A New User’s Guide To Native Linux Gaming
19th January 2008
Hazel
Articles
Introduction, Native Gaming
Introduction
For a lot of new Linux users, one of their first questions will be “Can I still play my Windows games?”. Whilst we will be looking at using Wine and Cedega to do this in our next article, it should not be assumed that this is the only option for gaming under Linux.
In fact, there are a great many native Linux games, and their quality and number is constantly increasing. Solitaire, mah-jong and the usual ‘casual gaming’ suspects are all available, but so are 3D first person shooters, racing games and turn based strategy. What’s more, these games are almost always free (as in beer) and often open source.
What is available?
Whilst it’s true that there isn’t the same range of native games for Linux as there are commercial games releases, in general there are a least a few quality games in each genre. The Linux Gamer’s Game List refuses to “list games which suck” but currently details almost 400 games. The Linux Games Tome, a collection of Linux games and toys now has over 1000 entries.
How complete are these games?
As with most Open Source projects these games are continually in development, but that doesn’t prevent many of them from reaching professional levels of completion. The gap between different games can be huge.
Take Tremulous for example – not only entirely playable and feature complete, but an innovative combination of first person shooter and real time strategy gameplay. On the other hand there is Planeshift, an MMORPG which is far from complete now, but is constantly expanding and improving.
How do I get the games?
Normally, you will be able to obtain some games through your Linux distribution’s package manager. Games can also be discovered and downloaded through sites like The Linux Games Tome.
Over to you…
Any tips for new linux users and gamers?
What’s your view on native Linux gaming right now?
Feel free to add your comments, questions, thoughts and advice below.
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29th January 2008
I think the major thing at the moment is still to make sure that people know what they’re getting, which isn’t the polished game that publishers would put out. People should think of each game as an alpha release. Hopefully some time soon we’ll get a lot more complete games.
Something people should take a look at is FretsOnFire, an open source Guitar Hero clone (windows binaries too) It’s obviously not as pretty as the GH games, most noticeably missing the 3D stage and so on, but honestly, who notices them while shredding? Go play that, head over to the forums, try a few custom songs then make your own and submit your own
29th January 2008
Not all the games are very incomplete, though you’re right that they are rarely as polished as commercial releases.
8th February 2008
I agree that Linux gaming has come a long way. In my opinion one of the most frustrating things about getting games to run properly in linux is finding/installing linux drivers for video cards. For instance, I know ATI drivers exist. I can find the drivers…I can run the install, but are they stable? No. Ubuntu has come a long way with this, but I dream of the day that these drivers install as easily and work as well as their windows counterparts.
While I like Frets on Fire and Tremulous, there are some excellent Kid-centric Edu games like Tux Math and Tux Typing available.
8th February 2008
You’re absolutely right about drivers, and I think it’s a real shame that Linux gaming is being held back by this. I haven’t had many problems with my nVidia drivers but I know other people have, and even more so with ATI. I hope that as Linux continues to become more popular on the desktop that graphics cards manufacturers will be forced to take action regarding this.
I hadn’t really thought about ‘edutainment’ games under Linux but perhaps we can recruit some kids to playtest and review them for the website in the future - thanks for the thought.
10th February 2008
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