Top 8 Linux Games Of 2007
Below are 8 addictive 3d games for linux users to fill their time with. These games are really good and some have won awards or have been featured on magazines. Most of it is cross platform and free. You don’t have to use ‘Wine’ to be able to play as they come with Linux installers.
-
- 200+ unit types
- 16 different races
- 6 major factions
- ability to multiplay up to 64 players
- ability to generate bots for practice sessions
- dynamic lighting system similar to Doom 3
- Battle For Wesnoth
- Nexuiz
- America’s Army
- Enemy Territory : Quake Wars
- Tremulous
- Tux Racer
- World Of Padman
- Vendetta
David White who started Wesnoth back in 2003, had a vision of a free open source strategy game that had very simple rules, uses a strong artificial intelligence, challenging and fun. Wesnoth has already passed the 1 million mark for downloads. As of March 2007, the game is available in 35 different languages.
A normal Wesnoth player has
to choose from. Actually, you can even make your own custom units, design your own map, scenarios or even campaigns. It’s all up to your creativity. The most interesting part of any game is the ability to multiplay. You can challenge up to a total of 8 friends in multiplayer fantasy battles.
Nexuiz is a free, cross platform, first person shooter distributed under GNU General Public License by Alientrap Software. It started back in May 31 2005 with version 1.0 using DarkPlaces, a significanlty modified quake engine. The current version, 2.2.3, was released on January 26, 2007. Nexuiz’s logo is based on the chinese character “力” which means strength.
Several notable features of the game include
America’s Army is a tactical, multiplayer, first-person shooter owned by the United States Government and released as a global public relations initiative to help with U.S. Army recruitment. The first version, Recon, was released on 4th July 2002. The current version 2.8.1 was released on 22nd Mar 2007.
It’s the first well known computer game used for political aims. The game is used as a playable recruiting tool and critics have charged the game serves as a propaganda device. A counter on the homepage of the PC version shows over eight million registered accounts as of 2007. GameSpy tracked the game usage and reported an average of 4,500 players at any one time between 2002 and 2005. It is enough for America’s Army to rank in the Top 10 Online Games chart.
is a first-person shooter follow-up to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. It also has the same science fiction universe as Quake 4, with a story serving as a prequel to Quake II. Quake Wars is the second multiplayer-only game in the Quake series after Quake III Arena. The gameplay is almost the same as Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, but with the addition of controllable vehicles and aircraft, asymmetric teams, much larger maps and the option of computer-controlled bots. Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is being developed by Splash Damage for the PC using a modified version of id Software’s Doom 3 engine and MegaTexture rendering technology.
At E3 2006(Electronic Entertainment Expo), the game won the Game Critics Award for Best Online Multiplayer.
Tremulous is an open source team-based first-person shooter with a game play that is similar to Gloom(a quake 2 mod) and Natural Selection (a Half-Life mod). The game features two teams, humans and aliens, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The game has been downloaded over 200,000 times and was voted “Player’s Choice Standalone Game of the Year” in Mod Database’s “Mod of the Year” 2006 competition.
Tux Racer is a newbie friendly, open source, 3D computer game starring the Linux mascot, Tux the penguin. Like many open-source games, the replay value of Tux Racer is extended by easy modification of the game. New maps can be created by making three raster images to indicate height, surface, and object placement. The last release of Tux Racer was version 0.61, 29th October 2001.
WOP is a new and free comic style game that uses the Quake 3 engine. The game was recently featured in 3 German magazine covers; PC Action, ‘BRAVO Screenfun’ and ‘Linux Intern’.
is a first person twitch based MMORPG. New players get an 8 hour trial which is enough to get anyone hooked to it. After that, you gotta pay $5 a month which is quite worthwhile, especially considering the incredibly communicative development of the game. It has a native linux installer as well as one for Macs and Windows.