For serious gamer folks in Linux, there is more good news. “Amnesia”, which many reviewed as one that is going to be among the scariest game ever and “And Yet It Moves”, a physics-based platform game, are going to have native Linux clients. Meanwhile, you may also want to check our listing of games for non-gamers in Linux.
At the beginning of this month we published workstation benchmarks comparing Windows 7 to Ubuntu Linux. In those tests, which were a continuation of tests from earlier this year when looking to see whether Windows 7 is faster than Ubuntu 10.04 and how fast is Windows compared to Mac OS X and Linux, the two operating systems performed quite closely in our workstation tests with only a few exceptions. Today, however, we are back to looking at the Linux vs. Windows performance of the Lenovo ThinkPad W510 and this time we are looking at the OpenGL gaming performance between Windows 7 Professional and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
If you like games–especially free ones–you’re guaranteed to like LinuxLinks’ three part collection of “addictive” Linux games. You can find the third installation of the collection here, and the first and second parts are linked there. The folks at LinuxLinks used “addictive” as their keyword in selecting the games, and they range from well-known titles such as Atomic Worm to lesser known ones, such as Epiar. We’ve done quite a bit of our own coverage on free, open source games at OStatic. Here are some can’t-miss examples.
id Software has announced from their annual QuakeCon event that they have open-sourced their Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Return To Castle Wolfenstein games under the GNU GPL. id Software is known for open-sourcing their games and engines after some years of use and this day has finally come for these two very popular Wolfenstein titles.
Those interested in obtaining the source-code to Enemy Territory and Return To Castle Wolfenstein can find the source in this FTP directory. The new source releases are the ET-GPL.zip, RTCW-MP-GPL.zip, and RTCW-SP-GPL.zip files.
There are literally thousands of free games that run natively under Linux. This huge selection makes sifting through all of these games a mammoth task for any sane person.
However, this has not stopped the gaming faction at LinuxLinks Towers trawling through the popular archives looking for games that players will keep coming back to. Sure, games are a matter of taste. However, what makes a game enjoyable does not simply depend on personal preferences.
In this third and final segment, we recommend a further 8 free Linux games that are great fun to play, highly playable and above all have a special addictive quality. We suspect that there will be a few games here that even the ardent Linux gamer will not have tried before.
Tankaar reached another milestone this Sunday, 8th August, 2010. After another two months of development (read sleepless nights and head banging with code) we finally released Tankaar 10.08. The previous version Tankaar 10.06 has been disabled completely and new one is available for download. There is something which makes this version special which I would like to share in this blog.
With this version number of astras in Tankaar touched the half century mark. So there are 10 more astras as compared to the previous version. These astras present new glimpse of the capabilities of Tankaar to offer variety. So with these new innovative astras the strategy of play becomes more involved. Apart from being innovative these astras bring Tankaar closer to the Indian mythological battles. “Rath Chakra” will remind you of the instances of Mahabharata where wheel of chariot was used for defense and offence. One such instance was when Abhimanyu was caught in Chakravyhoo and he used wheel of chariot for his defense. In another event Lord Krishna took the chariot wheel and tried to attack Bheeshm, as Krishna had vowed not to use any weapon in the battle. “Divya Trishul” will remind you of Trishul of Lord Shiva. “Shila Astra” will remind you of battle of Ram and Ravana where Vanars often used rocks as weapons. Inspiration of “Manav Astra” comes from astra used by Ram against Marich, uncle of Ravana. So with this version Tankaar moves it few steps closer to Indian Mythology.
Linux is not known for gaming, and when most people think of Linux games, they think of a few free and open source games that are good but not numerous. Nevertheless, there is a growing pool of free and commercial independent gaming developers who are pushing the envelope by offering their games on multiple platforms, including Linux.
They are available for purchase and download right over the Internet (often DRM-free), and some of them are pretty high quality. Here are five more you might not have played but are definitely worth giving a try.
Read more at MakeTechEasier
I am not a serious gamer at all. If you want to see me totally disoriented, play an FPS game in front of me. But then there are always these silly games for people like me. Here is a quick list of my favorite time wasters or puzzle games or whatever you call it.
Pingus
Pingus is my favorite time pass in Ubuntu. It is a simple puzzle game that almost everyone will love. It is quite addictive I should say. And you don’t have to be a “Gamer” to play it. It is available by default in almost all Linux distros I believe. If you are an Ubuntu user(or any other distro using debain package management), click here to install Pingus.
Hamish Paul Wilson started let me know of his porting of The Chzo Mythos to GNU/Linux at May 2010, and updated me on his progress at June 2010, now finally the porting is done and The Chzo Mythos is available for GNU/Linux free of charge !
Hamish Paul Wilson sent me this email today :
After playing more than my fair share of email tag with several individuals, I am happy to announce the availability of The Chzo Mythos for GNU/Linux. Hosting is being provided by the always generous Ryan C. Gordon of icculus.org and Linux porting fame, who most kindly accepted my request for an icculus.org account. Although I did hope to have this done by the end of July and with the support of Yahtzee himself (I never was able to get a response), I am quite happy with the release and my new found hosting abilities. Thanks again to icculus for making this possible.
And another release!
Unfortunately, 2.3.3 didn’t turn out that well, it didn’t fix the burn damage, and I forgot to include the newly added Korean translation in the installer… 
In its favour, it did include a crash fix I overlooked when writing the changelog (r11308, #2008).
So now we release 2.3.4, in the hope that it doesn’t have serious problems and we can return to our originally planned release schedule, with about 6-8 weeks between releases. Apart from fixing the abovementioned problems there are not many other changes, mainly an update for DyDo-AI, and some translation things.
Download:
As usual, downloads can be found on our download page or directly on Sourceforge.
Bug Reports:
As usual, we need bug reports to fix problems in the game. Please note that we use tickets only to track bugs, for discussions about how features should work and feature requests we have a dedicated forum section.
For bug reports, see BugReporting for details, in short:
Detailed Changelog:
2010-08-11: Version 2.3.4
General
Multiplayer
DyDo-AI
Translations