1. Battle For Wesnoth
David White who started Wesnoth back in 2003, had a vision of a free open source strategy game that had very simple rules, uses a strong artificial intelligence, challenging and fun. Wesnoth has already passed the 1 million mark for downloads. As of March 2007, the game is available in 35 different languages.
A normal Wesnoth player has 200+ unit types
16 different races
6 major factions
to choose from. Actually, you can even make your own custom units, design your own map, scenarios or even campaigns. It’s all up to your creativity. The most interesting part of any game is the ability to multiplay. You can challenge up to a total of 8 friends in multiplayer fantasy battles.
2. Nexuiz
Nexuiz is a free, cross platform, first person shooter distributed under GNU General Public License by Alientrap Software. It started back in May 31 2005 with version 1.0 using DarkPlaces, a significanlty modified quake engine. The current version, 2.2.3, was released on January 26, 2007. Nexuiz’s logo is based on the chinese character “力” which means strength.
Several notable features of the game include ability to multiplay up to 64 players
ability to generate bots for practice sessions dynamic lighting system similar to Doom 3
3. America’s Army
America’s Army is a tactical, multiplayer, first-person shooter owned by the United States Government and released as a global public relations initiative to help with U.S. Army recruitment. The first version, Recon, was released on 4th July 2002. The current version 2.8.1 was released on 22nd Mar 2007.
It’s the first well known computer game used for political aims. The game is used as a playable recruiting tool and critics have charged the game serves as a propaganda device. A counter on the homepage of the PC version shows over eight million registered accounts as of 2007. GameSpy tracked the game usage and reported an average of 4,500 players at any one time between 2002 and 2005. It is enough for America’s Army to rank in the Top 10 Online Games chart.
4. Enemy Territory : Quake Wars
is a first-person shooter follow-up to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. It also has the same science fiction universe as Quake 4, with a story serving as a prequel to Quake II. Quake Wars is the second multiplayer-only game in the Quake series after Quake III Arena. The gameplay is almost the same as Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, but with the addition of controllable vehicles and aircraft, asymmetric teams, much larger maps and the option of computer-controlled bots. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is being developed by Splash Damage for the PC using a modified version of id Software’s Doom 3 engine and MegaTexture rendering technology.
At E3 2006(Electronic Entertainment Expo), the game won the Game Critics Award for Best Online Multiplayer.
5.Tremulous
Tremulous is an open source team-based first-person shooter with a game play that is similar to Gloom(a quake 2 mod) and Natural Selection (a Half-Life mod). The game features two teams, humans and aliens, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The game has been downloaded over 200,000 times and was voted “Player’s Choice Standalone Game of the Year” in Mod Database’s “Mod of the Year” 2006 competition.
6. Tux Racer
Tux Racer is a newbie friendly, open source, 3D computer game starring the Linux mascot, Tux the penguin. Like many open-source games, the replay value of Tux Racer is extended by easy modification of the game. New maps can be created by making three raster images to indicate height, surface, and object placement. The last release of Tux Racer was version 0.61, 29th October 2001.
7.World Of Padman
WOP is a new and free comic style game that uses the Quake 3 engine. The game was recently featured in 3 German magazine covers; PC Action, ‘BRAVO Screenfun’ and ‘Linux Intern’.
8.Vendetta
is a first person twitch based MMORPG. New players get an 8 hour trial which is enough to get anyone hooked to it. After that, you gotta pay $5 a month which is quite worthwhile, especially considering the incredibly communicative development of the game. It has a native linux installer as well as one for Macs and Windows.
9.Alien Arena 2007
Alien Arena is a completely free FPS started by COR Entertainment in 2004 comprising of a science fiction ambience and a Quake like gameplay. This game is playable in single player mode against bots, but the action and thrill lies at the online multiplayer mode. Features of the Alien Arena 2007 include an internal server browser for finding other people to play online and an external program that acts as an IRC interface. There are 6 game types and 6 game mutators that changes the gameplay. Cattle Prod is a new game type that requires you to herd robotic cattle to earn points. Alien Arena 2007 is playable in Windows, Linux and FreeBSD.
10.Urban Terror
A mod of Quake III Arena, Urban Terror focuses a lot on realism. Number of weapons and gear that can be carried is limited. Accuracy is reduced when fired while moving and magazines require reloading upon expension. Damage areas are identified throughout the body. Wounds require bandaging and slows down movement significantly if the damage is not bandaged. Even a stamina bar is present to indicate if the player is able to sprint or jump. Released on 1st April 2007, Urban Terror 4 introduced 4 new features namely, ‘powersliding’, new weapons, player models and improved hit detection. It also supports anti cheating tools like PunkBuster, BattleEye and RunDMC.
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