Supertuxkart

After over 10 years of development, SuperTuxKart has released version 1.0.

It's been a long road. In December 2009, the long task of porting over to an entirely new codebase, Irrlicht, was complete. In December 2014, a new version was released with a new graphics rendering engine that made the 3d graphics faster and a lot more realistic. But still the versions were numbered 0.x.

Now, finally, 1.0 is out. The team released it having nailed a long sought-after feature, which is true networked multiplayer support. Previously, you could have more than one joystick / keyboard / controller on your computer, and you could have several human players on at once using split-screen graphics. Now, you can play against other players using their own computers / Android devices anywhere in the world, and the days of split-screens are over. You can use one of the servers they provide, or you can run your own on your own computer for just you and your friends.

This feature is now finished. Hence 1.0, and also the first full Android release.

I'm a long-time fan of open-source software. There are many proprietary karting games, of which Mariokart is probably the most well-known. (Cue this April Fool's joke on the SuperTuxKart blog of April 1st 2009). But the idea of developing a truly open-source karting game is very appealing, especially one that runs well, with good concepts, gameplay, physics and graphics. In fact, in homage to the open source concept, all the original karts / characters in the SuperTuxKart world were based on mascots from various other open source projects.

One benefit of open source is that anyone can tweak, modify, re-compile, etc. But you can also, if you're technically minded enough, design your own karts and tracks, and submit them to an online repository for others to download.

This is a cracking game, and because it's FOSS it's totally free. If you've not met it, and you want these kinds of games without forking out for proprietary ones, give it a go. Download here! Even if you have the proprietary games, give this one a go - it gives the best of them a run for their money.

Here's their official "trailer video":