
- #BZFLAG COM HOW TO#
- #BZFLAG COM CRACKED#
- #BZFLAG COM SOFTWARE#
- #BZFLAG COM SERIES#
- #BZFLAG COM FREE#
#BZFLAG COM CRACKED#
My favorite “gotcha” flags were “bouncy” (which causes one’s tank to jump uncontrollably around the map) and “obesity” (which triples the tank’s size with a corresponding drop in driving performance).īZFlag has recently cracked the rotation at a regular LAN party I attend with many of my friends, sharing screen time with high profile commercial titles that often require players to spend hours troubleshooting video driver problems before they can play. To call these flags “power-ups” is actually misleading, since many of the flags have negative effects.

Among the most lethal flags are “guided missile” (which takes some of the guesswork out of targeting enemies) and “shockwave” (which permits a tank to emit a spherical energy field that destroys any other tanks in its radius). The flags imbue tanks that touch them with special abilities. The “flag” part of BZFlag‘s title refers to the power-up flags that are strewn randomly across each map. In my hands, it allowed other players on the server to practice their skeet shooting. In the hands of an expert player, the jumping ability is a very effective way to elude hostile fire and reach safer ground. They accomplished this by allowing the tanks to leap into the air like giant, mechanized jackrabbits. Somewhere along the way, in the most obvious mutation of the old Battlezone DNA, the BZFlag folks decided it would be neat to add a Z-axis to the two-dimensional mix. In early versions of the game, it probably was easy. The rudiments of the game are very simple: drive the tank, line up enemy tanks in the crosshairs, and fire the cannon.
#BZFLAG COM SERIES#
Instead of a series of mano a mano battles with a computer-controlled adversary, BZFlag‘s multiplayer domains are filled with an international menagerie of expert human players who have no qualms about ruthlessly stomping on newbies in between their duels with each other. Where Battlezone was measured and deliberate, BZFlag is frenzied. Gamers who remember Battlezone will be able to feel the ghost of the old game while playing BZFlag, but they won’t have time for nostalgia.

In Battlezone, players drove a tank (rendered with straight green lines) around a very sparse landscape (also rendered with straight green lines) and traded fire with an increasingly difficult progression of enemy tanks. BZFlag has been developed in this fashion for twelve years, and the process is ongoing.īattlezone was a classic vector graphics game that was a fixture in early video arcades, and is where the “BZ” in BZFlag finds its roots. When applied to games, this approach results in products that are clearly labors of love, conceived and developed by people whose only goal was to produce the game that they most wanted to play.
#BZFLAG COM HOW TO#
Anyone who knows how to write computer code can contribute to OSS projects, provided they’re willing to donate their work.
#BZFLAG COM SOFTWARE#
This meat and potatoes approach is typical of software produced by OSS (open source software) projects. Only a modestly decorated menu screen with the most obvious option highlighted (“join game”) greets you. There are no movies, splash screens, or loading delays long enough to go make a sandwich. Launching the game doesn’t set off the usual procession of cinematic paeans to the game’s developers and publishers. Spending a little bit of time playing BZFlag is a study in how some high-budget commercial game projects have strayed from the fundamentals of good gameplay design. The latest version of BZFlag, released in January, takes up roughly one-fifth of one percent the disk space of Unreal Tournament 2004, a gargantuan first-person shooter that requires five CDs and about 45 minutes to install.
#BZFLAG COM FREE#
This is BZFlag, a free game with perhaps the best fun-per-megabyte ratio on the planet. I sputtered around the battlefield, ineffectually firing my cannon at other players whose tanks all seemed superpowered compared to mine. Whatever it was, it added an extra dash of disorientation to the often humbling experience of playing a multiplayer game for the first time. I had a feeling that my opponents were laughing at me, but I couldn’t be quite sure because they were doing it in Finnish. I felt more like a tank-shaped piñata, and I was having great difficulty staying alive for more than a few seconds at a time.
