25 Best Linux Games

bobz writes "The Linux Game Tome has announced the winners of the Happypenguin Awards. Games, toys and libraries in 25 different categories were nominated and voted upon by the Linux gaming community. Take a look at the best Linux gaming has to offer." Alas, no SimCity 4, and no Sims Online.

Comments

Old

[dissonant7]

...almost all these games are over a year old. If I want to play games, I'll use Windows. If I want to get work done, I'll run Linux. It just doesn't make since to use a screwdriver to pound in a nail.

Re:Old

[kvn299]

Just because a game is old doesn't make it bad. In my opinion, a game that can withstand the test of time (such a SimCity or Civ) is worth a hundred new games, in my opinion.

Re: Old

[Black Parrot]

> ...almost all these games are over a year old.

Are you bragging or complaining?

IMO that's the strength of OSS games: they can evolve continuously rather than being discarded after a year due to marketing demands. Within a decade the best-of-breed in every gaming category will be an OSS game.

Re: Old

[fitten]

Cling to your dogma. Variety is the spice of life, as they say. With your logic, PacMan and Mrs. PacMan should still be the top games in the arcades and MYST should still be the hottest game on the PC. The fact is that some games do enjoy long life (StarCraft, etc.) but people do like to play new games.

One of the reasons that games do well on the PC is that evne though the game will be pirated, there will still be enough sales to warrant the initial investment and recoup your costs of paying the programmers.

The problem is that games don't fit into the enterprise software model (which is one of the few ways to make money in the Linux/OSS world). You have to have money to start the development on one and you won't make any money on support/training for it. In addition, few people are likely to even want to pay for the initial copy of it. In addition, even without piracy, the market segment for Linux/OSS is not that big. This leaves you in the area of doing it for FreeBeer(tm) style development. How many game developers are going to code a game for free? Some, sure. How many who code games for a big game house will have the free time (unless supported by the game house) of developing/porting for Linux/OSS? Maybe a few.

Game lifespan is too short (among other things) to fit the enterprise model. Until you can make money developing games on Linux/OSS so you can pay people to code them, I'll predict that the rate of new games emergence will be slow.

Linux games vs. shareware stuff for Win

[October_30th]

Why should we expect Linux games to be any better than the millions of shareware games made for Windows? I mean, I've never found freely available Windows game that would be fun.

Re:Linux games vs. shareware stuff for Win

[LoudMusic]

Why should we expect Linux games to be any better than the millions of shareware games made for Windows?

Because not all Linux games are free ...

Unreal Tournament, Railroad Tycoon 2, the various Sims, QUAKE! - these games aren't free or even shareware. I wouldn't expect them to be better, but at least comparable to their Windows counterparts.

Why is it that when people think of Linux, or any other OpenSource project, they immediately think "free"? These terms aren't interchangeable. And not all the software that goes with them is going to be OpenSource or free either.

Grow some balls, pay for your software.

Linux needs games

[TTMuskrat]

IMO, Linux needs games in order to "make it" in the mass market. It already has the good O/S, it has the word processing software, it has GUIs if you want them - the only thing it doesn't have is a good games library.

Once you get developers either making games specifically for Linux or devs porting other O/S games to Linux, then Linux will be ready to take down the MS behemoth. After all, once it has games, you wouldn't need a different O/S for anything and you could then use your Windows discs as really cool frisbees :)

Gaming on linux

[Kirby-meister]

Linux could get more support, if only developers saw other developers do well on the system. And the only way that'll happen is if someone gives Linux support. Kind of a catch-22 there.

Re:Gaming on linux

[Zathrus]

And the only way that'll happen is if someone gives Linux support

You mean, kinda like how id Software does? Or maybe Epic (Unreal, Unreal Tournament)?

The reality is that there are some companies supporting Linux - id Software is probably the best as far as it goes - but it's not making money. For id it's not a huge deal, since they've specifically chosen a portable development structure, but for most companies it's a huge ordeal to not use DirectX, or to port from DirectX to anything else. And sales (and usage) figures aren't indicating that it's worth the money to do so.

Two words

[roystgnr]

I wish another game would come along with the impact that Doom had. It was just SOOOO amazing and nothing has come close since.

Deus Ex

You will be waiting a long time.

[RatBastard]

I wish another game would come along with the impact that Doom had.

I'm afraid that you will be waiting a long time. It's not even the gaming industry's fault on this one. Games like DOOM (or whatever your first quality game of any genre is) are like your first love: you never quite recapture the feeling of that very first (insert first sexual encounter here).

DOOM did a good enough job at faking 3D that when we got real 3D it wasn't that big of a deal. And now that we have 3D, what's left? Better graphics. And one day, maybe, passable AI.

The closest I've gotten to recapturing the feelings I had when playing DOOM have been with Half-Life and Halo. But neither of these games made me stare into my monitor at an odd angle trying to see around the corner, and they only made me jump out of my chair about three times each.