Free Gamer checks in on S.C.O.U.R.G.E. 2 development and gives a mini-review of S.C.O.U.R.G.E. as well.
Or is it?!?!
Regarding S.C.O.U.R.G.E, the last generation, the review states difficulty with game control but is otherwise positive:

Straight from the manhole, the rugged Unixmen lists SCOURGE among "Five nice open-source games for [GNU/]Linux".

Due to a server exploitation, our web host server required a complete redeploy. I'm taking this opportunity to update SCOURGEWeb but some things may be a little broken until I remake some modifications... thank you for your patience.. OC

Welcome back! Scourge is still being worked on, but slowly, because the regular contributors are away ATM and I am preparing to start my own game project. However, Gabor did implement city signs that tell you the city's name and he also did a bit of performance optimization by disabling fog in the outdoors.

I'm currently coding on another project, but will continue to monitor Scourge so I can maintain this column.

That said, stay tuned and see you again soon!

Hello and welcome back! Work on the game is still progressing rather slowly, but I plan to set up my development environment again very soon and at least fix a few bugs and do some optimizations in addition to my other project related work. Gabor already started fixing some of the more specific cases of outdoor slowness.

If you run the SVN version and have a basic understanding of C++, you are welcome to share your ideas on how to improve performance or fix little glitches, as we are very short on development manpower at the moment :-/

So, see you next week for the next edition of the column!

Hello and welcome to the 32nd edition of our weekly column! There wasn't much going on this week; most notably Gabor started adding villages and towns to the outdoor world and did some save/load tweaking. I didn't have much time too but thought a bit about how to market the game so we attract more contributors - the next release will have scrolling end credits of two and a half minutes, and we have to fill that time span with enough names and acknowledgements ;-) Expect a thread showcasing the project on the Freegamedev forum as soon as development has gained more speed again.

Of course you are invited to hang out on #scourge at freenode and share your thoughts.

That said, stay tuned and until next week!

Hello again! It's time for an update to our weekly column. Gabor has started work on roads but is busy on his job now. It doesn't mean nothing is done however; I'm still working on expanding the community wiki. I have to maintain it more or less continually as much of the content will flow back into the main S.C.O.U.R.G.E. project, especially history, location and person related articles which will be the reference for fleshing out the story and missions for the next release.

Contributions to the Player's Guide are very appreciated as I don't have the time to work on all sections of the wiki.

So, stay tuned and see you next week!

Greetings and welcome to the 30th edition of our weekly column! S.C.O.U.R.G.E. related development has continued at a steady pace.

Gabor started working on roads connecting the towns and cities and cod finished a first version of the rune font. I decided to look more into marketing, as well as developing the story background on the community wiki, even if it means that new game features will come in more slowly over the next time.

As usual, contributions are welcome, just ask on our friendly IRC channel (#scourge at freenode). The community wiki needs some love too; you could for example add more content to the Player's Guide, upload a few Screenshots or add your ideas to the Wishlist.

So, happy gaming and see you next week!

Hello again! Here is a new edition of our weekly column after i was AWOL for personal reasons during the last few weeks.

There has been quite some work done in the meantime: timong uploaded the new soundtrack to SVN, including area dependent outdoor music. Monsters are also generated in the outdoors now and many bugfixes, especially related to data persistence are underway. cod continued work on runes; while it is not clear yet what they will be used for, we will surely find a use soon.

New contributors in all areas are always welcome, as this version is a large-scale rewrite and feature boost; you can also hang out on #scourge at freenode to keep in touch with the latest and greatest ideas and enhancements. That said, I'm glad I found my way here again (partly due to timong's detective skills :-) ), so you can rest assured that this column will be updated more regularly again.

Hello and welcome to the 28th edition of our quasi-weekly column! There are many news.

Timong finished the chapter, intro/outro and battle music. He also composed a new Scourge main theme. He is now working on generic dungeon and outdoors music. Gabor continued work on the outdoor world, re-added NPCs and the underground part of the headquarters and fixed loads of bugs. I didn't code much but I'm planning on spicing up the minimap quite a bit. Depending on situation, it will show the immediate surroundings, the part of the world where you currently are, or both. In order to prepare this feature, I created an artistic travel map using nothing but Gimp.

Depicted here is the first ingame appearance of the new map (creating a new outdoor region in the map editor):



I also created a more varied set of outdoor ground textures so the landscape doesn't look too boring. Two examples:

Plains of Garmoskod (subtropical)



Geinaror Ridge (alpine)



Today is my 31st birthday, and a present I would really like would be more contributors. No really, we urgently need more contributors. By implementing a massive outdoor world, we have created room for more storytelling, lots of scripted side missions, great eye candy features we would like to try, sharply increased bug and bloat potential and so on. We virtually need more personnel in all areas: Coding, bugfixing, artwork (including handpainted backgrounds and portraits), scripting (Squirrel, C++-like), gameflow, dialogue writing, cutscene direction, playtesting etc.

If you are interested in contributing on an as-time-allows basis or just want to get in touch with the team, you are invited to hang out on our friendly IRC channel (#scourge on freenode).

So, see you on IRC or otherwise, until next week! :-)