Alien Arena has been released for Microsoft Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. Alien Arena has been free-to-play since its inception, and there are currently no plans to change it to pay-to-play.

There are 35 standard maps to choose from, 11 player characters, and 9 weapons with alternate fires, and a grappling hook. The game is powered by the id Tech 2 based CRX Engine, which features 32 bit hi-res texture support, shaders, textured particles, stainmaps, reflective water with refractive shaders, light bloom, real-time shadows, real-time vertex lighting, normal-mapping, and other modern effects, all of which can be turned on or off in the menu. Also featured is an internal server browser for finding other people to play online and the external Code Red Galaxy program which also serves as an IRC interface.

Alien Arena features standard Deathmatch, similar in style to Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament. Also included are Capture the Flag, Deathball, Team Core Assault, Team Deathmatch, All Out Assault, and Cattle Prod, a new play variant that requires players to herd robotic cattle to earn points. There are six game mutators (excessive, instagib, rocket arena, vampire, regeneration, and low gravity) which can alter the game to play differently. All modes can be played online against other players or offline against bots. The bots can be customized using an external program included with the installation of the game.

Alien Arena features 9 weapons and a grappling hook, each with a secondary function. You start out with the Blaster and the Violator, and can pick up other weapons at their spawn points in the various levels (assuming a weapon-modifying mutator isn’t set on). The weapons progress from 1 to 9 roughly in order of power.

* Blaster

The first starting weapon. The primary fire shoots out a slow moving plasma ball that does minimal damage. Takes 4 hits to kill a newly spawned player. The alt fire shoots out a much weaker plasma beam that may fire and hit immediately, but does hardly any damage compared to the primary fire and isn’t used very often. The primary fire can be jumped off of, kind of like a rocket jump, to gain new heights/speeds and string together trickjump maneuvers.

* Violator

The second starting weapon. The primary fire is a melee attack that kills fairly quickly. The alt fire is a slower firing melee attack that kills faster than the primary fire. The violator functions very much like the Quake 3 Arena gauntlet melee weapon.

* Alien Disrupter

A railgun type weapon. Primary fire shoots out a 60 damage beam slug that takes 3 hits to kill a newly spawned player. The secondary fire, when held down, is a scope, much like a sniper rifle, and when released fires a beam slug that does three times the normal damage. However, the secondary fire emits a noise that can be heard by other players, so it’s not a good function to be sneaky with. This weapon is used (with modifications) in the instagib mutator.

* Chaingun

Machinegun-like weapon. Primary fire spins the barrel and fires a stream of rapid fire bullets. The secondary function engages all the barrels simultaneously for a powerful shotgun burst. Very effective with the quad damage.

* Flamethrower

Spews fire that is most useful for damage over time. Primary fire is a constant but short ranged stream of flame that does moderate damage, but is enhanced with damage over time. Secondary fire shoots a long range mortar shot that does more damage than the normal shots, but consumes more ammo. Is the only weapon in the game that is capable of harming a player after death.

* Rocket Launcher

Does what the name suggests and shoots rockets. Primary fire is a moderately fast and quite powerful rocket shot with a fairly large amount of splash damage. Secondary fire is a slower moving rocket, but if the player has cell ammo, it homes in on players. The most commonly found weapon in the game. This weapon is used in the rocket arena mutator.

* Alien Smartgun

A grenade/mine layer that deals electrical damage through its blast radius, as well as with direct, electrically charged hits. Primary fire is a grenade that explodes in a few seconds time. Secondary fire is a mine layer function, where the mines either explode when walked over by a player, or, if not touched, in a period of time. When groups are layed, they all expire at the same time.

* Beamgun

A very powerful and sought-after weapon that shoots a stream of beams that may not have the power of blast radius or large areas of effect, but deal damage quickly. Primary fire is the constant stream of beam slugs. Secondary fire is a more powerful, but delayed blaster shot that can also be used to blaster-jump, and can also be used to plasma-climb.

* Vaporizer

The most immediately-devastating weapon in the game, this is Alien Arena’s equivalent of a BFG. The primary fire is an instant-killing blast that may take a few seconds to come out, but deals a lot of damage over a large blast radius. The secondary fire is a plasma bomb that also deals damage over a large area. This is the hardest weapon to find in the game.

* Grapple Hook

A weapon not found normally in gameplay, but is decided by a server setting. The setting determines either if the grapple is disabled, or a player spawns with it, along with the blaster and violator. Primary fire is a hook that, when attached, will bring a player to its destination rather quickly. Secondary function is a hook that doesn’t grab things and isn’t very long range, but is used primarily to attack players. However, the normal function can also hurt players, just not as effectively.

Two opponents (one of them can be an AI) start from opposite corners of the gameboard, which is covered by randomly colored tiles. By selecting an appropriate color each player can annex the tiles of that color that are adjacent to the players domain. The one who gets more than 50% of the gameboard area wins.

One cannot chose the opponent’s color to prevent attempting to annex his tiles. To ensure that the game is fair, one can flip the gameboard and play again from another side.

The game allows square, hexagonal, and random-shape tiles.

AssaultCube is available for Microsoft Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. While the Cube engine is free software, parts of AssaultCube, such as the graphics, are proprietary.

AssaultCube was designed to be more realistic and team-oriented than Cube while keeping Cube’s distinctive fast-paced gameplay. In comparison to other games, AssaultCube is slower than Quake but faster than Counter-Strike. The two fictional teams in the game are the Cubers Liberations Army (CLA) and the Rabid Viper Special Forces (RVSF).

AssaultCube retains a movement bug from the original Cube engine that allows players to utilize straferunning to move at a faster speed. This was left intentionally unfixed by the developers because it was considered an enjoyable feature of Cube, similar to bunny hopping in Quake.[2]

Another unrealistic feature of the game is the potential for using the recoil of the weapons (which pushes one backwards) to achieve unusually high jumps when shooting downwards. This was also designed intentionally, allowing players to achieve faster getaways in capture the flag games.

AssaultCube’s weapons are all fictional and fill the basic niches of a modern first-person shooter: the assault rifle, sub-machine gun, sniper rifle, pistol, knife, and shotgun. However, some[who?] players on AssaultCube believe the game should adopt more realistic weapons like in Counter-Strike.

AssaultCube has many team and non-team based match modes:

* Capture the Flag
* Team Deathmatch and Deathmatch
* One Shot One Kill and Team One Shot One Kill
* Last Swiss Standing (Knives and Grenades only)
* Team Survivor (Teams fight until opposing team is eliminated) and Survivor

The game never achieved commercial success but it did manage to build a dedicated following, who have stayed with the game and continued its development. Due to the lack of commercial success, the official servers closed in 2002. As a consequence of this, the original retail version of the game is unusable. However, the Allegiance community has successfully rebuilt the game and it is now free to play.

Allegiance received GameSpot’s Best Game No One Played award in 2000.

The PC version 1.0, subtitled Recon, was first released on July 4, 2002. Since then, there have been over 20 updated versions released, the most recent being AA:SF (Overmatch) v2.8.2. It is financed by the U.S. Government and distributed for free. It was originally developed by the MOVES Institute at the Naval Postgraduate School and continues to use the Unreal Engine.

America’s Army has been developed since 2000 and still changes through add-ons and patches. The Windows version can be found as a download on the Internet or as free DVDs at U.S. Army recruiting centers. All versions use Evenbalance’s PunkBuster technology to prevent cheating.

Professor Michael Zyda, the director and founder of the MOVES Institute, acknowledged Counter-Strike as the model for the game.

America’s Army is relatively authentic in terms of visual and acoustic representation of combat, especially pertaining to its depictions of firearm usage and mechanics, but its critics have alleged that it fails to convey wartime conditions as accurately as it claims.

America’s Army is the first computer video game to make recruitment an explicit goal and the first well-known overt use of computer gaming for political aims. The game is used as a playable recruiting tool and critics have charged the game serves as a propaganda device. In reality the game is developed by a regular game company that is funded by the Army. The game has hundreds of genuine hardcore fans and fan websites. The latest version is 2.8.2 which was released on September 6, 2007, with new features, bug fixes, and two new maps including Rummage and SF Hospital SE.

It is pointed out that its recruiting aspect bears resemblance to games in both the movie The Last Starfighter and to the novel Ender’s Game, a popular science fiction story of the 80s.

Its developers state that America’s Army has over 8.6 million registered accounts as of August, 2007, with over 4.8 million having completed the “basic training” part of the game. With several thousand players online at any one time between 2002 and 2007, it ranks in the top 10 FPS (first-person shooter) games played online during the period, as tracked by GameSpy. It was similar in performance to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory or Medal of Honor, also in the top ten, for much of that time period.

Until recently, the U.S. Army and Icculus had a contract saying that the former would port America’s Army to Mac OS X and Linux (x86 & AMD64) in both client and server versions.

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