Linux Gaming after Loki

mahdi13 writes "Linux Hardware has a great story about the past, present and future of Linux Gaming in 2003. They briefly touch on the commercial games available and what will be available for Linux in the near future. It is a good read and contains excellent information to keep the Linux Gamers satisfied with what is commercially available."

Loki Games

[feed_me_cereal]

Another great place to find loki games that wasn't mentioned in the article is used bookstores. I'm not sure if they're a nation-wide chain, but Half-priced books in columbus, OH usually has a bunch of loki linux games that I guess people probably bought thinking they were windows games. You can get most of them for a buck or two. I also found copies of quake3 a year ago at microcenter for $3! Though, I suppose at this point thats probably what you would expect to pay anywhere...

The Article - Unformatted For Her Pleasure

[Anonymous Coward]

The Past
Loki has undoubtedly become a synonym for "Linux game." While the company is long gone, their legacy lives on. Many of their works can still be had for a fair price at online vendors such as TuxGames, or at local shops which still carry older stock. I have found a number of my Loki titles at Electonics Boutique, including a tin box version of Quake 3 Arena. So which Loki-ported games were released? Which ones are still available? Well, the first question has an easy answer. If you look in the table, any game title that is still in stock is a link to its respective page on TuxGames. If there is no link, then the game is out of stock. This is not to say that you can't find it anywhere, but just that TuxGames no longer carries it.

Alpha Centauri Civilization: Call to Power Descent 3 1
Deus Ex 2 Eric's Ultimate Solitaire Heavy Gear II
Heavy Metal F.A.K.K. 2 Heretic II Heroes of Might and Magic III
Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns MindRover: The Europa Project 3 Myth II: Soulblighter
Postal Plus Quake 3 Arena 1,3,4 Railroad Tycoon II Gold
Rune Rune: Halls of Valhalla SimCity 3000 Unlimited
Soldier of Fortune Tribes 2 Unreal Tournament 1,3,4
Legend:
1 - expansion available
2 - unreleased
3 - still in print, not by Loki
4 - downloadable binaries
As you can clearly see, there are still a good number of Loki games available. These titles won't last long, so you should order them as quickly as you can. TuxGames is not the only place that sells Linux games, but they do only sell Linux games, and game-related merchandise. It is possible that some of the titles that are no longer available can be found elsewhere. And there's always eBay, if you are comfortable with online auctions. It is unfortunate that we never got Deus Ex, but circumstances and fate prevented the game from ever being completed.

Rune
Some gamers don't want to buy these games, and that is fine. Not everyone appreciates every genre, and some people refuse to buy games that don't get shoved down their throats on television and Internet ads. However, for the majority of Linux gamers, the series of Loki ports includes some of the best games ever created. There is no telling what games Linux users could be playing if Loki were still around today.

Tribsoft ported a game called Jagged Alliance II to Linux, and has since disappeared from the scene. Their domain name even points to some weird site in British Columbia now. I imagine they won't be porting any more games, but if you want a good strategy game with adventure and role-playing elements, something like Fallout, then look no further than Jagged Alliance II.

Xatrix Entertainment developed a game called Kingpin: Life of Crime. They ported it to Linux, and if you can find a copy of the game anywhere, you may like to check out the unofficial installer, made by ravage, of icculus.org. It's worth checking out, if you like violent first-person shooter games that revolve around organized crime.

So now that we have a good idea of what has happened in the past, let's take a look at what is going on right now in the world of Linux games.

The Present
So we know where Linux gamers got their roots from, but where will they go tomorrow? What is there to fill the seemingly large void left by Loki? Well, as you may have heard, there is a newer company called Linux Game Publishing, often referred to as LGP. What they do is, well, they publish Linux games. This includes titles that they port, and titles that are ported by others, just as Loki did.

So what does LGP have in store for us? Well, for starters, Majesty has gone gold, and should be available any day now. You can pre-order it already. The game looks and plays like a cross between the best parts of Lords of the Realm 2, Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, and Age of Empires. It brings back those same feelings I used to get, and I can get lost in the gameplay for hours on end. definitely keep your eye on this game. Click here for some screenshots.

L

Majesty Gold will be fun

[tuffy]

Give the playable demo [linuxgamepublishing.com] a try and see for yourself. Though most of my Linux gaming involves xmame [mame.net] or zsnes [sourceforge.net], when I'm not doing actual work.

BZZT! Wrong

[gatesh8r]

Thank you for playing! [transgaming.com]

Re:Last real area

[mojowantshappy]

Actually, the nVidia drivers are overall considered better for linux... well at least by many people I know and by observing the game benchmarks over the years with UT 2003 and Q3. Also, WineX still doesn't work very well in my opinion. Usually it is only the very big games that work, or games that are based off of the Quake 3 engine. Games like Morrowind or Black and White I have found to barely work at all. To add to that, you have to pay for WineX and it is a pain in the ass to set up.

ut2003?

[phre4k]

I see no mention of ut2003 in this article. It is one of the best ports i have seen. It runs nativily on linux. The installer is even included in the retail, which imho is great.

/Esben

Re:Mutant Storm

[SunPin]

Clearly, you didn't look at the site and should be moderated offtopic. I don't normally respond to ACs but the point has to be made:

The subject is commercial games.

I'm amused by trolls when they are clever. Guess that counts this AC out.

Re:Not too happy...

[WWWWolf]

Still no stable NWN client.

Oh yeah, but it runs already, sort of. Like just today I totally quit playing NWN on Windows and switched to Linux, because I got my accelerated graphics working and got far better performance than the 5 fps I pulled earlier. It was like, adding "export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libGL.so.1" to the nwn shell script with vim because it used the Mesa library for some reason instead of the nvidia-glx libGL.so

I mean, it's so simple. I can't see why anyone's still using Windows for gaming.

(Yeah, I'm inspired by that... whatever switch ad parody it was out there in the great web. But really, I'm happy that it now works and I get really amazingly smooth game. =)

Exile III by spiderweb software

[ggwood]

A small company called Spiderweb Software [spidweb.com] released a game for Linux called Exile III - it is similar to the classic Ultima IV or Ultima V style. It is shareware, so you can try before you buy (even for Linux). I am kind of disapointed they only released one game for Linux as they released so many for both the Mac and the PC - including scenerio design tools - and this was way before Neverwinter Nights. Sure the graphics are not overwhelming but worth a look. Here [spiderwebsoftware.com] is a link to the game.

I personally bought and played Exile I-III on the PC around 1998 and was very satisfied. Currently, there is NWN and Everquest and many others to choose from, but I felt it was the best comptuer RPG at that time.

But the reason I bring this up is that apparently it did not sell well under Linux - perhaps it was piracy, perhaps just not enough of a user base (note: I did not play under Linux maybe it is ultra buggy or something) but for whatever reason an ideal candidate for producing Linux games was turned off.

Re:Mostly FUD

[IamTheRealMike]

As just one example, three key pieces of DirectPlay (the pieces which cover the specifics of game connection and negotiation!) are patented. Don't believe me? Go do a patent search...

Luckily quite a few top name game developers refuse to use DirectPlay as it requires Windows servers and too many game servers run on Linux these days to ignore.

There could be problems with patents yes, but that's an issue for the whole of Linux (mp3, ntfs etc) not just Wine. And as SDL is simply DirectX done again, patents would cover similar Linux technologies also.