Aside from that, I am having my ass handed to me on the “easier” Arcade mode for Steel Storm Episode II.

While Episode I was criticized for being too easy, that shouldn’t be a concern for Episode II. Along with the new maps comes new enemies and weapon upgrades.

It seems that weapons can be enhanced as well as added. They also come with the time-honored tradition of having to use them immediately upon unexpected visitors.

You’ll never know when or where they’re going to appear. They may show up in front of you, behind you, or all around you after a forcefield traps you from getting away.

You can get more information and pre-order your own copy of Episode II right now at the Steel Storm website.

Gameplay is very smooth. Even with the video settings on max, my Acer TimelineX AS1830T, which has an Intel Core i5 U430 at 1.20GHz, was able to play the game just as well as my desktop with the AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ at 3.2GHz backed up by the GeForce GT240. That might speak more about the netbook’s ability than the game but I was happy either way. The game is built on the Darkplaces engine, a Quake modification by LordHavoc.

The bird’s eye view is neat concept that I have not seen before. I can’t recall another game with a similar aspect. Some areas of the maps are difficult to see at times, especially when some high overhang begins to block some of the action. Fortunately, the developers knew enough to have them go transparent at a certain point. The quality of the graphics and the sounds is very good with ambient background music adding a nice balance to the gameplay.

The strength of the enemies is considerable. At first they seem quite weak in comparison to your firepower, but you often find yourself surrounded by a small horde. If you’re fortunate to escape, you could still find yourself head-to-head with a big ass tank or surrounded by an even bigger horde that spawn out of nowhere.

You can get your own copy for Linux, Windows, and Mac at the official Steel Storm website. Episode 1 is still a Beta and is subject to bugfixes and feature updates. There’s already been a couple so keep up to date by watching Kot-In-Action’s blog.

In the meantime, here’s some game footage I was able to grab while playing.

It was to be released today, but due to some bugs it’s been postponed temporarily. In the meantime, we’ve been given a taste of what to expect:

The official Steel Storm website will soon have the finalized version of Episode I for download (for free, remember). You can also pre-order Episode II should you be so inclined for a measly $10.

I enjoy installing games that are either not in the official Ubuntu repositories or are newer versions than what is available. After downloading and extracting, I move them to /opt and add a launcher to the Applications > Games menu. Some of the games need to be launched from their own directory which makes simply pointing the launcher at the executable impossible.

Instead, I actually set the launcher up to run a shell instance and pass it the required commands in order to run the game. For instance, Nexuiz doesn’t require this workaround as it has that as an option built in to it. I simply set the launcher’s command up as:

/opt/Nexuiz/nexuiz-linux-x86_84-glx -basedir /opt/Nexuiz

However, for games such as Sauerbraten and Warsow, I set the launcher’s command as:

sh -c “cd /opt/sauerbraten/ && ./sauerbraten_unix”

…and…

sh -c “cd /opt/warsow && ./warsow”

Now I can easily get back to my fragging.

You can initiate three fights a day. There’s also a tournament you can enter every other day. Every fight, even the ones during the tournament, are re-playable. As your Brute gains experience, it will attain weapons, skills, and buffs along with increases in speed, agility, and strength. Every Brute also gets its own unique URL which you can use to recruit pupils of your own, helping your Brute gain experience faster.

It’s all free and requires very little skill to play. An entertaining way to fill a few minutes out of the day.

I’m going to use Urban Terror for my example. Urban Terror was originally a total conversion mod of Quake 3 Arena. Since the release of the free ioquake3 engine, it’s become a standalone game that’s free to use and fun to play.

To install the game, one only needs to download it from one of the mirrors (or with the torrent file), unzip it, chmod +x either the ioUrbanTerror.i386 or the ioUrbanTerror.x86_64 file, and run it. But now I have the directory sitting on my desktop, and I’d like to move it some place else but still find it and run it easily when I feel like playing later on.

First I move it to the /opt directory where it’ll stay safe and sound.

sudo mv ~/Desktop/UrbanTerror /opt

I have to use sudo as /opt is restricted to superusers. The move will retain the original ownership so I can still access Urban Terror without having to become a superuser or putz around with more file permissions.

adam@nyx:/opt$ ls -alh
total 24K
drwxr-xr-x  4 root  root    16 2008-12-30 18:00 .
drwxr-xr-x 20 root  root  4.0K 2008-12-20 19:09 ..
drwxr-sr-x  7 games games 4.0K 2008-12-30 17:06 Savage2
drwxr-xr-x  4 adam  adam  4.0K 2007-12-22 17:53 UrbanTerror
adam@nyx:/opt$

Now, I’ll right-click on the main menu icon and choose Edit Menus. I’ll select Games from the Menus list and click on the New Item button on the right. A Create Launcher window will appear.

I’ll keep the Type as Application and I’ll use Urban Terror for the Name. Since I already know the path to the file, I’ll just type it in at Command (/opt/UrbanTerror/ioUrbanTerror.x86_64). If I didn’t, I would click on Browse and navigate to it. I’ll leave Comment empty. At this point, you could click the OK button and you would now have a menu item under Games for Urban Terror.

However, the icon looks rather bland as a non-descript window and out of place considering the rest of the list. It would be nice to have one there for pretty’s sake. Fortunately, Urban Terror ships with one icon.

If you closed the Create Launcher window, you can get back to it by following the above steps again, except you select Urban Terror from the Games‘ Items list and click on the Properties button. We could have done this the first time we added the menu item, but I wanted to show the possible What If?

Once you have the Launcher Properties window, you can click on the icon button, that spring-loaded application on the left, and Browse to where the icon(s) are located. You may be presented with Ubuntu’s collection of icons. You can choose any icon you want, either from Ubuntu’s or some other third-party, but I want to use the one that came with Urban Terror. Clicking on the Browse button, I navigate to /opt/UrbanTerror/q3ut4 and click the Open button. I’m presented with Urban Terror’s single q3ut.ico icon. I double-click on it, see it now in place of the default icon, and click Close. Now I can see it clearly in the Games menu.

You can use this same process to add any menu item for any application you want. The Edit Menus option lets you pick and choose what you see in the main menu as well. You can show or hide items by either adding or removing the checkmarks from the Show column. This works with Gnome’s Main Menu panel applet and Gnome’s Menu Bar panel applet, whichever one you’re using. You might be surprised to find something you already have installed and didn’t realize there was a menu item for it. I usually make sure Configuration Editor under System Tools can be seen as I like to tweak Gnome a bit.

The only reason I ever keep some installation of Windows around is to maintain access to games I’ve purchased through Steam. While I do enjoy open source games such as Sauerbraten and Urban Terror, I’m still attached to my Quake, Doom, FEAR, Bio-Shock, and Half-Life titles. If Valve could succeed in its intended goal, I could finally leave Windows forever.