42 of the Best Commercial Linux Games

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."

Better idea:

[Anonymous Coward]

List the best [linuxlinks.com] free [linuxlinks.com] games. We're all well aware of the proprietary ones.

Alpha Centauri...

[headkase]

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.

Re:I knew it!

[MK_CSGuy]

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.

Games selection

[DrYak]

They include games with no real native client (EVE Online, which has a built-in Cedega-like engine)

Nevertheless, EVE Online is sold and supported specifically for Linux. They just happen to have chosen a different strategy - instead of paying someone like icculus to write a port, they keep the same code base and pay people at transgaming to make sure that this code runs on linux.
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)

, but they don't list The Ur-Quan Masters, possibly the best native-Linux game in history?

Ur Quan is really a great game. *BUT* it an open-source project hosted on sourceforge. The whole point of the article was to point out effort from corporation making efforts in order to have their commercial product run on Linux too.
Ur Quan however great doesn't fit into *that* criterion.

Given how small their "Adventure" category is, they would have done well to include it...

Their "Adventure" category seems to have only survival-horror kind of game. They have actual classical adventure games (in the point'n'click sense of the word) - the "ankh" serie - but those are sorted together with the RPGs.

Re:Yep

[Teppy]

I designed (and run) A Tale in the Desert [atitd.com], 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.

Re:EVE doesn't require Wine?

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't, it is just certified by the makers of the game to run nicely on WINE.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:EVE doesn't require Wine?

[TheThiefMaster]

Wrong.
http://www.eve-online.com/download/linux.asp [eve-online.com]
They provide .rpm, .deb and .tgz downloads.
Technically it's built with Transgaming's "cider" windows api for linux (based on wine).

Re:Games selection

[analog_line]

EVE Online may be "supported" for Linux, but it's terrible support. I resubscribed to EVE Online because of the Linux and Mac clients, and I had nothing but problems, and stopped the subscription after two months. Less than half the frame rate of the Windows version on the same hardware, and the Mac client was even worse.

Re:Alpha Centauri...

[phantomlord]

I'm running:
$ 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/" /usr/lib/Loki_Compat/ld-linux.so.2 /usr/local/games/smac/smacx.dynamic

Shogo and SiN?

[An Ominous Cow Erred]

I'm surprised that Shogo at least didn't make the list. I rather liked that game back when I was messing with the beta. =)

Where's Unreal Tournament 2004?

[Anonymous Coward]

They forgot Unreal Tournament 2004. It has a full native linux port. Hell, it even has a fully 64bit port. Some people have had trouble getting it working but there's install guides out now that make it really easy to install:

http://www.mepisguides.com/ut2k4/ut2k4.html [mepisguides.com]

UT2004 is a great FPS. I don't know how they left it off the list.

Well, sorta

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:How many...

[Cheapy]

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was released last year. So there's at least one. Amazingly fun game too!

Ankh 2 under Role Play?

[Nahooda]

Huh? They listed Ankh 2 under Role Play but it's a classic adventure.

By the way, if you'd like to support the development of commercial Linux games you should consider pre-ordering Jack Keane at ixsoft.de. If 200 pre-orders are reached the game will be ported to Linux. It's from the same company that's responsible for the wonderful Ankh series of which the first to games are already available for Linux.

-nahooda

Re:EVE doesn't require Wine?

[spir0]

double wrong. kinda.

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.