FOSSwire

Back in December, I looked at Wormux, a crazy turn-based battle game where you pitch (FOSS-inspired) animated characters against each other to find the last man standing.

Recently, the team announced the release of the new 0.8 version of the game. The new release boasts a new network play feature as well as loads of new maps, several additional weapons and other upgrades.

The new network multiplayer option allows you to play online, as well as on a local network. A game such as Wormux really is most fun when you are playing a human opponent, although a quick match vs the computer is good too. If geographical distance isn't an issue, it was always possible, and still is, to play hot-seat at a single machine.

This new feature though eliminates that requirement, however. As with any network game, firewalls might be an issue, but as the game runs off a single TCP port, it should be trivial to add exceptions.

Anyway, the point is that these new additions make an already highly entertaining game a lot more fun. Blasting the characters belonging to someone across the other side of the world is now as possible and satisfying as a real-life opponent in the same room.

It's worth noting right now that for Linux users, the static binary download is still only at version 0.7.9, and doesn't benefit from these new features. However, you can download the latest source and compile yourself.

If you still haven't given Wormux a try, I'd highly recommend it. Downloads for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X are available.

You'll have to forgive me, this is the second game review I've done in the past two days, after yesterday's look at Battle Tanks. After discovering this gem though, I simply couldn't not share.

The game is Wormux - and it is basically a clone of the Worms series of games originally by Team17. For those who aren't in the know, Wormux (and the Worms game) put you in control of a team of worms armed to the teeth with an arsenal of weapons. The aim of the game is to use those weapons against worms of the enemy team. Each worm has a set amount of energy, and being shot at, blown up etc. will reduce that energy until that worm dies (or if you can get a worm to go for a swim or fly off the edge of the map, it's instant death). The last team standing wins. It is turn-based, so while your team is in control, everyone else stands still for you to take a potshot at.

Wormux makes a formidable clone of the original series. It has an impressive set of weapons 'inspired' by the series, plus some extra ones that you won't have seen before. It doesn't copy directly in every way, however, and has a distinct free software spin to it. Instead of the same old plain worms, for example, the different teams that ship with the game are themed - so there are Tux penguins, PHP elephants, KDE dragons and so forth. This adds a unique Linux and free software spin to it, and keeps things interesting.

Gameplay is spot on. It manages to be simple, yet almost endlessly fun. The game is best played hot-seat with other human players, where you each pick a team and take it in turns to blow each other's worms up.

The game is very stable and seems to work very well, although again it does need 3D acceleration, so without it you might struggle to get it at playable framerates. Also, the screen scrolling system, where you move the mouse to the edges of the screen to move the camera around can be a slight problem if you 'get lost' and can't find the currently active worm.

Despite these minor issues, I am absolutely in love with Wormux right now. If you can't play the real Worms games, then this is, in my opinion, the absolute next best thing. Highly recommended.

Wormux is cross-platform and can binaries for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X and FreeBSD as well as source code downloaded from the download page. The Linux static binary can be downloaded from there, but install using your package manager if you can for the easiest installation.

In the world of turn-based strategy games, Civilization rules the roost. Or at least used to. I personally have spent a lot of hours over the years playing the original series (although I'm not much of a player any more, and never really was very 'good' by any decent standards).

So reviewing FreeCiv is sort of a bit of a nostalgia trip for me, but I'll try and keep that at bay as much as possible.

For those of you who haven't played any of the original Civ series, FreeCiv is a turn based strategy game where you build a civilisation and amass an empire taking turns with other factions trying to do the As the turns elapse, you progress through history - starting from 4000 BC up to the modern day, gaining new technology, starting and ending wars and (in theory) expanding your empire as that happens.

Graphically and conceptually, the game is very close to Civilization II, with similar isometric 2.5D graphics and an almost clone of the CivII interface, down to the layout of the main window to the nation select screens.

I didn't have an awful lot of time to delve into gameplay, but from the playing I did do, it seems very authentic as a clone of CivII. To veterans of the genre and the original series, it will be easy to pick up and the differences are minimal.

New players, especially those unfamiliar with this type of game might be a little overwhelmed. However, there are a set of very useful tutorials available from the FreeCiv wiki. Some tutorials, however, can delve a little too much into the client-server architecture of FreeCiv, which, while informative, might be a little too much for just a casual player who wants to pick up and play.

For fans of the original game series, I highly recommend FreeCiv for a free and cross-platform alternative. It does an admirable job from what I have seen of a good Civilization experience and is well worth a look.

People unfamiliar with the series should still give it a good try, but might want to read up on the tutorials a little bit first and give it some patience. If you're like me, you'll probably get hooked quite quickly!

FreeCiv is available for Windows, Mac OS X and many other Linux and Unix operating systems too.