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None of your examples are of games. There are no good, free, fun, games.

You forgot the best example of all. There is even a Mac version for jimicus and a Linux version for the rest of /.

None of your examples are of games. There are no good, free, fun, games.

FreeCol is still undergoing development and needs more work, but it's already playable and enjoyable. It has a moderate educational factor, which is a bonus for use by kids. It also has the improvement over the original SM's Colonization of using a backend server that's multi-player capable. A package is available in the Ubuntu universe repository. You're better off with the 7.4 package for Ibex than the 7.2 release in Hardy. 8.0 looks like it has some nifty improvements, but it won't be ready for deployment by Christmas.

FreeCol: Sid Meier's Colonization reimplemented in Java. Good graphics, good gameplay, multiplayer works well across platforms (just the other day there were three of us playing: I hosted on Ubuntu, my friends had XP and Vista). It isn't at the 1.0 release but it's playable as is and is actively developed.

• Battle for Wesnoth, a turn-based strategy game with some great single-player campaigns.
• Vega Strike, the game Elite would have been if it had been made for today's hardware (honourable mention to Oolite, which faithfully recreates Elite but with updated graphics).
• Nexuiz, a superb FPS with completely new artwork, levels, and game design based on an incredibly heavily modified version of the Quake 1 engine.
• FreeCol (and, of course, the classic FreeCiv), open source clones of the old Colonisation and Civilisation games, with large numbers of updates (and distressingly good single player AI).
• Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid, a complex platform game, full of gratuitous blob violence[1]. A sequel, this time in full 3D, was released last month.

With complex and polished open source games in almost every genre being available, it's quite surprising how much people spend on commercial games from companies that treat them like criminals. Wikipedia has a good list - I've not played more than a small fraction of them.

[1] This doesn't quite count as open source. The game is all GPL'd, but a number of images were things the author 'found on the Internet' and are used without a valid license. It was removed from the OpenBSD ports system last week because of this, as the author refuses to address the problem.

http://www.freecol.org/

Not perfect, but a good start!

IMHO, C/C++ is far from dying. It's getting stronger than ever atleast in the realm of software engineering. I see it finding it's nitch closer to the hardware and in core of advanced software where speed and optimization is important.

Dunno what you mean by "advanced software", but C has its place when programming near hardware. C++ will hopefully die and take buffer overflows and memory leaks with it.

Like, you wouldn't write a 3D game engine in java, atleast not yet anyway.

Quake 2 remade in Java runs just fine. It does use LWJGL, since Java doesn't have native OpenGL bindings - but the engine itself is pure enough Java to go through the Sun's JDK compiler without warnings.

Of course, there's Java3D, but I don't know how much native code it has.

Then, on the other end of the spectrum is FreeCol, which has less features than the old DOS version but requires 256 MB RAM to run and takes second-long garbage collection pauses on a 1 GHZ Duron, and has severe bugs relating to Java memory model (it starts threads from object constructors; fixing this made the problem go away) that make it throw NullPointerExceptions and misbehave when run with the parallel garbage collector. I guess some people can program and some can't...

Colonization rocked!

As the parent poster pointed out it runs perfectly in dosbox.

I'd also like to point out that there is a GPL clone. It's not perfect but as most GPL clones of commercial games, it has potential.
http://freecol.org/

You might want to check out FreeCol.

If you are interested in Colonization, then you should check out FreeCol, the open source Colonization clone.

http://www.freecol.org/