I've Got More Kudos to Hand Out - Wesnoth

 It seems like that's all I've been doing lately, just giving out kudos like they were some kind of granola bar! But I suppose it can't be helped. Battle for Wesnoth has been under my nose for far too long — especially for a good game.

 Battle for Wesnoth is an odd duck, to say the least. It's not that there's any weird happenings in the game, per se; it's how it came to be.

 Let me put it this way: It's an open source game that has actual content.

(the crowd goes wild. On the East shores, there are screams of terror, whlist on the West shores there are thousands standing with their mouths agape.)

 Open-source games (with the exception of games that started out commercial before releasing the source) have the tendency to be bad. Very very bad. Wesnoth is nothing of the sort. In fact, it somehow manages to be extremely well designed without using any proprietary software libraries. This is an awesome accomplishment, and has been taken full advantage of, with ports made for virtually every imaginable system. It is available on Windows, Mac (Surprised me to!), Linux, BSD (the Open and Free varieties), BeOS, AmigaOS4(!), OS/2 and eComStation. There's a gossiped unofficial port to MorphOS - which will put me in heaven if I ever do get the chance to get my hands on a PegasosPPC (I'm hoping to save up and get the new Pegasos 3!)

 It's not easy to describe what amazes me so. Perhaps it's the amount of people playing the game. Open Source games tend to be somewhat of a niche, with not many people playing. But Wesnoth is such a good game, it's actually able to attract people to it! One of the cool features of the game is the ability to make your own campaigns. This is a bit of a large task, however, as you need to understand WML (Wesnoth Markup Language, not the WAP hypertext junk).

 There are a number of things that I can say makes this game great (which I generally won't mention), but I think that the #1 thing is the Music. It's so good (not so much as well composed, but well produced), that Many would call it better then commercial game music (other than, of course, any music produced by Procyon Studios — Mitsuda is just too great). Some of it does sound as if it came from Blizzard's Diablo.

 Of course, there are negative points to all things, but there are a plesent few in Battle for Wesnoth. I've narrowed it down to two very minor faults. The first problem is that there is no loading screen — which can make you believe that your computer has crashed. It is, however, still bearable, and is never a problem during gameplay. The second (and last) is just an annoyance. There's no hardware acceleration (Such as OpenGL, which is available for virtually any video graphics setup), so things can get slow if you have a slow processor. There could have really been some nice effects if there was hardware acceleration (smooth scrolling comes to mind).