Freeverse

Resident art guy Steve Tzé traditionally dresses up our office mascots in Halloween costumes, and this year is no exception.

Starring Jen Carols as The Bride, we give you...KILL MONTY!

(Click the image to download the wallpaper.)

Version 1.0.1 of the Active Lancer Demo has been released.
The new version of the demo contains the following changes:

• contains considerably smaller resources, including compressed music and a shortened cinematic. This results in a demo with a significantly smaller file size.
  
• fixes a bug that prevented the game from launching under Classic OSes
  
• includes new gameplay balances and difficulty changes
  
• miscellaneous bug fixes

Both the new demo and the updater archive can be downloaded from the Freeverse download page.

A downloadable shareware version of 3D Crazy Eights has been released!

Users can download the free trial at download.freeverse.com.

The game is available from the Freeverse Store in two packages. An electronicly-sent registration code is available for $19.95, and a boxed version (shipping soon) with a full suite of puppets and a free copy of Enigma is available for $24.95.

Freeverse Software is happy to announce the planning of a fiendish Halloween party on their GameSmith game server.

The party, entitled Tricks And Trumps, will be held from 8 PM EST till midnight on Halloween night. The server will be decorated with spooky graphics, and all members of the GameSmith community are invited to come out and enjoy a night of doing more than just handing out candy to strangers.

As should be expected with any good Halloween party, there will be tricks and treats! We will be doing some free giveaways to lucky ghosts and goblins, as well as surprising people with a few tricks as well.

Joining the party is as simple as logging onto GameSmith with any game that supports it, including Freeverse's 3D Card Game series, Airburst, Solace, Board Games Deluxe, and many others. People looking to join the fun but who don't have a supported game can download a free demo of any of the titles and create a free account in a matter of seconds.

We hope to see you there!

Freeverse Software is happy to announce that our latest card game, 3D Crazy Eights, has gone golden master and is on its way to the duplicators for printing.

3D Crazy Eights is the card game you know and love from your childhood, updated to be shiny and new for the modern age. With tons of opponents, kid-friendly features, and full support for GameSmith, 3D Crazy Eights is crazy fun for the whole family!

The boxed version will include a free copy of our award winning codebreaking game Enigma and a full suite of opponents, all for the low price of $19.95. Both 3D Crazy Eights and Enigma are 100% OS X 10.3 "Panther" ready (as well as working on previous versions of OS X and Classic OSes 8.6 and 9.X). The boxed version will ship within the next few weeks.

A downloadable shareware version of 3D Crazy Eights will also be available within the coming weeks.

The tutorial for opening your router for use with GameSmith has been updated to contain port numbers from many of our newly released and upcoming games.

Many people have asked us over the years if there will ever be an OS X version of SimStapler. As mentioned last night on Your Mac Live, we're happy to note that a SimStapler mode will be available in our upcoming collection of video camera games, ToySight.

A screen shot is available.

The last clue has been posted in the Arcane Arena "Near-Deity" contest.

A new version of the GameSmith Server has been made live. Users do not need to modify anything on their machines to use the new server.

The major change to this server revision is to squash the "bot bashing" bug which allowed users to abuse single-player bot games to raise their ranks. On the new servers, games will only be ranked if there are two or more human players, and in a team game, only if there is at least one human on each team.

The new server also fixes ranking for 3D Crazy Eights (to be released soon) and adds support for 3D Gin Rummy.

Click the Read More link for a note from server programmer Randy Thompson regarding handling another ranking related issue.

Randy writes:

- Note: Someone wanting to cheat badly enough could switch his strategy over to "Guest Bashing" by launching multiple copies of a game, signing on as a guest, and then purposely letting the player(s) with the account(s) win. The only way to close THAT hole would be to revert back to only ranking games in which all players had accounts. Even so, a player that REALLY is determined to cheat can simply set up several accounts for which he doesn't care about their ranks and then bash them too! A way to close THAT hole would be to charge for all accounts, which isn't going to happen. (Anyone still determined to cheat and willing to pay extra to elevate his/her rank has serious personality issues that I don't care to deal with in code.)

The demo for our new vertical scrolling shooter, Active Lancer, is now available from MacGameFiles.

At 95 MB, the demo includes the entire first cinematic, as well as three separate game levels and multiple tracks from the soundtrack. Download the Active Lancer demo today!

Kit Pierce of MacGamer has given Active Lancer a huge thumbs up!

Active Lancer is a rare and excellent arcade entry from Freeverse. It's full of that Freeverse charm that makes their stuff so great. Active Lancer may not be a new concept, but the care behind the design of the game makes it a real pleasure to play. With local and network support for multiplayer games, replay value is high, and the game is a good challenge in single or multiplayer mode. In short, Active Lancer has all of the things going for it that qualifies it as a game worth playing. Check it out.

Active Lancer is now shipping, so be sure to buy a copy today!

Game features multiplayer scrolling action, LAN play

New York - October 20, 2003 - Freeverse Software announced today that it had begun retail shipments of Active Lancer, its vertical-scrolling shooter developed by Anson Tsai. The game features fifteen levels of vertical scrolling action, a variety of pilots and weapon types, and two-player simultaneous local or LAN play.

Set in a time when Earth had befriended a number of extraterrestrial civilizations, and developed the fledgling Utopian Space Order (USO), Active Lancer pits one or two players against the Cherae Ansebash, rulers of the Engaff system, who are determined to conquer the universe, one planet at a time.

Active Lancer is a vertical ship shooting game that takes inspiration from classics such as Super R-Type, Gradius, and Xevious. Players must maneuver the USO's ultimate personal strike weapon, the AK-71V3 Lancer, an ultralight, form-fitting, flying mechanical exoskeletion with five devastating weapons systems to defeat the conquering Cherae Ansebash hordes.

The Lancer is equipped with dual guided air-to-ground missiles and dumb bombs for targeting threats on the ground. Airborne enemies must face the Lancer's three multimode tactical systems: powerful lasers, homing plasma shots, and a weaker wide-range spread shot. Each of these weapons fires in normal mode, and an enhanced charged mode, which provides extra strength for each shot, as well as additional offensive or defensive effects.

Each Lancer is tuned to the specifications of its pilot, for maximum effectiveness in the universe's changing military environment. Lancer Squad's three pilots, Milo, Lada, and Kamu, have customized suits with their own blends of armor and engine power. Each ship is also capable of upgrading quickly while in flight, or during lulls in combat via an authorized USO upgrade hangar.

Technical Information
Active Lancer also sports a custom graphics engine that uses translucency, alpha blending, and scaling capabilities. It features 16-bit rendered 3D graphics, full screen 60 frames per second vertical scrolling and horizontal exploration scrolling. The game takes advantage of monitors that offer 16:9 aspect ratios, such as Apple 20, 22, and 23 inch cinema displays, the 15 and 17 inch Powerbook G4s, and the 17 inch iMac. Active Lancer also features a sixteen-channel surround sound engine that brings a whole meaning to "intense".

Active Lancer offers fifteen intense levels spanning over five different themes. Each level was created using an airbrushing, scanning, and retouching/embellishment process developed by Marcus Conge of Digital Manipulation. The game's captivating cinematics were created by a team of artists led by Andrew Tokuda, who also composed the game's thrashing techno score. The Active Lancer Original Soundtrack audio CD, featuring remastered, remixed, and extended versions of the game music, will be released by Digital Droo in the coming weeks.

Developed as a Carbon application, Active Lancer requires Mac OS 8.6 or later, or Mac OS X. The game will be available at Apple Resellers and at the Freeverse Store on a CD-ROM for US $19.95.

About Freeverse
Headquartered in New York, Freeverse Software is a developer, publisher and distributor of interactive entertainment products for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. Freeverse operates an online store: http://store.freeverse.com/

http://www.freeverse.com/lancer.mgi

http://www.desoftware.com/lancer.html

Active Lancer and Freeverse are our trademarks. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

contact:
Colin Lynch Smith
Colin@Freeverse.com
AIM: colinlynchsmith
Freeverse Software
447 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
(212) 929-3549 - Fax (212) 647-0562

The official site for our upcoming iSight-enabled suite of games, ToySight, has gone live!

The website, which can be found at toysight.com, contains screenshots from The Plank, Marble Factory, and Submarine Battle, as well as a movie demonstrating Freefall and The Plank.

ToySight is expected to ship by the end of the year.

Burning Monkey Mahjong Solitaire is the Application Of The Week at macoszone.com.

They add: The crew at Freeverse has done it again. This time the monkeys are back in the classic tile matching game of Mahjong. Burning Monkey Mahjong features over 30 different classic and original tile layouts, 5 skill levels, beautifully designed tiles, customizable backgrounds, and of course plenty of typical tortched simian wackyness!

Webpages are now live for 3D Crazy Eights and Burning Monkey Casino.

No downloads are available for either yet, but will be in the coming weeks. For now, you can enjoy some thrilling screen shots.

Clue #5 has been posted in the Arcane Arena "Near-Diety" Contest.

Version 3.4 of the GameSmith library has been released. This is a recommended upgrade for all GameSmith-enabled games.

New features include local or global TCP/IP support, parental lock-out, enhanced game info, significant speedups, and numerous bug fixes. You can learn about what's new, or you can update your games today!

3D Crazy Eights, our upcoming addition to the 3D Card Game line, has reached Beta 16.

The game is expected to go Final Candidate within the next two days and should ship in November.

Vice-President Colin Lynch Smith, as well as Solace developer Rocco Bowling are both quoted extensively in Apple Gaming's new feature on shareware games, entitled Hidden Gems.

Check out the article, as well as Apple's list of top shareware games for the Mac!

Zack Lipowski of Inside Mac Games has posted a review of our newest strategy board game, Solace.

Our recently released Burning Monkey Mahjong Solitaire was reviewed by Michael Phillips of MacGamer. What did he think of it?

Freeverse Software has done it again with Burning Monkey Mahjong Solitaire. With its addictive gameplay, rich graphics, customizable interface, wide variety of tile Layouts and of course, monkeys, BMMJ is sure to delight Mahjong veterans and neophytes alike.

Read the rest of his review!

3D Crazy Eights, our upcoming addition to the 3D Card Game line, has reached Beta 10.

While the game is not in a fully public beta, any parties interested in beta testing it may contact Bryan Pietrzak to join the beta.

The game is expected to ship this quarter.

Welcome, one and all, to our newest web creation - a simple, easy to read news page!

All of our updates and product announcements will be posted here. Archives are set up by category for easy browsing of news related to particular titles.

Additionally, our news can now be consumed via the RSS aggregator of your choice! Our feed can be found in the navigation bar on the left side of the page. We recommend NetNewsWire, AmphetaDesk, or nntp//rss.