Who said gaming sucks on GNU/Linux???
Though things are not yet up there on par with the BIG B’s support for games in GNU/Linux, we do not suck either. Gaming on GNU/Linux is catching up. This weekend I decided to try some of the games on my laptop. Ofcourse being a Age of Empires fanboy once upon a time, the first game I was interested was “Battle for Wesnoth“. A nice turn based strategy game having a pretty short and sweet tutorials and loads of campaigns online. Its there on the ubuntu repos.
The screenshots above show the title menu screen and one of the campaigns in progress. I have not yet started in full fledged mode this campaign. But yes, a very very addictive game for strategy lovers. It being turn based “actually” makes the game more interesting.
For those FPS (First person shooter) lovers OpenArena is brilliant. I can say it to be a clone of the world famous Quake series. But nicely done. Again on the Ubuntu repos. Go ahead and Shoot ‘em up. Happy Fraggin! 
And if you are looking at Sports games there is Boltzplatz 2006, a funny football game with toony characters. And the game that I did not know much about until a couple of days back is the Car racing simulation game named “torcs”. Nice one. Not up there like the Need For Speed Series. But definitely a very addicitive time pass. Check screenshots below.
Several other wonderful games are on. Just that they arent famous. Some good resources online for games available are given below. Please fell free to add as comment if you have other resources too.
Note: All screenshots were taken on my laptop
June 26th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
WOW, i never knew linux had so many great games. Thanks for the info & great links. Your post has more useable info than the links . Off i go to try out the games
June 26th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
@ashwin,
Yes. and there are more infact. I am yet to explore
July 14th, 2007 at 3:09 am
Ah Wesnoth! One of my all time favorites.
BTW, old is gold! Some of the games that run on the ScummVM platform (hXXp://www.scummvm.org/, and FOSS, needless to say) have outstanding gameplay!
July 15th, 2007 at 5:05 am
yes gaming suck in ubuntu .i cant play even 2D games but windows provides better support when compared to ubuntu for gaming
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. S3 Unichrome Pro VGA Adapter (rev 01)
this is my vedio card
July 15th, 2007 at 5:47 am
@Sivaji,
I never mentioned gaming sucks on Ubuntu. All the above screen shots were taken on Ubuntu only. I am not sure why you cant even play 2D games. Should be a Hardware issue.
July 21st, 2007 at 5:39 am
I did a redesign of the Track Dirt-1
I have just to add shadows
http://my.opera.com/area42/blog/drive-on-torcs
September 11th, 2007 at 10:27 am
I am sivaji from jaya engg college ,our hod (Mr.M.kumaran) is great fan of FOSS .
We (our hod) decided to have JAYA FOSS CLUB inauguration program on software freedom day that is on 14/9/07 with some fancy events like online quiz ,games contest ,debate WINDOWS Vs FOSS ,tech talk etc ever thing is based on FOSS .
We got around 300 students registered for games contest ,only 2 days left for contest ,but we cant install and run games because of hardware problem or something. Everyone forced us to have games contest on windows.
Later our hod made some arrangement and gave us 14 new system which has dual core processor ,512MB ram
myself and our friends started installing games on BOSS OS .since we are not familiar with Linux games installation we struggled a lot to resolve the dependency and to complete the games installation (open arena ,Nexiuz) .
All my friends where delighted when they saw the game open arena fighting for their turn to play
because they dont know Linux is having such cool games with rocking sound effects .some boys took that game cd to try it out on their box.