I got word of the linuX-gamers.net Live DVD and thought I'd give it a whirl. Not that I'm a hard-core gamer or anything. I usually don't have the attention span to play games. I think there were only three games that I ever got "hooked" on: Civilization (the first one), Total Annihilation, and Need for Speed: Porsche Unleashed. Now those games rocked, or at least they struck me in some way that I could not put them down. Every other game I've played pales in comparison. But I've been seeing games on Linux get a lot of attention these days so I decided to see for myself what's going on.

So I burned the DVD and booted it on my laptop, which is in no way a "gaming" machine but it's not exactly puny either. It's got 1GB RAM, DVDR, Intel chipset. It runs Gentoo great and Windows XP ok. I have Beryl on it which works wonderful, except for the blur plugin, but that plugin is even a little buggy on my nForce workstation. Anway, when I booted the DVD I wasn't sure what distro it was based on, but that shouldn't matter, right? It did a pretty good job of detecting my hardware. It choked on my wireless card but that's forgivable because it needs ndiswrapper to work anyway. I got an error booting about the sound card, but it appeared to work regardless. The thing that really took me by surprise was the monitor resolution dialog. It was actually asking for my monitor resolution, which I couldn't really remember because I set that up a long time ago. I guess I was hoping it would figure it out itself. I have one of those funky widescreen LCDs, so it was important that I get it right or else the video would look like crap. Now when I boot Gentoo I have to use 915resolution to hack my LCD resolution into the BIOS, so again I forgave it for not knowing, but I thought at least it would guess wrong. Anyway I took a guess myself and apparently I guessed right because all the graphics after that looked ok by me

I'm booting from DVD so I don't expect the best access times, and I don't get them either. Eventually I come up with the "main screen". There's some cool game screenshots and some icons on the bottom. The icons launch the individual games that the DVD shipped with. I really don't know anything about these games, so I decide to try each of them in order from left to right:

bzFlag

bzFlag, or I call "-j" for short, is apparently a first-person shooter, except you are in a vehicle (a tank?) instead of on foot. The game came up flawlessly. If you played Flight Simulator in the 1980s and then you went into a coma and woke up today and played bzFlag then you would feel right at home. The graphics pretty much remind me of the 1980s Flight Simulator games. It's 3D, but there's not textures or anything. Basically just regular geometric shapes of different colors. The game also apparently has no AI, and since I couldn't get on a network because of my Wifi driver problem, I was basically stuck in the world of Tron playing against myself. To the games credit, both the graphics and sound performed well on my laptop. Seems like a small thing to rave about but read on.

Enemy Territory

This is another game that I didn't know anything about. I just clicked on the icon to see what would happen... which basically is nothing. It looked like the game maybe tried to launch, but I got knocked back to the menu. Basically it was not playable on my machine. There's no error message, but I think it might have been because of my Intel graphics adapter. Games seem to prefer nVidia or ATI for some reason

Glest

I have no idea what this thing is. The first time I launched it I didn't get so much as a flicker. The second time I tried the screen went blank for a few seconds, then I got returned to the main menu. Doesn't play for me.

Nexuiz

Now I had seen this game run on an nVidia machine, so I knew what to expect. It's a first person shooter, and of great quality, even though I'm not a huge fan of first person shooters. I'm left handed and I'm not certain that's what the issue is, but first-person shooters have never agreed with me (i.e. I suck). This game did launch on my laptop, but the first thing you notice is that the sound skips. The graphics were even worse. The game looks good, but it simply unplayable on my machine. I could not get control of the game and got killed almost immediately.

Sauerbraten

I'm not sure how to pronounce this game. The icon seemed to indicate that It was some kind of Qbert-like thing, but it's not. The first thing you notice when you launch the game is that the music rocks! It's a first person shooter, and the music just puts you in the mood. All I wanted to do is go and shoot people (or whatever). Unfortunately the game play was just like Nexuiz. The lower right corner of the screen assured me of what I pretty much felt: I was getting 1 frame per second. Completely unplayable. Also the voices appeared to be playing slow as well. Which got me thinking maybe the music is playing slow too, in which case it's probably normally too fast for my tastes. Looks like a decent shooter, but just wasn't playable on my humble 1-year old laptop

Torcs

The next game was Torcs. By then I'm pretty much expecting every game to be a first-person shooter and to suck. As it turns out this is a racing game! I started conjuring pleasent memories of Porsche Unleashed but at the same time not expecting something of that calibur. But heck, at least it's not another first-person shooter. Unlike the other games, Torcs launched in a smaller window instead of fullscreen. So the first thing I did was go to "Options" and change it to fullscreen. Well, that was probably a mistake, because it appears that the game exited immediately after my setting that option. Perhaps it doesn't work? Perhaps it should have not been an option to begin with. I decided to skip Torcs for now and go on to the next adventure.

Tremulous

Not sure what this game was. It never launched. I get a brief black screen then back to the main menu. Oh well...

True Combat Elite

The icon and title seem to indicate that it's some kind of fighting game. I've never been good at those either, but I do like them. Unfortunately this game did what so many before it did... nothing. Black screen then back to the menu. I'm still yet to kick some ass!

Warsow

I'm not sure what the title means... maybe a typo? This game wasn't even man enough to give me a blank screen. I click on the icon. I get the hourglass for a second. That's it.

World of Padman

This game's icon has the letters "WOP". From the title, I'm thinking it's possibly some Pacman knock-off. Now a game like Pacman should definitely run on my machine, right? Wrong! When I click the icon, I can see that the program lowers my screen resolution, then.... gluck! My machine just hangs. How fitting, since this is the last game in the menu.

Conclusion

So altogether, there was only one game that was arguably playable on my machine. But even so, the graphics totally sucked and since there was no AI and I had no network I was stuck shooting at green pyramids by myself. Not exactly exciting. Maybe later on I'll try it again on my nVidia workstation, but it's actually doing work at the moment. My laptop is really my "play" machine, but either these games don't play on it, or there's simply nothing worth playing.