Rejected Libre Games
This page lists games that have been rejected for inclusion in my Libre Game Recommendations list, and explains why they have been rejected. Please feel free to contact me if the issues mentioned here have been fixed, or if you disagree with the rejection.
Table of Contents:
- Games Rejected for Lack of Distinction
- Games Rejected for Incompleteness
- Games Rejected for Other Reasons
Games Rejected for Lack of Distinction
The following games have been rejected because they fail to sufficiently distinguish themselves from other games that preceded them. This can either be because they are clones, or because they are too generic within their genre.
Because there are so many of them, games whose sole purpose for existing is to clone other games (i.e. that make no attempt whatsoever to distinguish themselves, or that even try to explicitly be as similar to the original game as possible) are not listed here.
- Ceferino
- Chromium B.S.U.
- Emilia Pinball
- Freedoom
- GNUjump
- Hedgewars
- Hexoshi
- Monsterz
- Nikwi Deluxe
- OpenArena
- OpenSurge
- Penguin Command
- Pingus
- ReTux
- Secret Maryo Chronicles
- SuperTux
- Warmux
- XMoto
- XScavenger
Games Rejected for Incompleteness
The following games have been rejected because they don't feel like finished games, or because they are considered by the developers to be incomplete. If you are a game developer, please consider contributing to these projects to correct this.
- 0 A.D.
- Ardentryst
- FreeOrion
- Hexoshi
- Naev
- OpenSurge
- Plee the Bear
- SuperTux
Games Rejected for Other Reasons
- Beneath a Steel Sky - This game fails to distinguish itself from other point-and-click adventure games in any meaningful way, and it's not especially fun.
- Extreme Tux Racer - I tend to agree with this video regarding this game. It's really not a very well-designed game, and it has poor production quality. It's certainly an interesting part of libre gaming history, having been one of the earliest libre 3-D games made, but not fit for this list.
- Freeciv - While Freeciv has evolved far beyond the original Civilization, more recent games in the Civilization franchise clearly outclass it, especially in terms of production value, and Freeciv fails to be distinct enough to stand on its own merits despite this. It would be helped massively by a default ruleset that does something fundamentally differently from the Civilization series.
- Freedroid RPG - A fun game and basically complete, but suffers from game-breaking bugs and balancing issues, especially toward the end of the game. Most notably, in my test run, I experienced numerous segfaults (crashes) toward the end of the final area of the game, and I also experienced a massive difficulty spike around this time from too easy to too hard when enemies started constantly spawning everywhere.
- GHextrix - An interesting concept, but very bad production quality.
- glTron - It's very nice, but Armagetron (which is very similar) is better in most ways.
- Gravitation - This game is designed to be artistic more so than fun to play. While it's certainly interesting, it doesn't really belong in a list of game recommendations.
- Minetest - "Poor man's Minecraft" would be an apt description of the default Minetest game. Would be much better if it defaulted to one of the "games" designed to be fun, rather than just being designed as a modding template.
- Netrek - It seems like a nice old game, but it's multiplayer-only and I found all servers available to be empty.
- Njam - A highly extended variant of Pac-Man, but the extra features and gameplay changes don't make for a particularly good game and the production quality is a bit lacking. The biggest thing that's a strike, in my opinion, is the change to the ghosts; the original Pac-Man had consistent, but complex and hard to understand A.I. behaviors for each ghost, while Njam trades this for random movements combined with simplistic behaviors, a substantial downgrade.
- Passage - This game is designed to be artistic more so than fun to play. While it's certainly interesting, it doesn't really belong in a list of game recommendations.
- Pink Pony - A very interesting variant on something like Armagetron, but unfortunately suffers from production and interface issues. In particular: it is often very hard to see the trails left behind by the ponies; there are no sound effects; and the main menu is ugly. This could all be fixed with some polishing.
- Powermanga - I think this game distinguishes itself sufficiently from other scrolling shooters to be worth recommending. However, it often segfaults (crashes) during a long game run.
- Sopwith - This game is nothing special gameplay-wise, something I would consider to be an old shovelware title (and the history of the game suggests that too, given that it was developed solely to show the capabilities of some hardware). It also has confusing controls, segfaults (crashes) any time I try to go into "single player" mode, and has a non-functioning window close button (can only be closed with Ctrl+C).
- SuperTuxKart - SuperTuxKart is very close to being sufficiently distinct from the Mario Kart series, but it is desperately in need of online multiplayer support and could really use some additional original powerups. It would also be nice if it was named something that doesn't sound so similar to "Super Mario Kart", though this is not a show-stopper.
- Voxelands - This seems to be a very nice sandbox Minecraft-style game with a nice unique twist. Unfortunately, in my playtest, I was unable to figure out what you're supposed to do and found what little documentation there is to be spotty and inaccurate. This situation needs to be improved so that the game is accessible to newcomers before I can consider recommending it.
