Free Culture Gaming!

After a two week hiatus, Free Culture Gaming will be changing course. Two new things have changed:

The first: all posts are now cross-posted to the FC-Discuss mailing list. Hopefully this should increase turnout and awareness significantly. To those of you who are just joining us, welcome. Please take the time to browse the site a bit.

The second: the times we picked were easy enough for most on the east coast to make, but didn’t really take into account those in other time zones or those who would be busy at the scheduled times. So for the next week a poll has been set up at When is Good to find out when everyone interested can attend. Please go to the poll (you need JavaScript for this to work), select your time zone from the drop-down list (if it is not detected automatically), and click on all of the times that are most convenient for you. The choices are rather comprehensive, but that was only so that time zone differences could be factored in. I don’t honestly expect anyone to say that they are free at 3 AM.

When is Good poll

Nexuiz recently released version 2.5 of its free FPS, and we are going to celebrate by playing it on Sunday. Join us Sunday at 8:30 PM EDT. Note that Nexuiz 2.4 and earlier versions are not compatible with 2.5, however you can download the ZIP file and play the game immediately after unzipping.

Meet us at #fcgame on Sunday to play.

Next Sunday (4/5/2009) at 8:30 PM EDT Free Culture Gaming will be playing BZFlag, the free CTF FPS!

Meet us in #fcgame on freenode at that time, where we will let you where the game is hosted.

Since Wesnoth 1.6 was just released, we’re going to have a game night tonight at 8:30pm EDT to celebrate!

Please download Wesnoth 1.6 stable and play through the tutorial before you join us at 8:30 (if you haven’t played Wesnoth before). Please talk to us in the official FC Gaming IRC channel, and we’ll organize the game there. Once we know how many players we have, we’ll join the official Wesnoth server and create a private game protected by the password “freeculture”.

If you don’t know what Wesnoth is, it is an open source turn-based tactical strategy game with a high fantasy theme, featuring both single-player, and online/hotseat multiplayer combat. For more info, see the Wikipedia article or the official Wesnoth website. We played it at our first game night, so I thought playing the new version would be an appropriate way to reboot FC Gaming

Apparently the IRC address was incorrect. It’s supposed to be irc.freenode.net, not irc.freeculture.org. It’s been fixed now.

Also, we’re going to try and test the games very early to make sure that they work before the set time, so that everything is ready by game time and no surprises arise.

This Saturday (9/6/08) we will be hosting our 3rd game night with Nexuiz. Nexuiz is a fast “back-to-the-basics” first-person shooter that uses the DarkPlaces engine, a heavily modified Quake I engine. We will be hosting with version 2.4.2, but 2.4 will work just fine if you’re willing to put up with nag screens. We’ll see if we can also use Mumble again for Nexuiz.

Meet us at the IRC channel at 6 pm Saturday where we’ll hammer out the details.

There is no game night Saturday, but there will be next Saturday (announcement to come).

However, I have been hanging out in The Mana World occassionally. The Mana World just hit 0.0.25, and it’s pretty fun. Look for your fellow free culturians (Conley, theophilus) and if you have an account, leave a comment with your character name. If you find me and tell me your from Free Culture Gaming, I will probably hook you up with some stuff. If you are having trouble finding me, ping me on IRC.

skyfaller found this blog, so I thought I’d point you all to it: Free Gamer

Sorry that there have been no game nights recently. We are going to try to get this thing really moving when school starts.

This Saturday August 9 at 6pm Eastern time, the Free Culture Gaming project will gather for the second time for a fully open source night of virtual mayhem.  The game will be OpenArena, a first-person shooter based on the Quake III Arena codebase, and we will be using Mumble for voice chat.  We will meet at 6pm in the Free Culture Gaming IRC channel to help everyone get their software configured, and hope to get the game running smoothly by 7pm. While there will be some time to make sure that everyone is properly set up, please try to have the latest versions of OpenArena and Mumble installed beforehand.

Wesnoth is a pretty neat turn-based strategy game with retro graphics.  It was my first time playing, and I really enjoyed it (except for the getting my butt kicked part).  One of these days I might actually be good at it and beat Karen and Nelson.

We’ll probably be doing another game night next week, so keep an eye out for more free video game fun.