Three Wise Men

Frozen Synapse is a new indie game from Mode7 Games.  How many of you are old enough to remember Laser Squad on Amiga? How about UFO / X-COM series from PC or perhaps Fallout Tactics? Frozen Synapse is a turn based tactics game with a relatively simple goal. You get a small pack of soldiers each carrying a certain weapon and you have to complete your mission in a limited number of turns. Missions can range from killing all enemies in the building or getting your units into a certain area to escorting a V.I.P. through a building or collecting few items and getting them out of the harms way. The main difference between Frozen Synapse and Laser Squad or X-COM is that in the former game both sides are planning their turn at the same time. When planning is complete both plans are executed simultaneously and this can result in many different and, especially, unpredicted situations. Read on for awesome screen-shots, game videos and more detailed game description.

Dust 514 is a codename for a game which has been in development for almost two years. Made by CCP in cooperation with Sony Entertainment it was finally announced on E3 2011 that game is becoming a reality.

Little is known about the game. Apparently it is a FPS and MMORPG hybrid. CCP’s creative director in charge of Dust 514, Atli Mar, calls it Persistent Shooter. Shooter because basically it is a first person shooter and persistent because it will have you coming back for more by combining elements of FPS and MMORPG and giving console players the unique experience in the world of EVE OnLine.

Recent Indie Humble Bundle provided us with Shadowgrounds and Shadowgrounds: Survivor two excellent third person action shooter games from Frozenbyte. There is a small problem if you are running Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal (this probably applies to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat). There are no sounds in the game.

The problem lies in the libasound which is bundled with the game. The solution is pretty much trivial, just get rid of those libraries. If you installed the game as root for all users then do this for Shadowgrounds:

# cd /usr/local/games/shadowgrounds/lib32/
# rm libasound*

And this for Shadowgrounds: Survivor:

# cd /usr/local/games/survivor/lib32/
# rm libasound*

Or if you are afraid that you’ll break something, move libasound_module_pcm_pulse.so and libasound.so.2 out of the lib32 directory.

Run the game, enjoy the sound. :)

Volley Brawl is a silly, but fun, game that will help you kill your time while you are compiling a new version of vanilla kernel or while you are waiting for some download to finish. If there is something missing in Linux then games are one of the first things on the list. Right behind a good graphics card driver and a working desktop environment, right? Let’s face it, games on Linux mostly suck. There are NO big titles available for Linux. There are some that used to be sort of big, but who will play ten year old games?

Installing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 on your PC is not a very difficult task, but reinstalling it is a completely different story. A story full of surprises, disappointments and breath-taking moments. Fortunately the story has a happy ending. Let’s start from the beginning.

In a land far, far away (Slovenia, Europe), not so long ago, lived a wise man who installed Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The wise man was happy with it and they would live happily ever after if some computer didn’t decide to die. The game was no more and the wise man had to buy a new computer. When he got his computer it was also time to reinstall the game. He tried to do so, but surprisingly to his disappointment the game barfed with an error: Game already registered.