In need of a new fun physics sim? How about one that's free, open source and can be played in multiplayer? Rigs of Rods might be what you're after and they have a new release.

What actually is it? Rigs of Rods is a free/libre soft-body physics simulator mainly targeted at simulating vehicle physics. The soft-body physics system is based on mass-spring-damper theory. It's pretty much a sandbox vehicle playground, one you setup yourself with trucks, cars, cranes, boats, bridges, aeroplanes and much more.

Not the most beginner friendly game, with it needing plenty of modding and configuration to get it where you want it but it seems like a nice option for some physics amusement. As it turns out, we've never written about it here, despite it being around since at least 2005 - madness!

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Seems the team has been busy since the last release over a year ago, with a major new release landing on February 2, 2021. Quite a lot is included too, and much like Pioneer (another open source sim), they've moved their UI system over to the popular Dear ImGui . Now they have a modern UI system in place, it should be a lot easier to tweak it and work with it.

Not only that though, here's a bunch of what else is new:

• Major cleanup of the codebase
• Upgraded the translation system to work with popular Weblate
• A new Quake-style console variable system
• Vehicle speedometer will now be based on wheel speed rather than vehicle speed
• Added the ability to configure the blinker lock range
• Added the ability to toggle hydro speed coupling
• Added support for OS-specific input mapping
• Added a game controls information panel
• Added thrust reversal for aircrafts
• Added the ability to individually remove vehicles
• Updated Xbox 360/One controller and G29 wheel input maps, added wireless PS4 controller input map

Plus the usual assorted bug fixes.

Find it on the official site and download it easily from itch.io .

As impressive as it is, hopefully someone will be able to hook up a good introduction / tutorial for new players getting into it. While it's been around a long time and there's beginner guides out there, having something in game for people to follow would really help.

Albion Online is the sandbox classless MMO that has Linux support and it's going strong, with another major update announcement that will bring Faction Warfare 2.0.

That's the big headline feature, bringing on the next stage of City Faction Warfare which will give you the ability to control entire regions and a special front-line battle system to encourage fighting. There will also be a big bunch of rewards too, along with powerful Faction Mounts to grab. Also teased is a new Faction with a unique playstyle aimed at advanced players. More map changes to help with this too including the Royal Continent to see an expansion.

Hellgates, the special system where two teams fight through a dungeon engaging in both PvE and PvE will also see a major expansion. It will have an option for 10v10, better graphics, a bunch of new layouts to prevent it getting stale, a new and better matchmaking system, a new rising lava mechanic to prevent one team stalling, new creatures to fight and a dedicated Hellgate Infamy system for rewards and track success. Sounds like Hellgates are going to get awesome.

You can listen to an overview of it in the below video:

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What else? Apart from the major features there's also new vegetation graphics coming to bring the world to life a bit more, better tooltips are coming along with a Loadouts feature to quick-equip a selected set of items and loadouts can be shared to other players.

Play Albion Online free on Linux from the official site or Steam .

Pioneer is another classic example of a long-running free and open source game doing well, with a brand new release up that overhauls plenty of important parts.

The Pioneer 2021-02-03 release has been a year in the making and implements their new UI system built on top of the powerful and open source ImGui . They also mentioned vastly improved combat with some aim assist, better trading, you can now actually rotate the camera with the middle mouse button for better camera control and plenty more.

Here's what else is new and you can see just how much went into it:

• New ship: Skipjack Courier from OKB Kaluri ( #4871 )
• New model: Escape pods (initially only to be scooped up, not purchasable) ( #4877 )
• Improve combat targeting by adding aim assist for player weapons ( #5037 )
• Complete overhaul of commodity prices, to be similar to Frontier ( #4831 )
• Redesign System and Sector Map View layouts ( #4852 )
• NewUI is dead, long live PiGui! ( #5032 )
• More lively station traffic control communications ( #4987 )
• Ship-specific atmospheric pressure limits ( #4958 )
• Add surface impact alerts #4891
• Captains log added ( #4795 )
• Show background stars in system view ( #5068 )
• Show surface starports in system view ( #5060 )
• Significantly reduce savefile sizes ( #5075 )
• New BBS advert for soldout commodity ( #5059 )

That's only what they consider to be major, there's a huge amount of smaller fixes and improvements across the whole game including a new unified colour theme and new icons, stars on the map showing up as bigger and brighter depending on their actual size in space, translation improvements and so on.

See more on the official site .

Chess, it's a classic right? So how about a nice game of Chess? I am in fact talking about Lichess, a free and open source browser-based online Chess game.

You might think it funny but until recently, I had somehow never heard of it. It's been around since 2010, starting off a simple hobby project and it has since grown into one of the most popular Chess websites around. Ten years later it's still kept the original promises of remaining free and open source and it just seems to have continually grown. If you believe Alexa rankings, it's in the top 2,000.

With close to 80K players online at the current time of writing, it's easy to see it's popular and it has every right to be. It works perfectly in any browser I tried (including mobile!), it has no adverts, it doesn't require an account, it's totally open source (even the Android build is open source), it has a ton of puzzles, it can teach you to play and so much more. Lichess is not just a browser-based Chess game, it's a huge assortment of different modes and a big community to back it up. Not only all that, you can also sit and watch games too. If that's your thing.

If, like me, you had no idea it was a thing and apparently you also live under a rock, I hope this was helpful for you.

You can play for free online, against friends and a lot more on Lichess.org .

After a new online experience to play with friends and one that's free to play? Untrusted is a new social deduction hacking game with two sides facing off. Now available in Early Access, developer evolvedlabs plans to keep it there until Q2/Q3 this year so they can thoroughly test it with players.

Inspired by the likes of Werewolf / Mafia and other similar types of games with support for 10 to 16 players to join a game online. The idea is that hackers from the fictional NETSEC group are tasked in hacking a specific server on a computer network, while there's a few AGENTS try to arrest them or convincing players to snitch on others. There's a few ways to each side to win and it sounds quite interesting.

Watch video on YouTube.com

Feature Highlight:

• Hacking themed game focused on social interactions.
• Hack into computers and analyze their log to find out who is telling the truth
• Keep your personal log and cross-reference data to find out who are the undercover agents
• Multiple winning conditions for both factions: hack or murder your way to victory.
• 2 Factions and many neutral classes
• 22 Unique classes
• More than 70 unique skills
• Unlock avatars and badges as you win

Find it free on Steam .

The developer added in an official GamingOnLinux avatar, so you can show off a bit if you wish. This needs to be done by redeeming a special code and we have lots to give away for you below:

[giveaway]26[/giveaway]

Major updates are going live for Valve's free to play MOBA with Dota 2 nowhaving a CS:GO styled Overwatch mode designed to help sort through all the reports of player behaviour.

Sadly, Dota 2 (and many other online games) end up with a lot of poor behaviour from players. From shouting down microphones, to using every possible slur they can think of in the text chat. It can easily ruin games, and it is quite a big problem.

As noted in the blog post this new Overwatch system allows players to review cases giving them a replay that might show off "negative" behaviour from a certain player, and then choose if that player is "guilty, not guilty, or insufficient evidence".

Eligible players will occasionally be notified below their profile pictures that they have the option to review a case. Reviewers will earn an accuracy score for their efforts, and those who falsely convict will receive a lower score, eventually losing the ability to participate in Overwatch at all. To gather a pool of reliable reviewers, we’ll be enabling a growing number of accounts for participation over the next week or so.

Reporting people has changed in Dota 2 now too. You can report other players directly from the scoreboard, or by selecting someone and clicking a flag on their portrait and you can place markers to show where reviewers can look for it. The system allows multiple reports too so it all adds together to add more evidence.

In another blog post earlier this month, Valve also announced the return of the Dota Pro Circuit for the Winter 2021 season and it's going to have six straight weeks of daily action. To help with this they've also revamped the experience of watching games directly inside Dota 2. You can see a schedule in-game, and see what's currently going on plus more like follow teams directly.

Additionally, Valve will be adding in a way to support your favourite teams in Dota 2 competitive by purchasing some branded cosmetics like in-game effects, sprays, emotes, loading screens and (of course) chat-wheel lines.

Love you wild adventures? Critters for Sale is one you should take a look at because this is the second time I've played it and I still have no idea what the hell is going on.

Originally released on itch.io back in 2019 which I mentioned here , and a contributor also took a look later, it's now seen a first episode release on Steam with Critters for Sale: SNAKE. It's so bizarre! A point and click visual novel adventure, one that's black and white with a bunch of animated scenes in the middle of the screen.

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"Critters for Sale is a compilation of 5 short stories: Snake, Goat, Monkey, Dragon, and Spider. All of which occur in different eras and locations, touching on themes like time travel, black magic, and immortality. A journey in which you meet characters familiar and foreign to you, ranging from inhabitants of a garden in Earth's orbit, aliens from Neptune, Noid Men from neighbouring timelines, and residents of a certain Reincarnation Palace. "

I don't want to spoil it so I will just say it's truly strange and I still don't understand it. Very unique idea, although I'm not really sure how legal including a real person is in a game in this way…you'll know what I mean if you try it. It's short too, so you won't lose much time by giving it a go and seeing if you like diving into something psychedelic.

Try out the first part free on itch.io and Steam . The full game with all episodes is currently due to arrive on Steam on June 3, 2021.

Note: The Linux version appears to still use an old Unity version, which has issues on NVIDIA GPUs. If you see distortions at the bottom of your screen, the easiest fix is just to add this as a launch option which makes it work perfectly:

-force-glcore42 -force-clamped

Inspired by the likes of Dwarf Fortress, Civilization, SimCity and more we have the free and open source Arcane Fortune which continues to expanding in features. Played in your favourite command-line terminal application, or just use the pre-made launch script it comes with that sorts out everything for you.

Seems like it has some genuinely great ideas, and considering how ridiculously popular Dwarf Fortress is, we know that shiny graphics are not a key to success. Perhaps Arcane Fortune will be able to carve out a nice niche.

Pictured - the beginnings of a new civilization in Arcane Fortune.

What's new in Arcane Fortune 0.3.0:

• Nobility - these families may join your empire and offer some advantages based on their personality and inclinations. For example, in diplomacy or war. Their opinions of you may change, however, depending on how you govern your empire.
• A trade system to exchange resources and negotiate defensive pacts with other empires.
• Kingdoms - sub-empires that may join your empire. Unlike noble houses, they retain more autonomy, but will share all the diplomatic relations (war/peace) with the parent empire.
• Assassination - useful both to explore other cities (they can scale walls) and to rid the world of the presence of unwanted leaders and nobles.
• Screen reader mode -- there is a page on the wiki which has more information about this mode and its features. Mostly the benefit of this mode is that the text cursor will be placed in relevant parts of the screen and some text can be tabbed through to help cue screen readers. There are also other small changes I've made based on feedback I've received.
• Changes to mouse controls making it easier to pan the map while moving a unit (thanks to lecom & Tchey on the forums for specific advice on this).
• Miscellaneous bugfixes (and likely new bugs to replace them!)
• Performance optimizations -- some of which might not be noticable since the nobility might slow the game down nearly as much as I've managed to speed it up.

The idea is certainly interesting, and the mash-up of ideas already makes the early game quite engrossing. The key is going to be in the AI, much like it is for Dwarf Fortress. Arcane Fortune is going to need to keep players engaged with encounters, and other civilizations.

You can download free on the official site and GitHub .

Combining elements of the Wolfenstein 3D classic first-person shooter with the rolling gameplay of Super Monkey Ball, what could go wrong? Return to Castle Monkey Ball is quite hilarious. Pointed out by a reader earlier this week, it's a web game you can play on itch.io right in your browser so there's no downloading and the idea actually works quite well. Amusingly so and it's pretty challenging too.

The idea here is that you're rolling your way through some cramped hallways, while soldiers are trying their best to shoot you. Smash into them to hurt them, keep rolling and collect bananas to boost your score and hopefully make it out alive. Probably one of the most unique mashups I've seen lately. Check out their trailer:

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"Fight your way through eight procedurally generated floors to escape the fortress! Collect bananas and treasure to maximize your score and defeat guards for time bonuses! Just get to the end before the timer runs out! Lose all three of your lives and it's game over for you.

Are you tough enough to take on this challenge and break free from the grips of your captors?"

The developer mentioned they're taking no money from it and it shall remain free.

Do give it a go on itch.io if you need a good laugh.