Linux: Difference between revisions

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!Title

!Genre

!Description

|-

!0 A.D.

|Real-time Strategy

|Historical RTS heavily inspired by Age of Empires. Very nice graphics and a variety of historical civilizations to play as. No campaign mode (yet) but the multiplayer works and the AIs are decently challenging.

|-

!Battle for Wesnoth

|Turn-based Strategy

|Fantasy strategy game where much of the game's units, music, artwork, and campaigns are player contributed. The game plays on a hex based system, with terrain affecting the accuracy of attacks and unit movement. Six well-balanced factions are available for play at the start. It makes you really feel like you're commanding an army by having you level troops into hardened veterans, which you can recall for future battles. Dozens of custom units are available for single player and multiplayer by downloading player mods known as "eras". Fantastic quality considering it's freeware. Download stable version if you just want to play the game without too many bugs.

|-

!Beneath a Steel Sky

|Adventure / Point 'N Click

|Classic adventure style game that follows Robert Foster on a journey through a cyberpunk-esque metropolis. Requires ScummVM to be played, but that is also a free install from your local package repository. Fun fact: the background art is drawn by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame.

|-

!Freeciv

|Empire Building

|The awesome that is Sid Meier's Civilization, now with multiplayer that isn't hot-seat, custom tilesets, and you can tinker the hell out of the rules. It's been upgraded since to play more like Civ2. If you preferred the sort-of sequel "Colonization," check out FreeCol.

|-

!Frogatto

|Adventure / Platformer

|Old school adventure platformer with RPG elements like quests and buying powerups.

|-

!Frozen Bubble

|Puzzle

|It's Bust-A-Move, that game that's like Breakout plus Bejeweled where you break the walls by adding more bricks. Every Linux magazine from here to India puts this in their top ten list. Casual gamers can't get enough of this on Linux or any other platform.

|-

!Micropolis

|Simulator

|A free port of the original SimCity.

|-

!Nethack

|Roguelike

|Imagine Dungeons and Dragons in a very difficult, video game form. Death is permanent, the dungeon is always randomly generated, and you aren't going to win for a very long time. A spinoff of "Rogue," so it's a Rogue-like game, but everyone had a go at the source code to add everything including kitchen sinks. You can check out the game's wiki [http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page Here.] Default interface is ASCII graphics in a term window, but you can download extra packages for a tileset or even isomorphic interface instead.

|-

!Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

|Roguelike

|This game is a modern take on the roguelike genre that doesn't stray too far from its roots. It keeps the randomly generated environments, turn-based gameplay and punishing difficulty of classic roguelikes. But reduces the amount of keystrokes to learn, replaces the ASCII with more descriptive tiles and improves the interface to the point it is playable by using a mouse. It also focuses on reducing the amount of spoilers required to finish the game without sacrificing its inherent complexity. Definitely one of the best modern roguelikes (others are ADOM and TOME4) around and probably the easiest one to get into that doesn't dumb things down too much (Dungeons of Dredmor) or is barely a roguelike (FTL, Spelunky, Binding of Isaac). You can get it [http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/downloads here.]

|-

!Oolite

|Space Combat, Trading

|The classic 8-bit galaxy-on-a-single-floppy space game Elite lives on. Better graphics (duh), a mod community and [http://wiki.alioth.net/index.php/Oolite_Main_Page a wiki] proves that Elite ain't dead.

|-

!OpenTTD

|City simulation

|Reimplementation of Transport Tycoon Deluxe. Pay off your debt by setting up highways, rail lines, and airports moving people and goods in between cities.

|-

!Simon Tatham's Puzzle Collection

|Puzzle, Casual

|Futoshiki, Lightup, Loopy, Nonograms, Sudoku, Untangle... all those Japanese puzzles that people install on their Blackberries and iPhones and buy cheap books of at Barnes and Noble, Simon Tatham already ported them to Linux and you can make each one as hard or as easy as you want. Also available on Android (which is Linux under the hood, so no surprise.)

|-

!Spring RTS Engine

|Realtime Strategy

|It's Total Annihilation re-implemented to use OpenGL and more computing power. When the kids in high school were pissing themselves over the strategy of StarCraft, the TRUE neckbeards-in-training were playing Total Annihilation. The game mods have taken on a life of their own, so you can use Spring Engine for real-time strategy games with rules (not just re-skinned units!) for WWII, Gundam, Star Wars, sci-fi, necromancers, or even a Tron game if Darwinia isn't crunchy enough for you.

|-

!SuperTuxKart

|Racing

|A cool mascot racer in the vein of Mario Kart. But here, all the characters are mascots of various free software projects, such as BSD's Beastie, GIMP's Wilber, and KDE's Konqi.

|-

!Torus Trooper

|SHMUP

|Another shooter from Kenta Cho. Remember Tempest? This is Tempest on steroids. You're racing down this tube, sometimes at over 4000km/h blowing shit up. The graphics and music help to put you in the mood too, kind of has the same feel as Rez. It's not a game with a whole lot of depth, but it's fun to play every now and then.

|-

!The Ur-Quan Masters

|RPG

|Star Control 2. Adventure across the stars, recruiting other aliens that got the shit kicked out of them since the previous game, or fend off the aliens that decided to kiss ass to the new murderous-squid overlords. Between exploring distant stars and doing mineral scans (Hmmmm...) you get into ship-to-ship action combat against different vessels with a rock-paper-scissors balance of abilities.

|-

!Widelands

|Real-time strategy

|Settlers 2. Economy-focused RTS.

|}

{|cellspacing="0" cellpadding="3" border="1" class="wikitable sortable" style="text-align: center; width: auto; table-layout: fixed;"

!Title

!Genre

!Description

!Link

|-

!Abuse

|Platformer

|You got locked up in a prison where illegal genetic experiments take place, and all the inmates were transformed into monsters. A 2D platformer with a rather unique mouse-driven aim system, a gritty style, and merciless action. Was made free when the developer went bankrupt. Worth checking out.

|[https://www.moddb.com/games/abuse Mod DB]

|-

![[Dwarf Fortress]]

|Sim

|Comes with 2 game modes: Fortress mode where you set off with a bunch of dwarves to make your fort in the wilderness, and Adventurer: A roguelike with no purpose(yet). Addictive gameplay, very in depth damage system(even keeps track of how much damage each FINGER receives), and a game so confusing to newcomers it is recommended to read [http://df.magmawiki.com/ MagmaWiki] thoroughly before playing, or watch the tutorial videos like [http://www.youtube.com/user/51ppycup 51ppycup's YouTube.] It's definitely the most complex game you've ever played, and probably the most complex game you will ever play. It's worth the endeavor though.

|[http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ Official site]

|-

!Heroes of Newerth

|Action-RTS

|It's DotA by S2 Games. Need I say more? Just run the shell script in terminal to install and you're good to go. Went F2P model because of competition from LoL. Some heroes are original, while others are ported from DotA. This'll hold you over until Gaben decides to port every Valve game (DotA2) to Linux.

|[http://www.heroesofnewerth.com Official site]

|-

!Katawa Shoujo

|Visual Novel

|The story tells of a young man who, after suffering a heart attack upon hearing a confession from the girl he loves, is diagnosed with cardiac dysrhythmia and sent to a school where he meets several lovely and charming teenage girls who each suffer from a different disability.

|-

!Marathon trilogy

|FPS

|The predecessor to the Halo series. The year is 2794 and you are a security officer aboard the UESC Marathon, a large, multi-generational colony spacecraft (converted from one of Mars's moons). As the ship and the Tau Ceti colony are attacked by hostile extraterrestrials, you find that something is amiss with the ship's artificial intelligences - one of which having gone quite insane after figuring out a secret greater than universe itself.

|-

!Revenge of the Cats: Ethernet

|Team FPS

|Tug-of-war style territory fight with an unusual travel/heal/respawn mechanic.

|[http://ethernet.wasted.ch/ Official site]

|-

!Typhoon 2001

|Tube shooter

|Fan remake of Tempest 2000, one of the trippiest shooters ever.

|[https://www.systemshock.org/index.php?topic=1289.0 Mirror]

|-

!World of Padman

|Arena FPS

|Wacky colorful cartoons and cleavage. Spray your color and run around on bookshelves.

|[https://worldofpadman.net/ Official site]

|-

!Xonotic

|Arena FPS

|This is very much like Quake (its engine actually is a massively improved version of the original Quake engine), but with even more jumping around; you'll see what I mean once you play it. Includes game modes like Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Capture the Flag, "Keyhunt" and more, both in Singleplayer and Multiplayer. Has about 10-30 people playing for any region at their respective daily "peak times", but hopefully there will be more once version 1.0 is released.

|[http://www.xonotic.org/ Official site]

|}

== Commercial games ==