Linux Games

[Member PPC]

In this troubled times, I though it might be a good idea to start a lighter post- games

(Not so) long ago antix was not for “real gamers”, but now things are different. If you want to escape from your real life problems, into an more pleasurable alternative reality for some minutes, you can game on antiX:

*Casual games:
-for games like solitary, mahjong, chess, etc- you can install this packages: gnome-games , aisleriot or pysolfc , gnome-sudoku, openyahtzee

*For more hard core gaming:
if you have a power enough system, you can run thousands of (usually paid) Windows games using “Steam” (instablable from Package Installer), but also “Heroic” (an open source version of Epic Game Store, that installs and configures Wine, so you can play games acquired there in Linux- so far 100% success rate for me, but audio requires pulseaudio). Epic Store does give away at least 1 free game every week- I already have about 80 commercial games I got for free- right now I’m playing, on my free time, the excelent game/interactive movie “Wolf among us”, that I got for free

–For old adventure games: install ScummVM (available in the repository, then download some free games from Scumm’s website, over at https://www.scummvm.org/games/). theu have about 10 games, some with very high quality. best of all, if you have old disks of your old adventure games around somewhere, you can probably play them using Scumm!

-For old DOS games: good news – antiX (full version) already includes dosbox that runs almost 100% of all available DOS games – an there are thousands of freeware/shareware games you can play on antiX- best of all? Probably if your system can run antiX, it can also run any dos game!!! Dig around and you’ll strike gold- Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, etc. etc. etc…

-for old arcade games: install MAME (available in the repository) , and dig around fore free (old, and I admit crappy) arcade games.

-Board games: I love real table top board games- sourceforge and gitlab have small treasures like free, Open source versions of: chess, checkers, domino, clue/cluedo, settlers of catan, risk, stratego (https://sourceforge.net/projects/java-stratego/ ), tangram (available as package “glpeces” in the repository) monopoly, etc, etc, etc…

–Google Stadia (be warned: requires a fast network connection, in a country where Stadia is available, Chromium based browser and a google account, so “Hi there, Big Brother!”)- does allow you to play for free, a few commercial games, like Destiny 2, Bomberman, Hitman, etc… You can play what look like Playstation 5 quality games even in a dual core with a couple of gig’s of RAM- as a rule of thumb- if your computer can run youtube in a Chromium browser, in at lest 720 dpi, then it will probably allow you to play Stadia games without any problem

Edit:
I forgot about this pearls:

-Starfighter– https://github.com/pr-starfighter/starfighter/releases/download/v2.4/starfighter-2.4-linux-x86_64.tar.gz -it’s an old school space ship side scroller shooter- just like I used to play in the 90’s…

*Strategy:
-freeciv – it’s just like the original Civilization game, but free and open source (available in the repository)
-freecol – open source remake of the old Colonization (available in the repository)
-openttd – open source transport simulation game based on the popular game Transport Tycoon Deluxe by Chris Sawyer
-0a.d. – a very good – commercial grade good- strategy game, that I’ve been wanting to try for ages…(available in the repository)

*Racing games:
TORCS – it looks a bit dated, but it’s decent enough for some fun (available in the repository)
Supertux kart – boy, I wish I had this game when I was a kid…(available in the repository)
Speed Dreams – it’s TORCS “grandson”, available as an huge 1.7gb apppimage here: https://sourceforge.net/projects/speed-dreams/files/2.2.3/Speed-Dreams-2.2.3-x86_64.AppImage/download

*Fight simulators:
FlightGear (available in the repository) – another commercial grade opensource game
Linux Air Combat (https://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxaircombat/)

*Space flight simulators:
Endless-sky (available in the repository)
Oolite (an Elite clone) https://sourceforge.net/projects/oolite.mirror/

• This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by PPC.
• This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by PPC.
• This topic was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by PPC.

[Member blur13]

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Thanks for this list!

If I might add, The Ur-Quan Masters

http://sc2.sourceforge.net/

Free and open source, recently had a massive update so compiling from source is highly recommended. Otherwise sudo apt install uqm

Also, a list for gaming on Linux would be incomplete without Wesnoth.

https://www.wesnoth.org/

sudo apt install wesnoth

[Member PPC]

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Thanks, I knew those games, but I forgot to add them… Some extra pearls:

*Casual games:
https://apps.kde.org/categories/games/ (I think all of them are in the repository)

*Strategy games:
-OpenRA games (available, in appimage format here: https://www.openra.net/download/#linux): includes free versions of Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn, Dune2000
-micropolis (available in the repository)- based on the original simcity source code,
-opencity (also in the reposity)- a 3d city builder

*First Person shooters:
dhewm3, doomsday, freedoom, prboom-plus (all in the repository, based on the original Doom)
quake, quake2, quake3, quake4 (all in the repository)
openarena, xonotic, assaultcube (also in the repo)

*Nethack (the grand daddy of dungeon crawlers, in the repository)

minetest – Minecraft like game

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by PPC.

[Moderator Brian Masinick]

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For me personally, I’ve never been a big player of games, though in my “early days” of testing systems, especially when some of my team members had “ported” drivers from one system architecture to another, occasionally I would use a program that had a “pseudo-random number generator”, which at least verified a few of the mathematics functions and some general utilities – it was a game called “Go Fish!”

In these times, where the well being of loved ones is threatened and there is destruction of buildings, loss of lives, and many other atrocities, it’s good to be able to think of other things, so this is a good thing!

For those who do play games, I send my thanks to PPC (and anyone else who has other games to share). HAVE FUN and take some time away from the things that are deeply concerning to all of us.

--
Brian Masinick

[Member Pap]

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blur13 wrote:

*For more hard core gaming:
if you have a power enough system, you can run thousands of (usually paid) Windows games using “Steam” (instablable from Package Installer), but also “Heroic” (an open source version of Epic Game Store, that installs and configures Wine, so you can play games acquired there in Linux- so far 100% success rate for me, but audio requires pulseaudio). Epic Store does give away at least 1 free game every week- I already have about 80 commercial games I got for free- right now I’m playing, on my free time, the excelent game/interactive movie “Wolf among us”, that I got for free

You don’t need Steam’s DRM or any kind of “Store application” to play a good portion of “hardcore” games. I admit I am not much of a gamer myself, but the ones I ever played came from GoG which, despite its name (Good Old Games), is not for old games only. Lots of new games to get if you so wish, most of them play on Linux natively (no Wine or whatever). The only thing they don’t provide on Linux (yet) is their “GoG Galaxy”, a kind of “hub” application, similar to that of Steam’s – but you don’t need it to play, it’s optional even on Window$.
On GNU/Linux, GoG games are downloaded as a (usually huge) shell script file, complete with a graphical installer and uninstaller. But most importantly, it is 100% DRM-free.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by Pap.

Official, dedicated, determined, fanatic systemd HATER since... its release.

[Member blur13]

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Yes, that DRM free aspect of GOG is a big deal. When Steam and Epic cease to exist, so do your games. With GOG you can have a downloaded offline copy of the game that is yours forever, independent of what happens to GOG.

[Member PPC]

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@Pap – yes, I probably won’t ever pay for DRM stuff (music/audio-books/books/movies/software) that I can’t “own” myself. I only mentioned Epic and Steam because they are where most PC games can be acquired now, and Epic does “offer” free games- so if they cease to exist and I can no longer play the games I got there for free, at least I won’t complain about losing my hard earned cash, same thing with Stadia games. I still have all my PS2 disks, video DVD’s, audio CD’s and my PC CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs – I own a physical copy of every Software product I ever bought. Oh, and my ebook reader? It’s a Kobo (Linux e-ink device), once you download something to the device, it’s yours (and you can also side load any document you want – epub or pdf)- so no DRM’ed Kindle hardware for me…
By the way – “Heroic Games Launcher” current version also works with GOG, not just Epic Store

P.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 2 months ago by PPC.

[Member sybok]

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*Casual games:

I found out a while ago that there is a console-based sudoku in Debian, the package is simply called ‘sudoku’.
I prefer this one over GUI-interface.
And it is the only game I play in Linux these days.

Comment: Fedora has a console sudoku as well, I believe it is called ‘nudoku’; it behaves differently from the aforementioned one.

[Member PPC]

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After over a month, I have one nice entry for this thread, specially for people that have devices with extremely low hardware specs (for example: 512mb or less):

Games that run in the terminal:

–Solitaire -This first entry does not seem to be available in the repository- tty-solitaire … But I was able to compile it from scratch using the instructions on it’s home page:
https://github.com/mpereira/tty-solitaire

–Sudoku– Sybok already suggested sudoku and nudoku – available in the repository
–Tetris– vitetris – also available in the repository
–Snake – nsnake – also available in the repository
–Space Invaders– ninvaders – also available in the repository
–pacman– pacman4console – also available in the repository
–Nethack – nethack-console – also available in the repository

These are probably some of the greatest time wasters of all time, and are available, for playing in the terminal… How would have guessed that you can play arcade games in the terminal?…

Bonus round:
–2048 – this game does not require installation or compilation – copy the script’s contents to a file, make that file executable and run it- https://github.com/JosefZIla/bash2048
–bsdadventure – a text game included in the package bsdgames – available in the repository
Complete list of games included in this package (most have very low playability):

adventure, arithmetic, atc, backgammon,
battlestar, bcd, boggle, caesar, canfield, countmail, cribbage, dab,
go-fish, gomoku, hack, hangman, hunt, mille, monop, morse, number,
pig, phantasia, pom, ppt, primes, quiz, random, rain, robots, rot13,
sail, snake, tetris, trek, wargames, worm, worms, wump, wtf

I played boggle, hangman, tetris-bsd (plays ok, but it’s monochromatic, unlike vitris) … backgammon (I tested, but I can’t play that board game) the rest well… you may enjoy some of them…

–Moon buggy – moon-buggy – available on the repository – This was one of the first games I ever player on a computer, but this version’s playability is very low
–Chess– it seems you can play chess via the terminal, but I have not tested it- see tutorial here: https://itsfoss.com/play-chess-linux-terminal/
–Checkers– I have not installed this one. It’s available here: https://github.com/thomasrrgsd/ascii_checkers

An honorable mention: xsol – a simple solitaire for X– it’s not for the terminal, but it’s so light that it should be playable in any system that is able to run X…

• This reply was modified 1 year ago by PPC.
• This reply was modified 1 year ago by PPC.
• This reply was modified 1 year ago by PPC.

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