I just finished quake4, and I am playing (again) doom3 on Linux right now. It feels great – so if anyone wants to say that there are no games on Linux, I could just show the list of some of the games I played this year and found quite impressive:

  • Nexuiz
  • OpenArena
  • Doom3
  • Quake4
  • World of Goo (this one actually managed to keep me awake until 5am for a few days)
  • Caster
  • Cube
  • …

and, besides those, we still have wine which plays most of the games just fine (except some of the bleeding edge ones, and the ones which are hurt by the the-f**ing-hating-mouse-rotation-bug like call of duty 4).

But.. even with all that progress, I miss the good old games. Of course, Crysis, Assassin’s Creed, Call of Duty 1/2/3/4, Dead Space and all other thousands of recently released games look pretty amazing, but I feel that most of modern games are not even close to the old ones. I still remember being awake for 24+ hours playing Baldur’s Gate, and loosing some of the faculty exams because of the Baldur’s Gate 2. And I’ll probably never forget how scary it was to play Doom on a 386 in a dark room. Nor wolfenstein 3d on a 286 for the first time. And, speaking about game story, few games came close to Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1/2, Final Fantasy VII (a.k.a. how-you-felt-when-Ariel-died??)/VIII..

But, speaking of 3d-shooters. The best so far (at least, for me) are: Doom, Doom 2, Heretic, Hexen, Duke3D/Blood/Shadow Warrior, Serious Sam 1/1.5/2, Half-Life, Prey, Quake1/2/4, …. Most (all?) of those games are based on the same concepts we have seen in early 90ths. I could mention Halo/Gears of War, which introduced some changes in the gameplay, but not that much to say that it was a break-through. You still keep walking around, grabbing new weapons (and dropping less useful ones, like in Medal of Honor/Call of Duty/Halo/…), killing stronger and more stronger enemies, and that’s it. Occasionally there are some innovations, like portals and gravity (Prey) or maybe some sort of character development (Daikatana, Call of Duty, Unreal Tournament) or time/physics manipulations (Half-Life 2) and environment interaction (Doom 3, Unreal Tournament), but nothing ground-breaking.

So far, I am feeling like the progress stopped in the way the games are developed. We have new physics, graphics, sounds, polygons and so on, but few games are introducing something truly new. On the other hand, maybe we have reached the point when everything is already implemented, and the games just have to focus on the state-of-the-art graphics only, and forget about all other items..

So, if you read so far, what do you think about that? Are there any modern games which are truly outstanding (and run on Linux – either natively or using wine)? I promise to test all the suggestion and post my impressions on this blog.