Slashdot Mirror
The Best Linux Games of 2001?
Apostata asks: "As more
and more people migrate (or consider migrating) to Linux, I'd like to
know what Slashdot readers would vote for as their top picks for
Linux-friendly games (either native or commercially ported) for
2001."
XBill for life! Who needs quake 3?
Quake3 and UT, all the way.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Emacs, meta-x tetris. Doesn't get any better than this...
// zyqqh
This game is criminally responsible for the diversions of many many man hours that could have been spent learning useful aspects of Linux and directing them at gaming.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
The only way to get decent "real" games at the moment is through emulators. Therefore I recommend Xmame + lots and lots of arcade games! Pang, Twin Cobra, Spy vs Spy.. ;)
'Course, the KDE games are coming along nicely...
Can you hear me, Major Tom? I'm not the man they think I am at home...
TuxRacer is good on two fronts: they are Linux-friendly and they have an Open Source version (although it is older than the commercial one).
If I may be slightly off-topic here, I'd like to see more people involved in creating Linux games. Unlike developing for a console, there are plenty of freely available docs and tools to make it happen. Take a look for example at plib, a portable scene graph/geometry/network enabler/GUI/sound library intended for games. It's Open Source, GPLed, has a great, easy-to-understand C++ interface, and is overall a good thing. I've been using it for nearly six months, and I can't believe the ease with which I've been able to create a couple of little games. I'd love to see more Linux-based Open Source games based around plib.
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
X-eyes.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Gnomehack.
This is absolutley my favorite linux friendly game. It single handedly frustrated me to the point of never wanting to boot into Windoze again.
:)
StrategyTalk.com, PC Game Forums
Called "Keeping Up With Patches."
First you must begin by being wary enough to defend your installation: are there new patches or kernels available for LINUX?
Then if you see a new update, you must go on to the difficult stage-- downloading, compiling, and installing the new kernel.
In the higher levels things get intense as there are "must have" updates that patch serious security holes, and a time limit on the "Production System" level.
If you lose at the lower levels (the training levels) you can just start over. If you lose on the higher levels, you die / get fired.
Real fun game, lemme tell ya. The Open Source Mullet guy here drinks 12 cups of coffee a morning because it's so much fun.
Kohan from Loki is easily the best game I have bought for the past 3 years. Loki's newsgroup is filled with some of the best people from around the world who set up games weekly (or more often) to play online. Kohan is very stable and tons of fun to play, and has easily soaked up more of my time than I really want to admit. Loki even ports the patches so the Linux players can play against the WinSlaves (although there have been a couple of issues with the "sync error" that are mostly cleared up these days).
If you like RTSes, but hate all of the MM, or are just looking for something that isn't yet another Warcraft clone, then I highly recommend checking out Kohan.
I read the internet for the articles.
As for the games that were ported over from Windows, Why not just go and check a place like Gamerankings.com and see a good compilation of reviews? All you have to do is check on the games that have been ported to Linux and figure it out from there!
For my money, though, Xbill is excellent :-)
from the tis-the-season form-making-lists dept.
/. Do we really have to fill out a making-lists form?
Aw, Christ. Bureaucracy takes over
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
gcc
I have purchased several Loki games over this year, but Descent 3 is the best! I am on my third run through (with higher difficulty). It is fast, the music is great, and the plot is fun. Nothing says FU like a black shark missile :)
Come on... With XMAME we get thousands of arcade games at our finger tips. What's better than that?
for non-commercial 'head to head' sh*t on your neighbor fun, I love BZFlag. As far as commercial games go, my first experience was Myth II: Soulblighter. I loved playing it on Winderz and the same applied on the Linux side. As to the new games that are out, haven't tried any of them yet, though Alpha Centauri looks interesting - being poor sucks.
-- oodabadabaY
The only Unix-based games I play much are Angband and pysol. I play Civ III on Windows, because that's where the current patches will be, and I play a few things on MacOS.
The games that have been ported (with a few exceptions) are almost all shooters - which I simply don't enjoy playing.
I like RPG's and turn-based strategy, for the most part.
The commercial offerings just haven't appealed to me much yet.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Seems like that's the game I play the most...
managers...why god invented purgatory
I've played Moria/Angband since iMoria on the University of Washington VAX in 1987. Moria and its variants are truly the greatest computer games ever invented.
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Nethack.
'Nuff said.
You can't see this if you have sigs turned off.
i got sucked into this damn game to the point where i was dreaming of gems and seeing outlines of gems on my carpets, walls, etc.. :\
... how my parallel port is using the same IRQ as my sound card (for some reason). So the game is, I have to unload my parallel port modules, then reload the sound modules, and then (finially) reload my par port modules. Its really fun, and after going through a few lives and continues, I win everytime.
Has finally arrived, and will begin shipping to destinations just after xmas.
Get to play with digital DNA and see evolution at work all on your Linux box.
check ds.creatures.net and also of course www.tuxgames.com
There is no best one as each Linux game brings soemthing new to Linux, perhaps if enough of these games sell we might see more of each catagory or the same.
Matt
Very addicting...even the demo. Not much in the action department like some games, but still very fun. The only new thing I would like in it is network play.
Tribes2 is really bad for the Linux game market. I can't stop playing it and am simply not interrested in buying any other game since 6 months.
1. Unreal Tournament
2. Quake 3 Arena
3. Rune
4. Heavy Metal FAKK2
5. Soldier of Fortune
6. Heavy Gear
7. Postal Plus
Out of those, the ones I enjoyed the most, in order of how much I enjoyed them...
1. Unreal Tournament (good lan party fun!)
2. Soldier of Fortune
3. Rune / Q3A (can't decide)
4. Heavy Metal (good, but a bit buggy and quirky)
I'm really looking forward to RTCW, supposed to be out in January says the guy doing the port.
After that there doesn't appear to be too much on the horizon, anyone know of any good games coming out for Linux?
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Ok, I really love UT, but when I downloaded the demo for Uplink, my eyes were opened. So simple, yet so elegant. And the price...that's hard to beat.
I highly recommend Uplink for anyone that is tired of the same old $#!+.
-Ben
Return to Castle Wolfenstein seems pretty badass, and the Linux executables were available within a few days of the game release.
Tribes 2 for Linux would be great if all the people playing the Windows version weren't watching their game crash all the time. Nothing like watching someone crash while running the flag.
It's a very interesting Artificial Life game. Something like The Sims, but more oriented towards biology. It's written in its own interpreted language that you can see and modify (look in the Bootstrap folder). It's free (but not GPL'd) and you can get it here.
Creatures and Creatures 2 can work under Wine, but they're pretty unstable. It's also possible to play Creatures 3 with this one because they share the engine.
I've just gotten into this game. I ordered it back when Loki was in bankruptsy and it got tucked under my newly purchased copy of Diablo II. After sorta getting bored of diablo (DAMMIT!, why are all the good weapons hard to find??) I've rediscovered it. And I remember now why I bought it! Wonderful graphics.. stable as hell.. my only beef... listening to "praise the kohan" or whatever every time I move someone.. chreeerist!
- Jimbob
The game I have had the most fun with has to be Shogo:MAD.
No, it did not have the most up to date engine.
No, it was not the most original idea in the world.
However, it was mad fun to play. The playability of the game was superb and the linux from whatever transfer was excellent.
Kudos to Hyperion Software.
____________________________
ACK
There two great clones of classic
games for that console:
Mad Bomber, a Kaboom! clone
and
Circus Linux, a Circus Atari clone.
Both are very good.
Heffel
Expert Java EE Consulting
Isn't it obvious? Nethack is still the best game on Linux...
like this
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
My favorite Linux game is seeing how long you can read the mkisofs manpage without developing stigmata wounds, bleeding from the eyes, or going insane.
Bowie J. Poag
/.
If you are only interested in fast-twitch games, why did you use such a trollish subject line? You might have made a point, but instead you just look like a fool to people who know that strategy games like the wonderful FREECIV are plenty stable - more so than many non-linux games.
--Charlie
It's incredibly nice... (The Sims for Linux)
I realized the other night as I was playing Nethack 3.3.1 on Windows that I have been playing the same game (on and off) for almost ten years, never winning, never getting bored.
sig is
Open Source or not, I have to admit to wasting more time on this game than any single one since Warcraft.
And what I find nice about FreeCiv is that I can play it in one Virtual Window, go to another VW to do stuff, then return to where I left off in FreeCiv. It nicely works with the multi-tasking environment of Linux, unlike the Loki ports I have tried.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
If you like Nethack, check out Falcon's Eye. It's an SDL-based fork of Nethack with an isometric view. The graphics are quite nice and it even has a soundtrack.
I've wasted a *lot* of time with it.
My favorite game of all time just happens to also by favorite linux game as well! Nethack is a game I can play and replay (unlike Playstation 2 or your latest Windows game), and it still feels fresh after all these years.
Useful links to learn more:
http://www.nethack.org [The official Nethack site)
http://www.nethack.de (A good all around reference)
http://www.spod-central.org/~psmith/nh/ (the *best* place for spoilers)
http://nethack.devnull.net (home of the recently mentioned-on-slashdot tourney where some incredible players put up some incredible scores).
Happy hacking!
I don't know if it was actually published in 2001, but that's when I bought it. Descent 3 for Linux is an excellent port of the Windows version, and it even adds a few features that the Windows version doesn't have (like no-mouse-grab and rendering in a window). You just can't beat 6DoF in a first person shooter, as long as you don't get motion sickness too easily. :) Multiplayer is incredible too, with lots of multiplayer game modes.
Then again, I always said that Linux itself was the ultimate video game- it's the only one that's kept me playing continuously for 6 years.
--WH--
Have a nice day, Citizen. The Computer is your friend! :)
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
There are a bunch of good Linux games, but I think I have to go with MindRover being the absolute coolest, most original, most FUN game I've yet seen on Linux... (The all-time winner of that award in my book would be "The Incredible Machine", but unfortunately there's no Linux version of it or any of its sequels, yet...) If you like coding, you'll probably love MindRover... If you like BattleBots, you'll probably love MindRover... You basically build and program your own robotic vehicles to compete in a variety of missions... It's extremely cool... Check it out: The main site, and Loki's product page...
BZFlag is an incredibly fun Opensource MultiPlatform OpenGL tank shooter type thing, brilliant fun, and it even works on a 56K modem. well, almost.
Software Freedom Day!.
Probably the only thing left for them to do is a multiplayer game.
Cryptnotic
My other first post is car post.
Has anyone out there done a Linux port of Steve Shipway's Wanderer?
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.
.... but wait, I guess it is only tribes 2 because that is the only game that came out in 2001. Oh well.
Can you see Iron City here?
Powermanga, if only they could make the game full screen and full speed at the same time. It's really not that hard.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I've recently fallen in love with "Return to Castle Wolfenstein". It is a great multiplayer games, and it uses the Quake3 engine.
;)
The only downside, is that they (id software) has not made a single player binary for it yet. But, who needs single player? When you can frag your best friend with a panzerfaust!
--Frank
"Neither life nor happiness can be acheived by the pursuit of irration whims." --Ayn Rand
If it needs anything more than curses to run, I ain't interested.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
FreeCiv! Ever since I got RedHat 7.1 I've been an addict. Game is incredibly fun alone, even more fun online, and customizable to the extent that it's like having several games.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
Here is my list:
AZspot
In Emacs
This
XSnow was much cooler than XEyes. (XSnow has snow falling in the background of the screen, and it piles up on the top ledge of windows and the bottom of the screen.) XPenguin isn't bad either.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
What more do you need? I've wasted WAY too many hours with that thing!
I've even beat the Expert mode in 2:44. Anyone done better?
/usr/games/fortune. Today I got these gems:
and I know, don't flame me, it's a Unix game from way back."What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
Rune, Kohan, and SimCity 3000 are a tie. They are all excellent examples of their respective genres, and the Loki ports are fast, stable, and are in no way inferior to the originals.
:)
Alpha Centauri I enjoyed, but in many ways it is just "more of the same" from Sid Meier. More of the same stuff that we love, of course
MindRover looks really cool. I've had it sitting on my shelf for a while now, but my preliminary attempts at it found that it was hard to just jump right into the game. Sometime when I have a rainy day to kill reading the manual I plan to dive in...
Get the extra graphics so you can play some of the more unusual games. The theme music works well, so be sure to turn it on.
As the name suggests, it has a high geek factor since it was entirely written in Python.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I thought you meant this Falcon's Eye.
This was the One True.
Long live Mehul Patel!
There are getting to be a lot of games for Linux. To me, though, there are very few games that I would truly call Linux games. That is, sure, you can get emulators and lots of versions of Tetris and Sokoban and lots of retro remakes of Asteroids and so on; and you can get some big titles that you can also get for other platforms, like Quake 3. But there's no much that really makes you think "Wow, now there is a gaming experience that I can only get under Linux." This is similar to the later years of many all-but-dead systems, like the Amiga, Atari ST, and Apple IIgs.
Tux Racer is one of the few games that shines for Linux, even though there is also a Windows version. Too bad it's just one of several dozen "Franchise Racer" games, though. It's a good game, but it relies on the player never having seen Crash Team Racing or Diddy Kong Racing or other such games which make Tux Racer seem lackluster.
Here's hoping for some original Linux games in 2002. The coding abilities are there, so the time is ripe for some good stuff.
Text Mode Quake is where it is at!
skout perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(
Is a very good total conversion for unreal tournament. Check it out here.
My picks thus far:
1) Unreal Tournament
2) Tactical Ops
3) Return to Castle Wolfenstein
They really should release a playable demo for Tribes 2 linux...
better OpenGL support?
Either you didnt read the DRI docs or use a modern distro which supports OpenGL pretty well on more than a few cards or was just bad luck . i know had some headaches when I first started to setup dri (XF86 cvs)
OpenGL supported cards are:
Matrox G400,G450,G550
nVidia TNT and above
3dfx Voodoo3 and above (OpenGL w. Glide)
Radeon, Rage128
Except for the nVidia all the other cards are supported by XFree86 natively. nVidia has its own binary drivers (best supported by games).
A default install of Mandrake sets up DRI for you where you can play Quake3 w/o problem if you have a DRI supported card. I played Q3, Q2, Q1, Tribes2 (after the Matrox Multitexturing patch), Unreal Tournament on my G400 MAXX. NO problems
Zork ROCKS! It's easy enough to get started, but it's really challenging and fun. I think it's one of the most fun multiplayer games out for ANY platform. The graphics require a little imagination, though...
Loki absolutely doesn't support anything but GeForce-based cards on the Linux port; you'll hafta upgrade. Get the right hardware, though, and it plays great. I've had the occasional in-game hang, but (1) it doesn't happen frequently enough to really disrupt my experience, and (2) they're working on it.
You can't just DL the Linux binaries; Loki doesn't get paid by Sierra for the port, rather *they* paid *Sierra*, so any user of the Linux version who only purchased the Windows one is costing them money.
I was out shopping for the future inlaws Christmas gift this weekend, in the casino games section at Best Buy. We were looking at several different slots games, and my eyes kind of got wide when I saw the banner on the corner of the box; Windows and Linux.
I took home two copies; one for them and one for me (I like to play video poker, lol). It's not blow your doors awesome like Wolfenstein, but at 19.95 they've put out a VERY realistic slot machine game. Rated pretty highly by Casino Player Magazine, too.
- MindRover - Publisher: Loki - Robot Programming Puzzle Game
- Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns - Publisher: Loki - Fantasy Real-Time Strategy Game
- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - Publisher: Loki - Sci-Fi Colonization/Civilization Turn-Based Strategy Game
- Uplink - Publisher: Introversion - Sci-fi "Hacking" Sim
- Return to Castle Wolfenstein - Publisher: Activision - Modern remake of the classic 3-D shooter, now with suberb multiplayer
I'm pretty sure all of the above titles received A-category reviews across the board, so out of those four you should be able to find one you at least like.Another note: Linux Game Publishing is shipping a port of Creatures Internet Edition which should reach resellers after Xmas.
:wq
I can't see why everyone else doesn't also response 'Tribes 2'. This is THE most impressive thing I have seen running on my Linux box, apart from maybe VMWare, but that's no game...
Tribes 2 has incredibly graphics, the game runs BETTER under Linux than Windows on my 500Mhz Athlon / 64MB DDR Radeon / 384MB. And it is totally immersive. If I just had ping times of less than 500ms everything would be sweet!
My favorite game is /usr/bin/gcc.
/etc/mail/sendmail.cf, but I've only been playing it for a few years, so I'm still a beginner...)
(I would say
--
I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
Linux itself. Remember that article about it a few days ago? I don't want to get the link but something about how Linux is like a big "massively multiplayer game with lots of enthusiasts." Something like that anyway.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
-Don
From: Jeremy Huxtable (jh@Ist.CO.UK)
Subject: Big brother
Newsgroups: comp.windows.news
Date: 1988-07-25 07:43:13 PST
Try this out on your NeWS server.....
%!
% eye.ps
%
% Jeremy Huxtable
%
% "Big Brother" implementation in PostScript.
% Create an Eyeball class from the Default window class.
[...]
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
I hope the singleplayer Wolfenstein comes out for linux soon. I'm not buying it until it does!
Other than that, the OS itself is a beautiful game! My favorite 'game' is windowmaker, rox-filer, and useful little perl and sh scripts to tie it all together!
Return to Castle Wolfenstein!
wine /c/windows/sol.exe
icqqm [ICQ:11952102]
I created 320x240, 400x300, and 512x384 modes for M.A.M.E. They are also useful for postage stamp games like Powermanga. Just Ctrl-Alt-+ until it's close enough to full screen for you. It's also good for some XMMS plugins.
p l
If you don't want to go through the pain of designing your own video mode then this page helps quite a bit.
http://xtiming.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/xtiming.
If you're using XFree86 4.x then it also helps to know that it will look something like this when you're done:
.
.
.
Modeline "320x240@76d" 15.71 320 324 348 388 240 241 244 253 doublescan
Modeline "400x300@75d" 24.17 400 408 448 504 300 302 306 316 doublescan
Modeline "512x384@75d" 39.45 512 524 596 648 384 387 392 404 doublescan
.
.
.
Section "Screen"
Identifier "screen1"
Device "Matrox Millennium G400"
Monitor "Display 1"
DefaultColorDepth 16
Subsection "Display"
Depth 16
Modes "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480" "512x384@75d" "400x300@75d" "320x240@76d"
ViewPort 0 0
EndSubsection
There ya go, hacky fullscreen of postage stamp displays. Enjoy.
Definitely not Global Thermonuclear War. It's really a lose-lose game. In fact, I'd say the only way to win is not to play at all.
Both work perfectly under winex
Does anyone know of an instruction site that tells (in depth) how to get Half-Life, CS, and the like working in linux? The configuration and compilation process of WINE (or is it best to use WineX? what's the difference? etc), proper X config, and the like, is all quite complex and involved, and more than even I feel is timeworthy for a game. I've seen one or two 'howtos' that are poorly written, but nothing that takes the topic from the ground up using the latest software versions (wine, X, etc) into consideration.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
ADOM is a great game. Its a Rouge-like, similar to Nethack, except that it has an interactive storyline, tons of NPCs, towns, villages, and more. I actually like ADOM better than Nethack, as far as gameplay is concerned. However, ADOM is only free as in beer (runs on Linux too). On the other hand, Nethack is free in every way.
Don't forget to fill out the New FizzWizz Taste Survey! :)
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
My list of games that work well at lanparties and run under at least Linux and Windows; some other platforms as well.
Wolfenstein has two seperate binaries: one for multiplayer which contains a scripting engine and other goodies, another less complex one for multiplayer.
The Linux binary currently ONLY does multiplayer. Hopefully a native single player one will exist soon, but first the porting guy has to port the script engine.