42 of the Best Commercial Linux Games 158
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."
Yep (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yep (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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,
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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
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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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It isn't that hard to develop for Windows, Linux and Mac at the same time, if you use the right tools. For example, if you write an entire app in Python and use something like TKinter for GUI, you get cross-platformability 'for free'. Of course few games are written in Python, though. But even
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but if I recall right wasn't Tabula Rasa almost completely in python?
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It's westlake, not westbake, my friend (Score:2)
It would be presumptuous of course to think that his choice of a new alias was more than a coincidence.
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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
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There's no harm in having a Linux box available for purchase on your website though. It's just a box, it's not expensive to have a pic of Tux on it and then only include the Linux version. If selling in stores though, I agree, would possibly be best t
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IMHO that would be a "killer app" for Linux. Develop a game using OpenGL and other libraries and then create a live-CD which only starts the game (and all the underlying hardware is done by Linux).
That way PC gaming can be made as simple as console gaming. The only downside I see is the lack of upgrades when doing that... other thing you could do is ask to install in some of the available partitions. And let the people play *onl
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.
DANGER! (Score:2)
Running commercial, proprietary software from a Live CD means handing over your entire system. There are enough jail breaking tools and exploits to do damage to user accounts, not to mention the crap
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.
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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.
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Is there anything like that for linux?
I'm reminded of the debian software popularity contest package, and I usually tick the box to submit the info
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CNR (Score:2)
CNR [cnr.com]- with its roots in Linspire - has the right idea.
But I tend to use it as a reality check and on that level it can be depressing. "The Year of Linux" software looks like a shareware catalog from 1992.
CNR lists 23 commercial "games," only three of which are worth even passing notice: Postal 2, Flight Gear, and Bridge Construction Set.
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Generally though, your distro's repositories are your source for new software. Ubuntu, I know, has user-ratings available via their "Add/Remove" program. It wouldn't surprise me if others had something similar.
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Well done.
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The IRC channels and *nix support forums only mock these people with a stony silence...
I've seen this problem in #linux on various IRC servers. Most of the time when I ask a question, I get 10 "rtfm"s, 10 "giyf"s, 10 "shut up, n00b"s, and if I'm lucky one person will point me in a vaguely useful direction; it doesn't matter whether I mention that I've already spent a decent amount of time researching the issue or not, I get the same reactions. It wasn't any better in #gentoo (on freenode, anyway).
I knew it! (Score:5, Funny)
How many commercial games can you play on Linux?
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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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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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.
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VMWare 6.5 has much more complete 3D support
I assume that would be VMware Workstation 6.5. We (I currently work for a large unnamed virtualization provider) generally like to version our products, not the company itself ;)
:D
I've seen a demo of 3D graphics from a virtual machine. It worked. I haven't seen the final version, obviously, but it comes in a shrink-wrapped box with a manual, so it can't possibly have any bugs
(Kudos if you know who I'm quoting; hint: he's had rank in the FSF).
VMWare Workstation 6.5, currently in Beta (Score:2, Interesting)
This version does still buffer the video card, but it seems on par with DirectX 9.x and pixel Shader 2.0
I started testing with older games so far, such as Diablo II, which work fine. Soon I will try newer games. However, since it does not yet report the actual physical video card, some games will not work with it.
This is improved greatly over the past version, for use with Direct3D games.
Also, it seems WINE has improved greatly as well.
However, if
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My personal fee
EVE doesn't require Wine? (Score:5, Interesting)
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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).
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.
The Best 42? (Score:2)
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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.
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Of course, I did love how the AI didn't have any wall attacking scripts. Thus, you could build a wall straight over to the enemy and lock them into their base because they woul
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I'm not just talking AI there, as in, not calculating the best path to avoid fire. I'm talking as in, it couldn't get from point X to point Y, when told exactly where to go, and it had a clear way between them. I'm
Better idea: (Score:2, Informative)
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How many... (Score:2, Interesting)
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The only 42 Commercial Linux Games (Score:5, Funny)
Douglas Adams. (Score:5, Funny)
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Anyway, cool list. There are games on there I didn't know about. Will have to check them out.
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Good work, there. Except that you forgot that there are multiple ways to interpret "not writing jokes in base thirteen".
If indeed, he wrote it not as a joke, but as a statement (in base thirteen), then the math is correct and the question is solved.
I wish you an improbably nice day.
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No.
As everyone may well know, 42 is a very meaningful number.
Six times nine, and all.
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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.
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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)
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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!
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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?
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$ 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/"
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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)
Lesser Known Linux Games (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.linuxgames.com/archives/10260
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.
Re: Tribes 2 (Score:2)
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I kinda consider that a blocker against the game even being released, much less being listed as one of the best (unless the others really suck).
Here's to hoping that they patch it to not require shaders, or that radeonhd adds support for my r600 card.
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.
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It's just beautiful. With the exception of a few wrinkles, like the gesture system (nice idea, but far harder to use than just clicking buttons), it's darn near perfect.
Shogo and SiN? (Score:3, Informative)
Dominions, and descendants, from Ilwinter (Score:2)
RTCW? (Score:4, Interesting)
No Descent 3? (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.lokigames.com/products/descent3/ [lokigames.com]
It deserves mention in the list, perhaps in lieu of one of the more ordinary first person shooters listed.
Vendetta Online (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Vendetta Online (Score:4, Insightful)
MindRover (Score:2)
What really set this game apart from the crowd though, was that you could actually construct full-fledged autonomous vehicles with fairly sophisticated AIs and weapons, all without writing any code. Instead, you were presented with a number of Lego MindStorms-like s
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Devastation Net (Score:2)
EVE Online is not native (Score:2)
TFA has 2 requirements. one is "Not require Wine to run."
EVE Online requires Wine/cider to run. It is a not a native client, so it shouldn't be on the list. That cuts the games down to 41. Any others that shouldn't be there?
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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.
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It damns with faint praise to say that four years later UT2004 has become easy to install.