PROGRAM | USABILITY | INTERFACE | COMMENTS |
|---|
GNOME Games | Good | Fair | GNOME's collection of small desktop games is a fairly simple and not so stunning group. A few of the games can be addictive, but they are mostly good to kill some time with. |
KDE Games | Good | Fair | The KDE games would get the exact same description as the GNOME Games, but a few games rise above the usual set of games. I give brownie points to the KDE games for adding a few choices that are different, such as KAsteroids, KBattleship, KFoulEggs, and KSokoban. |
Other free games | Varies | Varies | Casual gamers looking for a bit of amusement rather than a great game experience have a lot of choices. Cube and Flight Gear are the exceptions to that rule, offering both a good game and the $0 price tag. Check the Links section for URLs of some of the good sites to keep track of Linux games. |
Doom 3 | Good | Great | It's a great gameno one will deny that. You have to like first-person shooters. As with most FPS games, the multiplayer game is better than the single-player game. |
Unreal Tournament 2004 | Good | Great | UT2004 is another first-person shooter, but, with the added perks of driving around vehicles and using more interesting weapons, it's a fun change. |
Neverwinter Nights | Good | Good | For those that have a Dungeons and Dragons geek hidden within, Neverwinter Nights provides good fantasy role-playing gaming with no subscription. Installation of the Linux client gets a bit involved but it plays well when you get it going. |
Other commercial games | Varies | Varies | A few companies actively make Linux games, but most seem to release a Linux version for some games and not for others. You can stay up-to-date with sites such as happypenguin.com. If you are into gaming, try buying a couple titles; sales encourage game makers to make more Linux games. |
TuxNES | Fair | Poor | TuxNES is a solid emulator of the old Nintendo. It has better color than some Nintendo emulators in Windows. The GUI can be a pain to install. If you're not afraid of the command line, just run TuxNES from the terminal. |
XMAME | Poor | Fair | The program isn't the easiest one in the world to get going, but XMAME is the best choice available for playing arcade games and legal game ROMs. |
Other emulators | Varies | Varies | The selection of game emulators available for Linux is staggering. Some standouts are SNES9x, ZSNES, and Virtual Boy. Look up some and try them out. |
WineX/Cedega | Fair | Fair | Some games are easy to load in Cedega, but most games stop being fun if you have to spend a whole lot of time getting them to work. Cedega is the best we have right now for bridging the Windows to Linux gaming gap. Try Cedega and support it if you have the time and patience. More Cedega users will only make the product better. |
