Well its been a month since there has been any post and a long time before I posted so I have returned. First I'm going to start with talking about Alien swarm. Then I'll talk about our contest for a free Starcraft 2 trial key. Lastly ill post a question which you can answer in the comments section.
Alien swarm
Alien swarm is a free game released by Valve that originally was a UT2004 mod. When Valve hired 3 of the developers from the Black Cat studio they started to port Alien swarm to the source engine in there free time. Now Valve has released this and the entire source code so its extremely moddable. But lots of people questioned why they would release this game for free until someone posted in the steam forums why he thought they released it for free. The major reason Valve released this for free is that its more of a demo for the full game. The full game will be something you purchase with a lot more content instead of the campaign you get. Now there are some limitations for this game. These are you have to have a Steam account, Its limited to windows unless you use Wine or other windows emulation software and it seems to not work well with some hardware even causing some hardware to over heat. Now even with these issues I must say that this game is very fun to play even with just the one campaign.
The game play is a over head view of your characters. You play with 1-3 other players against what is called the swarm which are a alien race of bugs. From what I was able to figure out is that this race is attacking outlining colony's. You play the role of a military squad that is sent to recover and save all the civilians and kill the swarm. Any ways back to game play, The overhead view that you are placed in is a bit strange but is fairly easy to get used to and once you do you will probably be able to complete the normal campaign with out to much difficulty. While normal is a good level to start at you probably will want to go to hard fairly soon. One warning I will give is that often people who are new will just join hard/insane right away and ruin the game by dieing right away my suggestion would be to vote them out or play with friends. Any ways I found the game play quite fun especially with the unlock system were you get a new item or weapon every level.
The graphics I have to say look very nice. They did a great job of making the aliens look like they are running on the ground not just floating. The levels are set out amazingly and you will come across stressful points that are difficult but shouldnt be to hard if you figure them out. The actual look of the game is amazing I don't think they could have done a better job using the Source engine. One thing that surprised me is that they actually use the standard poly count in there weapons and models that they would use for a fps which is around the 6000 range. But this does show in the detail in the game.
Over all this game definitely worth the 2Gb download. I would suggest you try this game and when you get bored of it leave it installed as lots of good mods seem to be in the works. Also for those that complain I'm late about this I'm aware of that.
Contest
Ok so I purchased Starcraft 2 on a midnight release and got a trial key that I figured would be good for contest here on Guys on FOSS. While blizzard doesn't make there games open source they do at least release there games for multiple platforms even if they don't support Linux. I haven't figured out how to do the contest yet. But in my next post which will be some time during this week or next week will explain how to join.
Question
Should Guys on FOSS get a dedicated web server instead of a Garrys mod server to host a forum and our pod cast's.
That is all for now hopefully this post is long enough to make up for the month of us missing. Oh and our pod cast's will most likely continue after summer break. Although ill see if I can get some of us together to make one for at least next month.
