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42 of the Best Commercial Linux Games
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Jun 14, 2008 02:51 PM
from the answer-to-everything dept.
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."
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Submission: 42 of the Best Commercial Linux Games by Anonymous Coward
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Yep (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yep (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Yep (Score:4, Interesting)
But enough are willing to pay to make PC gaming a billion dollar industry.
The developer for Linux begins with the handicap of a 0.68% market share -- in a world where Vista has 15%, OSX on the Mac and the iPhone 8%.
Operating System Market Share [hitslink.com]
When your potential market is already microscopic, you can't afford to lose a significant percentage of sales to the pirate.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
But enough [Windows and Mac users] are willing to pay to make PC gaming a billion dollar industry.
If you design a game for both PCs and Macs, then adding Linux as a third platform shouldn't be that hard, since hopefully you're already writing using a cross-platform toolkit (in fact I am in the process of doing so myself). Note that if you're not doing so, but rather writing specifically for PCs and specifically for Macs, then you're already wasting a lot of effort over what it would take to use a cross-platform toolkit from the beginning.
So the main reason not to support Linux is if you are PC-only,
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
First, adding Linux means adding TONS of work for support. Linux distros are much less static than Windows or OSX - the platform can vary greatly. This makes support very hard, this is why id and Epic do not give support for their ports.
Also, OSX and Linux have many subtle differences which might catch you off-guard. Expect lots of testing and debugging.
When we move to consoles its a different story altogether. Forget about one cross-platform toolkit, the platforms are too div
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The second platform for the Windows developer is the XBox 360 - and the cross-platform toolkit is sitting there in front of him
The Mac port can be outsourced.
The OEM Linux PC is typically presented as an entry-level system with bottom feeder specs.
The games in the CNR [cnr.com] repository make that plain enough.
It's the rare Linux develope
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Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I think there's a small problem of distribution. Linux-only games won't sell. However, Windows games do sell, and if there's Linux binaries available, all the better.
Of the games on the list, I have NWN, Quake 3, 4 and Doom 3... NWN, Doom 3 and Q4 on the virtue of buying the Windows version and downloading the free binary, Q3A because luckily there actually was a local book shop that had Linux games (I also bought Myth II from them, and ordered SMAC from another store). Loki was a great company, too bad t
Re:Yep (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't play a single-boot game. I haven't done that since the DOS days, and even back then I found it highly annoying. I have this ridiculously overpowered PC for a reason, and I very much enjoy firing up any random game in a few seconds, play however long I want, and quit back to the desktop so I can resume productivity. I often alt-tab out of games to poke at something else, or look up a game guide on the web.
Parent
Re:Yep (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
That doesn't feel quite right.
You only have to look at CNET and Download.com to see that there are communities built around Windows. A $20 shareware product like SolSuite Solitaire [download.com] rates an editorial review, a video, and 9 million downloads.
I knew it! (Score:5, Funny)
How many commercial games can you play on Linux?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
A lot. Many require WINE or similar to run though. In fact though with a VM you could say you can run every single commercial game in existence on Linux. Just because a game doesn't run natively on Linux doesn't mean that you can't play it using WINE, and many of the more prominent games even have specific steps to play the game perfectly or better then on Windows.
Re:I knew it! (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:I knew it! (Score:5, Informative)
However, it is possible to provide access at the API level - an OpenGL library and device driver which passes calls through the VM to the host OpenGL implementation. One such project is VMGL [toronto.edu] for Xen, and I believe something similar has been done with QEMU.
Parent
Well, sorta (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
EVE doesn't require Wine? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:EVE doesn't require Wine? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.eve-online.com/download/linux.asp [eve-online.com]
They provide
Technically it's built with Transgaming's "cider" windows api for linux (based on wine).
Parent
Re:EVE doesn't require Wine? (Score:4, Informative)
the native linux program is a downloader of the Windows Application, and an installer of cider/cedega/whatever it's called.
given TFA's requirement of "Not require Wine to run" this would have to be a fail.
Eve Online is a Windows program requiring Wine or derivative to run. Technically, they could list the Eve INSTALLER on their list, but that's not a game.
Parent
The Best 42? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Technically, yes (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, do note that the list is already containing some... rather... "classic" ones. Gorky 17, for example is a 1999 games for example, so it's rapidly approaching a decade old. So is Creatures 3. Knights and Merchants is from 1998. (And even back then it was a crap game, with some of the worst pathfinding (among other sins) I've seen in a RTS. And not very popular either. So it's... unsettling to see that as one of the best games for Linux.)
Quake 3 was a good game, back then, but it's from 1999 too. Ok, they have Quake 3 Arena there, which is from 2000.
Don't get me wrong, there's newer stuff in that list too, and some good stuff too. But, nevertheless, it's basically 42 games spread across 10 bloody years. Yeah, so some would be closer to one end than others, but that doesn't invalidate the point much. You're probably better off trying to use Wine than waiting for those commercial Linux games to trickle in.
Parent
Better idea: (Score:2, Informative)
How many... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The only 42 Commercial Linux Games (Score:5, Funny)
Douglas Adams. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
No.
As everyone may well know, 42 is a very meaningful number.
Six times nine, and all.
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Crappy list (Score:3, Interesting)
Games selection (Score:5, Informative)
It is a commercial effort, by a commercial company to be sure that their product can be used on a Linux desktop. It fits the list.
(same story for Mac too, btw)
Ur Quan however great doesn't fit into *that* criterion.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Ditto to this. Cider does a piss poor job of supporting EVE, when the "native" clients first shipped it was slow, crash happy, and prone to graphical corruption. Even today it's slow and prone to graphical corruption, it's just less crash happy. Meanwhile Windows users get to use EVE's "premium" graphics, a series of new models and lighting system requiring Shader Model 3 while Linux and Mac users are out of luck. The situation is so bad that the remaining Linux users have gone back to playing the regular c
Alpha Centauri... (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I would have nominated Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri but that one broke many a kernal ago on a glibc update. Too bad Loki is dead or they could have updated it.
Funny, I actually got SMAC to work on a reasonably new setup; the updater blew up (I had to patch the game manually by extracting the update and patching the files individually with xdelta), fullscreen mode doesn't work (weird video mode), and apparently I'd need to disable compositing to make it not crash when the actual game play begins, which I'm too lazy to do...
We needs a new build or at least a competent clone! SMAC rules!
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
This game surely enters my best 3 games ever list, maybe even the 1st.
This game has the optimal mixture of reasonable graphics, great design, great story, many options and great "feeling".
Seriously, every time I return to it the game just blows my mind away,
Re:Alpha Centauri... (Score:4, Funny)
I actually returned to Alpha Centauri yesterday
Can I see your engine? How does it work? Is it a Wankel warp engine?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
$ uname -a
Linux death 2.6.25-gentoo-r4 #2 SMP Thu May 22 15:42:34 EDT 2008 x86_64 AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+ AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux
SMAC and SMACX work fine here if you download the libraries and follow the instructions at http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Running_Old_Loki_Games [gentoo-wiki.com]
I run it via a slightly different command than what they give there though
LD_LIBRARY_PATH="/usr/lib/Loki_Compat/"
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
On a related note, the other day I was really wishing I had purchased the combo pack (SMAC + SMACX) for Linux which was selling several years back. I was checking on Amazon [amazon.com], and apparently nowadays a used copy of SMACX goes for ~$110, with $150 minimum for a new copy.
Difficult choices (Score:5, Funny)
Foremost among these difficulties was finding 42 commercial Linux games.
DEFCON FTW (Score:3, Interesting)
As said allready: The list isn't very good. (Score:3, Interesting)
Kohan has a pure native version *and* a version that comes autobundled with it's own Wine/Cedegar offering instant one-click install and play and it isn't even mentioned.
Where is Tribes 2?
What about Rune or Heavy Metal?
The last time I tested Wurm Online (given, that was a while ago) it was crappy. I mean, really crappy.
I'm glad they mentioned Savage/Savage 2 though. The S2Games people deserve credit for a wonderfull game that runs natively on Linux since day one and was the first quality title that actually actively advertised their support for Linux.
But some of the games on this list are far outperformed by todays FOSS counterparts. The only indie game that I didn't know of and got me curious was "H-Craft Championship". Gotta check that out.
I'd just like to take a moment... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is one developer that's definitely worth your time and few dollars. Skip the Starbucks for a day and try it out. Even though it's a linear-ish game, there's still replay value. Went all the way through it four or five times now and it's never the same twice.
Shogo and SiN? (Score:3, Informative)
RTCW? (Score:4, Interesting)
Vendetta Online (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Vendetta Online (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
s/commercial/proprietary/g (Score:3, Insightful)
I hope I am not being overly pedantic here, but there is nothing non-commercial about the GPL or any other free software licenses. In fact, you can pay money [redhat.com] for Free softare games if you like. What they really mean is proprietary. In the article, they do however have a clearer definition,
To be eligible for inclusion in this list each game needed to be:
My only complaint is with the title of the article.