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42 of the Best Commercial Linux Games

Posted by timothy on from the answer-to-everything dept.

LinuxLinks writes "It is true to say that the number of commercial games released for Linux each year remains small compared to other platforms. Nevertheless, we faced lots of difficult choices compiling a list of 42 of the best commercial Linux games. The selection we have finally chosen covers a wide range of different game genres, so hopefully there will be something here that will interest all."

6 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. I knew it! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    The ultimate question:

    How many commercial games can you play on Linux?

    1. Re:I knew it! by MK_CSGuy · · Score: 5, Informative

      Correct me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK there is no VM that allows native access to the graphics card.
      All the VMs I worked with (Virtual PC, VMWare and QEMU in the past, VirtualBox today) emulate a card on par with an S3 Trident or some other limited card.
      You can change the video memory size (and remember that this means regular memory speeds! no GDDR3!) but no pixel shaders and other "modern" technologies.

  2. Douglas Adams. by DrYak · · Score: 5, Funny

    42? why not 43? or how about 50? There is a theory which states that if you ever discovers exactly why it is 42, the Life, Universe And Everything will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
    --
    "Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
  3. Re:Yep by Teppy · · Score: 5, Informative

    I designed (and run) A Tale in the Desert, one of the games on the list. About 3.1% of paid players currently use Linux. Also, 7.3% use OSX, and the rest use Windows.

    Of all trial accounts, 7.3% of Linux users go on to pay for at least one month of the game. Of OSX users, it's 6.9%, and of Windows users it's 11.8%.

    For some reason the Linux number has dropped significantly over the years (used to be around 10% IIRC), though the other two numbers have remained about the same.

  4. Well, sorta by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Informative

    VMWare has some limited 3D support you can enable in version 6. It isn't that complete, but 3DMark 2001 does run and gets a respectable score, for older hardware. VMWare 6.5 has much more complete 3D support. It is still in beta and I've not tried it (I use VMWare in a production environment) but I've no reason to believe they are lying. It claims to be DX8, more or less, as in Pixel shaders up to v2.0 and actually makes use of the hardware in your system.

    You are still going to get slowdown, of course, but I imagine they may make it workable. When it goes final, I'll get the upgrade and see what happens.

  5. Vendetta Online by Incarnate-VO · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I designed and run Vendetta Online (vendetta-online.com), another game on the above list. I don't have the cool realtime stats that Teppy does, but we have quite a few Linux people and a significant OS X population (around 30-40% of our userbase, last I checked). Our game is completely native on each platform, and includes a 64bit Linux client. We don't use any kind of portability/wrapper libraries.