Pacific Storm in London Drugs

My brother's band came over today for a jam session, so my Dad and I went out to the malls to do some chores. Whilst in the London Drugs I noticed two boxed copies of Pacific Storm available in the computer section. The cool thing about this is that Pacific Storm was made using the LGPL 3D engine Ogre3D. This is probably the first time that I personally have seen open source software on the shelves of a major retailer (Mandriva at the UBC Bookstore is the only other case). A big congradulations go out to Lesta Studios on getting their work into major retailers, a big congradulations to Sinbad and the rest of the Ogre3D team for making Ogre3D a top notch open source graphics engine. Pacific Storm can be purchased from your local London Drugs for $40. You can check out more screenshots of Pacific Storm on the Ogre3D website. Now if we could convince them to port to Linux (Ogre3D (OpenGL) runs on Linux already)

This isn't an isolated case of quality coming from open source games. I am constantly keeping my eye on Battle for Wesnoth, which recently released version 1.2. This version introduces some new music, multiplayer features, and graphics, including new character portraits. I know that the character portraits were the main complaint of Byron, and with these new ones (and hopefully even better ones in the future), he's got far less to complain about. I think I prefer the mountain graphics from the previous releases, but these kind of artistic things are still getting ironed out.

Another game having a new release recently is Danger from the Deep, a WWII German submarine simulator. This game used to have the standard ugly programmer graphics, but in the past year the models and other graphics have gotten much better. This is a game that looks like it is really picking up speed (it's at about Klein Fahrt right now, but it's getting closer and closer to Grosse Fahrt), and you might want to give it a download and try it. The game desperately needs a manual (as much of the gameplay is difficult to figure out), but I think it could be a submarine simulator's dream.

Another game using Ogre3D is Ankh, made by Deck13 (Ogre3D site screenshots). Ankh is an adventure game, much like the LucasArts games that many of us grew up on. I don't know how much it retails for, but the game looks like it kicks ass. The primary language of the game is German, and they even got some professional voice actors to do the voices (apparently the main character is voiced by the guy who does German dubbing for Tom Cruise). The developers did a preorder campaign to see if there was enough demand for a Linux port. About a week later they announced that there was plenty of demand for Linux, and the Linux port is now underway.

If anybody thinks that Linux/open source gaming is dead, I'm sure they will be beat down to a bloody pulp this coming year. Just check out the Featured Projects page for Ogre3D.