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Gltron can be played by up to four people in front of one computer. Great fun for a couple kids. I have seen it.

http://www.gltron.org/

and its on sourceforge... I could come up with a link... lets see...

http://www.gltron.org/

Hooray!

I was in a similar boat to you - console-style multiplayer games on a PC system. In the end, we found quite a few good games:

Little Fighter 2
Simple 2D fighter
Has:
    Gamepad support
    Up to 4 players
    Co-op mode
    Versus Mode
    Modding Community
    Free

GL Tron
Simple 3D arcade game of Tron
Has:
    Gamepad Support
    Up to 4 players
    Open Source

Project 64
N64 Emulator
Some good roms can be found here.
Has:
    Gamepad Support
    Super Smash Brothers!
    Huge catalogue of old games
    Up to 4 players
    Free

Lego Star Wars
Has:
    Gamepad Support
    2 player co-op

To be honest, we only ever played the demo of this, but it seemed a pretty good game, and it's got good reviews.

Frets on Fire
PC Guitar Hero clone
Has:
    Split screen play
    Gamepad/Official Controller Support
    Import Guitar Hero songs
    Open Source
    Community made songs, mods, etc.

A little warning with this one: it takes a while to set up. It should really be considered beta software, and ATM it is going through some developer reorganisation. The official game is still kinda buggy, but there is a good fork available (just hidden away in forums). Will probably become a lot better in a few months time.

If you can get a cheap old PC and get a small LAN together, you'll get a lot more options - there's a lot of good old PC games out there. If you want to game on the cheap, just stick to the older games - Win98 era or so.

http://www.gltron.org/

can be played on one keyboard

great group fun

and free

btw. usually for many games it sucks to play on one screen, because it has to be divided up some way

Armagetron? Judging by the screenshots, it looks like a slightly worse version of GLtron

Both free, for Windows/MacOSX/Linux.

What games should be included in the distro, but aren't?

I can think of one offhand, gltron. Any others?

I would have cited Wesnoth, GLTron and .

What's interesting about that list is not only that they're all great open source games, but also that they're cross-platform!

Life is good for open source gaming.

One of my personal favorites is GLTron, nothing like 4 guys sitting down to 1 keyboard for a test of reflexes, the earlier versions were faster, but the newer ones have turbo.

Lately, I have been seeing more and more high-quality Free Software games, many of which would benifit from powerful graphics cards:

Neverball and Neverputt
Battle for Wesnoth
Blob Wars: Metal Blob Solid
Project: Starfighter
Pydance
Freedroid and FreedroidRPG
GLTron
Armagetron

Many of these are as high-quality as any proprietary game.

(As far as I can tell, you are using "commercial" as a synonym for "proprietary".)

glTron! has multiplayer on a network. and it's TRON. that's action!

also, all of you owe it to yourselves to discover the horrific wrongness that is www.bikinikaratebabes.com.

however, if they put naked midgets and fat women in the game, I might just have to plunk down hard-earned cash.
admit it, you would too.

Since glTron is GPLd, and Sonic Speedsters doesn't seem to provide anything similar to source code, do you think this might be a case of Copyleft violation?

Here's the game!

Well, I think we should add to the list, Shadow of the Beast, Stunt Car Racer, Racing Destruction Set, Marble Madness, Impossible Mission, and Frontier/Elite...

Now, there is work being done on a Shadow of the Beast 3D.

There is also work being done on...

Space Racer - Update of Stunt Car Racer
Trophy - looks real close to Racing Destruction Set
GLTron - one of many clones of the old tron cycles games
Vega Strike - Clone of Elite (I know there's an Elite 4 listed on Frontier Development's page, but judging from the copyright notice at the bottom, it hasn't been updated since some time in 2001)
TrackBalls - Clone of Marble Madness

and...

XArchon - Update of Archon

And they're all open source...which means that you can play current beta versions in most cases...

Well there were the original toys which at the time I thought were lack luster and haven't improved with nostalgia. But its the new ones that got me... I can't count how many times I built 'recognizers' out of legos... its nice to see someone else thought "this would make a great toy".

Is this the point where I also plug gl tron?

GLTron would make an excellent multi-computer screen saver. Imagine a room full of machines playing on a large virtual areana.

Win2k/XP is a rather nice Desktop OS. Its come a long way, finally stable, good features, and lots of applications and games. (Ya viruses too)

Truely, I dont think linux has a chance on the desktop. Hardware support isn't there, Application are not isn't there (Loki is gone). I know everyone is working thier ass off to make it, but until the average joe will want to drop Windows boxes for a Linux box, linux will be mostly a server os. (I'm not counting the slashdot crowd, most of us dual boot, and/or have a dedicated linux/bsd server.)

Servers are another questions, Unix is the only way I run my shops. After running DNS/SMTP/HTTP on unix and windows, I can tell from experience, a unix type os is the only choice. (We run Solaris) But hey m$ wins again, seems 1/3rd of all unix admin programs run only on windows or if they use a web gui, only IE is supported. (sigh/disgust)
-
Do you GLTron ?

I really dig this, man. It's a good cause and it helps your family realise that they have choices, lots of them. Noticing that alot of people are recommending office productivity suites (which is cool, but you can only recommend Open Office/AbiWord/Gimp so many times =P) or server/high-end programs (very commendable, but...very time-consuming if anything like what I had to do to teach my parents), I wanted to include a list of games I figured might brighten their day.

First off, glTron. GPLed and very very addicting. Great to show off the fact that 3D Gaming and Linux are not mutually exclusive. (I would mention TuxRacer here, but it has been said before)

Secondly I want to go old-school with Nethack. I mean, it's Nethack. If someone in your family thinks they are cool because they can survive a Zerg-rush, let them play this and see how tough they are. ;)

Thirdly I would mention anything old by Id. They have a ton of free mods and maps for Quake or Quake II and with the new Tenebrae mod it's not your Mom's old Quake. Plus if you compile it for their PC on their PC, it might get them interested in Programming.

Which brings me to my last addition, Dev-C++. For the Casual Programmer (i.e. takes a few courses, kinda C-curious) This is the perfect IDE. Based on GCC it has a good-looking front-end, great support, and takes up ALOT less space than Visual Studio. I know at least one teacher that recommends the students run this, and rightly so. It really puts the brain-strain on the appropriate part of programming, the actual program.

Next to the ones listed above, these are some of my favs:

- GLTron, 3D lightcycle game
- Parsec, 3D space shooter (no single player mode, though)
- Crack Attack!, based on SNES Tetris Attack.

Cheers,

Costyn.

Gltron and audacity are the ones that spring instantly to mind

GLTron is one of the coolest free games out there.

SetupWeasel

Heres a cool lightcylce game: glTron

there is a already a tron game made for linux called glTron made by andreas umbach. you can access it here

There's also glTron, another Free light cycle game. Runs on *nix, Win32 and MacOS X. It's perhaps not as feature-full as Armagetron, but if you want a pure light cycle game, it rocks :-)

Here.

And with a version for just about every OS.

I like GLTron better. Closer to the movie in visuals. GPL'd.

Thanks to SDL & OpenGL the same source code is used for all four supported platforms (Linux, Win32, MacOS9, MacOSX). There's still the odd #ifdef for things like reading directories, but that's about it.

- Andreas

err, that would be gltron.org

Yeah, it's late in teh discussion and no one would see this if I didn't attach it to a highly moderated comment... so sue me...

GLTRON

With Linux, Win32, MacOS and OSX versions available... woohoo!

• Often, the game has to be chosen to run on the slowest computer in the bunch; running an older game ensures that everybody can play.
• Older games tend to rely a little less on flashy 3D graphics and a little more on gameplay, especially team play.
• Extremely old games (read: those that came on floppies) usually have a trivial form of copy protection which can usually be avoided. Not that I'd ever advocate such a thing. ;) Even older CD-based games with first-generation Safelock and such are easy to copy. Just make sure that all copies are destroyed at the end of the night.
• Finally, older games are less immersive. I don't mind forgetting myself when I'm playing Silent Hill 2 or something similiar, but I go to LAN parties to socialize. Games with MIDI soundtracks are just asking to be talked over.

It's even easier than that. You don't even need windows to build an app for it. Just cross-compile for it. The SDL homepage provides an excellent setup script, and after that it's just cross-configure.sh && cross-make.sh.

I'm building my windows binaries for GLtron for over a year now, without having to mess with VC++

- Andreas

Donations to the cross-platform Simple Direct Media Layer project are also being accepted at the libSDL.org site. (SDL, BTW, recieved a $1,000 grant from the Linux Fund, so you might want to look there too.)

Keep in mind that while most of these projects are developed for Linux, ports to Windows and sometimes Mac OS are usually included. So, even if you don't run Linux -- or any *nix -- you can still benifit.

Projects that you can support include...

1. New Breed Software creates software for both the Agenda handheld (Atari 800 emulator, Agendaroids, Aliens, ...) and X (Circus Linux, X-Bomber, ...).

   www.linux-games.com (note the "-") also has a couple Agenda programs as well as Penguin Command, Castle-combat, Timewarp...

   glTron? Nuf' said.

   Chromium BSU is another action-diversion.

   FreeCiv, PipeNightDreams...well, go see the entire list yourself.

- Andreas

- Andreas

GLtron: cross-platform gaming on Linux, Win32, MacOS, MacOS X. Soon with networking

At some point there were rumors that the Tron 2.0 would be handed off by disney to be handled by Pixar. Are these rumors now shafted to the "too implausible to even be repeated" list?

P.s. to anyone who has played Mac Beamwars or any other lightcycles-like game : GLTRON

What do y'all suppose will happen to the billions of lightcycles third-party implementations floating around out there once disney finally releases their own TRON pc game?

• glTron - Probably the most mature 3D tron game. Features network playing and themes
  
• Obviously Multiplayer Tron - New project, really unstable.
  
• Armagetron - Came out when development of glTron became very slow. Best multiplayer support, but glTron's graphics are better.
  

• glTron - Probably the most mature 3D tron game. Features network playing and themes
  
• Obviously Multiplayer Tron - New project, really unstable.
  
• Armagetron - Came out when development of glTron became very slow. Best multiplayer support, but glTron's graphics are better.
  

What follows is a question regarding SGI their quest to go after anyone with any name starting with "Open" or containing "GL".

Remember when Sun Microsystems cease-and-desisted CmdrTaco because of "Java Invaders" and the usage of the Java logo on Slashdot?

Still, if SGI wants to go through with this, they'll have to hunt left and right for "offenders", like GLDuke, GLTron, GLQuake, OpenType (a joint font standard between Microsoft and Adobe), and others.

But NOW, a new beta is available (precompiled for win32/mac) and I hope to get the new release done before christmas, of course the source is in CVS for everyone.

- Andreas

I just want to say that GL Tron is really cool. The lightcycles in it are better than the original movies!

Wolfenstein, OTOH, was chiefly publicized through word of mouth. I don't remember ever seeing an ad for it before I played it. It benefited, however, from being based on an extremely popular 2D shooter called Castle Wolfenstein that ran on the Apple II, AT/XT, and possibly other platforms. I played it on a IIc.

There are games which are publicized mostly through word of mouth and get decent distribution -- GLTron and Dope Wars come to mind. Of course, Dope Wars is, again, based on an older MS-DOS game...