twenty or so people, went to a park every Friday afternoon to play ultimate frisbee. RivkA always made sure that everyone else was having a good time, and that everyone had a chance to participate.

In later years, a smaller group of us used to meet every (American) Thanksgiving to eat a scrumptious pot-luck meal, listen to Alice's Restaurant, and play Cosmic Encounter. RivkA mentioned a few times that she wanted to come to my game group, but she never had the time or, in later years, the strength.

Over the last few years, I saw her at the Jewish bloggers convention, occasional simchas or lectures, and when we met one afternoon to say hi to a mutual visiting friend whom RivkA was hosting (allowing to help out).

If there are any incontrovertible things to say about RivkA it is these: her smile was infectuous, her Zionism and faith were unwavering, and her life touched and inspired many people in her family, in her country, and around the world.

In Rivkah's words:

I am different.

I have a different type of cancer.

My cancer is responding to treatment.

I am young.

I am strong.

I have a great attitude.

Blah, blah, blah....


Cancer Sucks.

(source)

RIP.

Session Report, in which I come up with a solution to kingmaking in Steam

The latest Jerusalem Strategy Gaming Club session report is up. Games played: It's Alive, Steam, Princes of Florence, Notre Dame, Dominion Intrigue/Seaside.

I come up with what I think may be a solution for the kingmaking problem in Steam. Nadine teaches two games, and we play some cards from Seaside for a change.

Rachel is off to America for a week. This shabbat I will be having a number of gamers over for dinner and going to Nadine's together with a bunch of gamers for lunch.

Atonement (or Goat's Monthly Post)

Julius' endless poking has sent me over the cliff of post-guilt, fortunately, lots of projects have been jumping up and down for attention of late, so I have quite a bit of content to redeem myself with.

RPGs

OSARE

OSARE showing off powers

Pfunked and recently released an update to the promising OSARE This brings "powers" to the game, the classic Hack 'n Slash abilities that encompass magic, melee and ranged special attacks. No skimping on them here either, intricate systems such as block-counter based attacks and time stopping magic spells definitely differentiate OSARE's powers from the more generic "Do x damage" spells more commonly found. The new powers do bring in a bit of a balance issue though, but such is the nature of RPGs

Dawn RPG

Dawn RPG

Dawn-RPG has also been updating steadily throughout the year; I kind of forgot about the project and should be punished appropriately :P Main recent additions are sound an music (from the illustrious OGA, more on that later), and "characteristics" that diversify its abilities system. Dawn is definitely a project to watch, they are a bit more "traditional" than OSARE in a few ways: Larger amounts of inventory slots and more numerous actions and abilities (albeit more generic in the terms I described earlier), along with quests (although that may be added to OSARE in a future release).

Lips Of Suna

Lips Of Suna

Lips Of Suna hit the 0.1.0 milestone as well, recently. 240 days since the last release means that lots has changed. So much, in fact, that nekotaku didn't even have enough time to list it all, so sorry if I cannot give a concise overview (the game doesn't run on my system because of GFX problems :\). From the screenshots though, one can see that the models have been improved significantly, albeit at the expense of a couple m2 of cloth ;) --edit-- Scratch that, after interrogating nekotaku with a comfy pillow in IRC I managed to pry this out of him "I worked a lot on the graphics engine, as can be seen from it not working :-P I also wrote a new AI, worked on combat, implemented a faction system, a quest system, a crafting system, etc.".

RTSes

Warzone2100

Warzone2100 going BOOM

Warzone 2100 released v3.0-beta1. Another release that keeps its changes close to the heart, it seems that v3 mainly consists of graphical and gameplay improvements and fixes rather than slews of new features. Kick the Goat if you find that his journalistic integrity doesn't meet up to the standards of your average blogger though.

0 A.D

0AD's new Celtic Faction

0AD dropped their second Alpha release "Βελλεροφῶν" (or Bellerophon). Their change log is as beautiful as the game itself; and it had better be after having recently acquired a development manager, and they're always looking for more team members so if check their open positions list and join up if you're man enough. A new faction, gameplay improvements such as fog of war and unit formations, performance improvements... Oh, and victory conditions, sothat you can finally beat your opponent!

Racing

SuperTuxKart

According to my googling, it has been over a year since SuperTuxKart has been mentioned on Freegamer! Scandalous! Anyhow, they recently released Alpha 3 of their 0.7 Irrlicht engine revision, lots of new things has been added like ODE physics and a bunch of new tracks and racers. I'd love to post some screenies/videos, but they're all of the old version. You can find a recent video here, on a German fan site :)

Odds and Ends

Wesnoth Tactics

WTactics wiki

Wesnoth Tactics... Now here's an interesting one, a collectable card game based on the Wesnoth art and universe. Loads of cool art originating from there, which is available at OpenGameArt. The game is also playable on PC using a closed source CCG game client, LackeyCCG, but they plan to produce their own cross platform client in the future. This is a very interesting example of the flexibility of open source settings instead of code; Wesnoth has spawned quite a few shared setting (Or "commundo" as a circa '09 #freegamer channel would have said) games, and hopefully the trend continues

OpenGameArt

Finally, OpenGameArt has received quite a few mentions in this post; they are still alive and very much kicking with quite a few large developments done to the site, namely: Flattr integration, sothat users can recieve micro-donations for their art, and the freeing up of quite a bit of funds for commissions due to serving costs being covered by GameBoom