linux games

[miriam_e]

I don't play games. I don't know why. Some part of me is missing, perhaps. Sports, board games, card games, gambling, arcade games, role-playing games, computer games... it doesn't matter. They just don't seem to hold my interest. I know how brilliant many games are. I have tried some text-adventure games in the past, and probably due to their similarity to books, I have enjoyed some of those, but even then they don't hold my attention for long.

Dan, my nephew, shows me some jaw-dropping games whenever I visit my family. The graphics, the backstory, the immersion, are all quite amazing. Because Dan blew my mind with "Dear Esther" I posted about it here recently.

I'm visiting my family at the moment and I'd just watched my Mum playing a puzzle game and wondered what stuff might be out there, so on an impulse I did a quick search to see what Linux games exist. Boy, was I in for a surprise!

http://www.penguspy.com
http://www.lgdb.org
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Linux_games
http://icculus.org/lgfaq/gamelist.php

...a couple of blogs with game lists and reviews
http://www.dedoimedo.com/games/linux-games-best.html
http://www.linuxlinks.com/article/20080510052539217/Games.html

...and a commercial game publisher
http://www.linuxgamepublishing.com

Comments

[greylock]

No games at all?
You're the first person I have known to that level.

I'm of the generation that has grown up never knowing what life was like before computer games (just), and they were always with me, be it at the arcade (20c Pacman! Or Galaxia at the 'lil table if I was good at dinner! A treat!). I got my first console in '83 (with three! whole! games!), and my first TRS 80 clone (a VZ 200 from Dick Smith, you may remember the type if not the model) with many clone games enjoyed in monochrome. And text adventures! Oh, how I loved them. I still feel a burning desire to finish the HGTTG game...
I even started learning basic and programming my own. Started.

I was envious of friends with C64s or Amigas who had colour! And easily tradeable games. By the time I was 14 I was given my stepfather's hand-me-down Atari computer and a box of ripped games on floppy. And so it goes. They all held my interest for a while. When I had a PC I would get lots of shareware and freeware games, but I am rarely a dedicated gamer. I get bored.

In recent years I've tired of the things. I sporadically get interested (I have a Playstation 1 and a Wii) use them a little bit and get bored.

It's something in me too.

But I marvel at the hours, days, I wasted playing the RPGs like Death Knights of Krynn or the Cresent Hawk's Inception. Or Star Command 2. I was so immersed with the latter I started designing a homebrew RPG that meshed Babylon 5 and Star Command.

I'm a little jealous of the people who are raving about Mass Effect. It's almost as if games have gone from being simple games to (if I may quote myself) Choose Your Own Adventures on Steroids. Interactive cinema. And I wish I could enjoy it. But I don't have the temperament.

I also loved the puzzle gams like Lemmings, Sim City and Civilisation. I played the latter two for years, and I still consider them some of the best time-wasters out there.

I've downloaded and installed FreeCiv and LinCity and Linnings(?) and the Linux clones are every bit as good as the PC versions were 20 years ago. Solid timewasters.

It looks like Linux games are more advanced than I realised. Probably 10 years behind the big game studios.

And now I'm going to see if Transport Tycoon will install. That looks like fun. For a little while.

[miriam_e]

I've always been more interested in how computers work and how the games are made than in playing them. For me I guess that's just the greater fun.

I remember the VZ200. I had a MicroAce, which was a ZX80 clone. It was a kit, which I built with soldering iron. Then I had a Dick Smith System-80 (a TRS-80 clone), a Tandy Color-Computer (or CoCo), an Amiga, followed by a few other Amigas. Now I have mostly standard Intel-based Linux boxes. About 11 years ago I bought a PalmVx handheld computer (it still works and I still use it daily). I also have two little Vortex86 computers, each having a motherboard a little wider, but half the thickness of a matchbox. The Vortex86 is billed as a computer on a chip, and is largely code-compatible with Intel's x86 CPUs. Lastly, I most recently got an Android (which is Linux) handheld computer which uses an ARM processor.

I bought "Lara Croft - Tomb Raider" and Douglas Adams' "Starship Titanic" and "Creatures", and a few other games. I loved looking at how they worked, but never got into playing them. Tomb Raider gave me unpleasantly high levels of adrenalin and Starship Titanic was too frustrating... and I always seemed to have more "important" things to do. Most of the money I spent on computers was on hardware or productivity software (Lightwave raytracer, various wordprocessors, painting programs, programming languages, and so on). Over the years I taught myself many computer languages and built quite a lot of virtual worlds.

Yeah, I was surprised by the the quality and range of Linux games too. When I showed my game-playing nephew, Dan, he was surprised also. Then he showed me "Battlefield" -- probably the most realistic game I have ever seen. It is just stunning. What a pity $100 million (its budget) is being invested in a killing-game though.

I hope you can get Transport Tycoon running. It sounds like a fascinating premise for a game.

[greylock]

I think you are like the feminine, not evil version of my stepfather.
Except he games.

(He has a server set up for Battlefield Game of War 3 or something, and I think a bunch of his fun is writing C code and such to stop script kiddies. And learning from script kiddies. And he likes the challenge of gaming for some reason.)

I've always been more interested in how computers work and how the games are made than in playing them.
As a kid I had that in spades. Apparently I was always taking stuff apart. I got trained out of it. I taught myself a smattering of html years ago by using WHYSIWYG editors and reverse engineering the code, but mostly I am an end user.

It was a kit, which I built with soldering iron.

That's pretty awesome. Of the subset of people who would have done that, I'd say the number of women worldwide would have been minimal. Tens, maybe hundred-odd best.

Lastly, I most recently got an Android (which is Linux) handheld computer which uses an ARM processor.

I look at my phone and and I am amazed every day.

What a pity $100 million (its budget) is being invested in a killing-game though.

You may have posted about this (I have a sense you did) but you should check out WarCo:
http://defiantdev.com/2011/09/12/first-look-at-warco/
They're still looking for funding, sadly. You might not be interested in playing it but it seems like a thing you would enjoy watching become real.

I hope you can get Transport Tycoon running. It sounds like a fascinating premise for a game.

Sadly, by Ubuntu is too old and I can't add old packages (or, if I can, I haven't looked into a workaround. It's not worth it for a Railroad Tycoon clone. Some day I'll spend some time setting up my new machine. But the coders at Canonical and Mozilla don't make it easy.

[greylock]

Oh, and as a complete aside, since it is relevant, you may remember Wing Commander (or, if you are like me, you might like to forget Wing Commander).

That series of games, which was the biggest thing ever at the time, has been reborn as an OSS game series: http://www.metafilter.com/114155/I-heard-human-blood-boils-in-space

I haven't looked into the details, but like Abandonware, it's pretty neat that customers are taking over the means of production.

[miriam_e]

The kit was really easy to build. I and my girlfriend at the time built it. Good fun. I doubled the amount of memory the standard version was supposed to have. I can remember thinking, "Wow! 2,000 bytes! How will I ever use up all that memory?!"

Heheheh. Now my main computer has around 9 Terabytes and it still isn't enough. :)

I'm pretty sure I remember seeing friends play Wing Commander.
http://www.wcsaga.com/
Looks interesting. Pity it is war stuff. If it was exploration stuff I might be tempted. :)

Having the customers and programmers take over commercial stuff does happen. The brilliantly high quality, free for download, 3D modeling program, Blender, is the result of the parent company going broke then being bought out by its programmers and customers. Weirdly, giving stuff away can be more profitable than a standard business model. I keep getting the feeling that great changes are afoot in the economic world that are barely noticed by most people. It will be interesting to see if the dictatorship will give way to democracy in business, and that sharing will be the driving force for innovation. I live in hope.

I look at my phone and and I am amazed every day.

Yes. My feelings exactly, except that I don't use mine as a phone, but purely as a computer. All that wonderful processing capability in my hand. Wow!