27 December 2007

Linux games: best of breed

While I find such lists of must have games an interesting read and I think is wonderful to have all those games (big thank you to all packagers), my opinion is that the focus should be on a "best of breed" selection and promotion of this particular selection.

 These days I play a lot less than I used to and my area of interest (and expertise, if I may say that) has closed a lot (and is badly represented by the available Free Linux games) but I see a lot of redundancy, for example Alien Arena, Cube, Cube 2 "Sauerbraten", Digital Paint's Paintball, Nexuiz, Open Arena, Tremulous, Urban Terror, Warsow and World of Padman are all the same for me: they are First Person Shooters. They all have they own particularities, strengths and weakness (sometime even the same engines), but for a non hardcore gamer like me, the similarities are more than the differences.
And yes, if I am an expert in one of them, I will be pretty good in the others, but honestly, I will never be an expert in the area, I play FPS games only occasionally.

What is the best of the FPS genre? I really don't know, I mostly play Open Arena because this is what I am most used to from the Quake 3 legacy.

 I understand defining "best of breed" is very hard, each person has his own option. And also defining what "breed" is hard but important in this: for example for the "Strategy" genre, Battle for Wesnoth is "the best", but refining the genre in turn based and strategy, then Wesnoth is the best TBS with something else (Widelands and Glest are my current favorites) for RTS.

So, what are your favorite genres? The favorite games in those genres?

5 comments:

  1. xmoto (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Moto)

    yum install it. It's awesome

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have recently started playing Warsow, and I find the game very good. I am not a FPS person myself, last time I played such a game was ~5 years ago.

    I used to be a fan of Settlers II, and Worms; so I will soon start playing Widelands and Wormux (open source equivalents).

    You must give Worms/Wormux a try, the game is very good.

    ReplyDelete
  3. these are good, but heres some other really good ones
    http://www.cyberpunkcafe.com/page.php?81

    mostly linux AND windows compatible which is good if u want to play with your windows friends.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I am sure there are lots of fun games but my point was about the most representatives one, which are best suited as defaults in a Linux distro install.

    ReplyDelete
  5. this list is the best and newest list of Fresh Free Open Source Games

    ReplyDelete