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.
No idea for recent ones, but you should try the first “Dune” : an excellent mix between strategy and adventure.
Just grab it from my abandonware repository if you want (see on Website URI)
I wish I would see another piece of gaming art like Planescape: Torment again… in my opinion one of the very few real Role Playing games which saw the light.
Abandonware rules. When I am totally out of games to play, I install some of the old ones, and have much more fun with a 2MB game that with most of today’s 2GB ones…
The first dune was really cool! And first Master of Orion and Master of Magic totally rock. I still have them installed in dosbox.
Following the advanced + 3d + modern games, two RPG’s Fallout3 and Massive Effect on PC, but no Linux
You can run some PS2 on Linux with pcsx2, and in that case, old but amazing is Shadow of Colossus
Fallout3 was great. I was able to play it with wine, but it crashed randomly on startup. Massive Effect is still on my list of games to try.
Shadow of Colossus and ICO are masterpieces indeed. I have them on my PS2.
You also have “Return to Castle Wolfenstein”, “Enemy Territory” and “Enemy Territory: Quake Wars”. All based on Id Tech engines and running natively under Linux (I use Mandriva). I am a fan of Enemy Territory and I play this game (almost every day) since 2004.
Ahhh.. “Return to Castle Wolfenstein”.. I totally forgot about it. I played it about 5 times already from the beginning to the end, and it even worked faster on wine than on native windows at that time somehow!
I´m stopped in time. Sometimes I still play Starcraft. Reading your post, I remember SimCity I, Rise Of The Triad, SimAnt, Monkey Island and Out of This World. All great games!
I am still playing SimCity 1 on my n800
.
I would suggest checking http://savage2.com/en/ an excellent game that works in linux.
And how about Tribes 2? It is only PC game what has kept me on gaming. Linux release by Loki was great but it was sad when Loki went down and Sierra abandoned the game when it started to focus to flopped Tribes Vengeance, aka Tribes 3.
The Tribes 2 master server got shutdown less than year ago. The game was up almost 9 years. And now there is Tribes Next (www.tribesnext.com) what builds up again the game. Too sad that Linux version does not exist because thy have needed to hack the binaries with hexeditor and they do not know Linux ELF structures.
One of the most used game on Linux for me is Neverwinter Nights (1). Sometimes I get all dooms and quake 1 work on Linux with hardware renderending and I play them trought. Nothing beats the story and gameplay on them (quake story is fantastic! if you have ever even noticed it!)
I see you promised to waste as much time as you can
A noble enterprise it is!
I feel obligued to mention here Another World (or Out of this World), Flashback, Abuse (and it’s free counterpart fRaBs), Descent series (not everybody will like real 6 degrees of freedom, there are some modern linux clones), Warcraft II (it was only lacking of unit grouping under a keystroke), Age of Empires series (not much innovative but shows what makes a good RTS), Heroes of Might and Magic series, DeusEx: Invisible War and other games based on silently hunting using stealth (another great concept), Aliens versus Predator (have you imagined what does a spider feel when walking on a ceiling?, moreover – great gameplay!), Ił-2 Szturmowik (polish transcription with pronounciation exactly matching Russian one – I couldn’t resist myself) and other simulators, and last but not least Cave Story (not modern eyecandy, but great storyline). Oh I almost forgot there are plenty of adventure games – to name a few: Sanitarium (a must see!), Neverhood (game made of 4 tons of modelling clay, also a protagonist is caled Klaymen). For more timewasting titles browse http://happypenguin.org/ .
One more thing – I hope you know what is a legal base of abandonware
(as far as I know it’s entirely illegal – it’s only based on assumption that there’s noone to sue you)
Have fun playing!
I hope you know the difference between abandonware, freeware and public domain. In US and many other countries there’s no such thing as “Abandonware” – people just assume copyright is void because there’s no copyright holder anymore. But that’s only convenient assumption.
2Fri13: I never heard of Tribes2, thanks for the tip! I’ll surely look onto it! Neverwinter Night 1 (and its expansions) were pretty cool too, I played them several times. But I felt that Baldur’s Gate story was way more intriguing. Quake story (the one which was in a .TXT file) was also cool. Besides, even doom 1/2 had a story described in a .TXT file. And doom has also some books published (quite unrelated to the game itself by the way). But only modern games I remember which managed to recreate some of doom/quake fun were Painkiller and Serious Sam.
2Werni: amazing, I have played all of those games! Few of them (until descent) I played while I was living in Russia, and at the time there was no copyright law there at all (now there is). But it is a pity that abandonware is considered illegal in US and some other countries – specially for the games that are not being produced nor sold anymore. As for Descent – it was one of my favorite games, with all that freedom to move wherever I want and how I want. Descent: Freespace also was great, and had a really nice story.
But many thanks to the reference to http://happypenguin.org/, it was exactly what I was looking for!
I well know how it is when there’s almost no copyright, and suddenly copyright shows up and people get confused about it. Good old times
But I’m glad that that no-copyright mess is over.
And a word about that pity with illegal abandonware. There was “UFO (or X-COM): Terror from the Deep”. Another bright star between games. Some years later (I guess that happened after collapse of memorable game developer: Microprose) this title was assumed abandonware. It was freely available from some abandonware sites. And then (not long ago) Valve bought rights to this title and started to resell it. So abandonware sites removed this title. Now: do people who downloaded it for free have it legally? Excuse me for an offtopic.
How about Spore? I played it once, seemed interesting! But nothing is better than Fallout 1/2… Starcraft… and other old games… Many of which don’t even work anymore on modern PCs…
http://home.comcast.net/~SupportCD/XPGames.html – another nice site with links to freeware games. Excuse me for those are “made for Windows”, but you may still try your luck with Wine.