Gameplay combines battles, swimming and singing; the latter allows Naija to interact with the world. Her songs can move items, affect plants and animals, and change her physical appearance into other forms. These forms have different abilities, such as firing projectiles at hostile creatures or passing through barriers inaccessible to her in her natural shape.

The Aquaria game engine is licensed under GPL, the game content however, remains licensed under a range of licenses. This division between content and gaming engine has raised an intense debate as to whether Aquaria really is Open Source at all.

The view we take on this at OSL is that the definition of Open Source has had to evolve to keep up with cross-media developments on the Web, so that projects that aren’t entirely made up of source code such as films, music, photos and games etc, can still be included in the ‘spirit’ or ‘ethos’ of OSS. Aquaria fits into this expanding definition.

The Aquaria game engine source code can be found here.

Unlike most similar games, Open Sonic provides a greater level of interaction between the player and the levels. It’s more than just a jump’n'run; the user must come up with some strategy in order to get through the levels.

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The aim in each irrlamb level is to touch every glowing globe, sometimes within a time limit. In some levels the player has the grapple upgrade, which allows the player to shoot an elastic rope at objects and terrain and can be used to climb walls.

Each player controls the team of his choice (penguin, gnu, firefox, wilber,…) and must destroy his adversary using more or less casual weapons.

Although a minimum of strategy is required to vanquish, Wormux is pre-eminently a “convivial mass murder” game where, turn by turn, each member of each team attempts to produce a maximum of damage to his opponents.