Rodney Orpheus

The Linux gaming world owes those magnificent men at Id Software a huge debt; they have consistently championed and supported Linux, not only by releasing their awesome games on the platform, but also by open sourcing their gaming engines and letting the community use them to make new works. Consequently we’re quite well-served for shooters built on Quake and Doom. Here are some of my faves…

The big daddy of Linux gaming, to my mind there simply isn’t a better shooter available today than ET: Quake Wars. Amazing graphics and deep multiplayer means that it’s not just fast & furious action, it requires some serious tactical thinking too. It’s a lot more complex than most shooters since each team has five different classes of troops, each with their own abilities, and the two teams (humans vs. aliens) have completely different weapons and powers. So don’t expect to just jump in and start blasting, you’ll need to spend a bit of time getting the hang of this one. Once you do though, it’s freakin’ awesome. The graphics are state-of-the-art too, but you’ll need a serious accelerated graphics card to make the most of it. I have to run it with the lowest quality setting on my nVidia 7600 card (still looks incredible though), and on my Intel laptop it’s unplayable. But on a good gaming card it’ll look better than almost anything out there at any price on any platform. Oh, it even has built-in voice chat that works with Linux too.

I can’t praise this game highly enough though, it should be the first purchase of any Linux gamer that likes to frag people. Buy the retail Windows version and download the Linux installer to play. Those nice people at Id deserve your money. Or download the fully-playable demo version and give it a go right away. A poll on their website currently shows 21% of the players running Linux, with 66% on Windows, 4% on Mac, and the rest on consoles. Not too shabby really. If anyone tries to tell you that you can’t run serious games on Linux, show them this.

Before ET: Quake Wars there was Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, originally a multiplayer mod for Id’s Return to Castle Wolfenstein. In the end, they simply released it as a freebie, and although it’s getting a bit long in the tooth now, it’s still a deservedly popular game. Refight World War II at squad level tactics over various theatres of war in a fully professional game without paying a penny. You can’t argue with that, so download it now. The only downside is that sometimes the PunkBuster anti-cheat software can be a pain, so good luck with that.

It’s Doom! It’s terror! It’s big guns and big monsters that leap out and scare the shit out of you! It’s a few years old now but the graphics were pretty ahead of their time then and stand up well even today. Still one of the finest and most atmospheric shooters ever made; play it in the dark with headphones for full effect. You can pick it up pretty cheaply at any online retailer too.

One of the top amateur games built on the Open Source version of the quake engine is Urban Terror, a fast FPS set in the modern world along the lines of Counter-Strike. It uses a fairly old version of the quake engine so the graphics are pretty clunky by today’s standards, but on the other hand it doesn’t require a hugely expensive machine to run it. And it costs nothing, so you can’t go wrong really. Has a nice selection of modern weapons to use and tight gameplay which has led to it having a solid following online.

Unlike the other shooters here, Sauerbraten is not built on Id’s quake technology, but on the Open Source Cube 2 engine. For a game that’s not based on one of the big engines it looks very good and plays extremely well even on low-end hardware. The coolest thing about Cube 2 is that it’s a doddle to edit and create your own levels – you can even edit in multi-player mode! If you’d like to create games, this is really one of the best starting points available. And if you have young children around, Platinum Arts have released Sandbox, which is a version of Cube 2 for kids to use to create their own worlds. A really good project which is very active – the best is yet to come here.

Unreal Tournament 2004

• License: Proprietary
• Cost: One-time purchase of retail box
• Development status: Inactive

OK, it’s been out for five years and has been superseded by UT3 on Windows, but this is currently the latest version available for Linux – though they keep saying that UT3 will be coming for Linux sometime Real Soon Now. Until then, this remains the classic standard for deathmatch style play. There’s a downloadable demo available too. Given its age, I’m not sure if it’s really worth buying when there’s stuff like the latest Cube 2 available for free, but on the other hand, you can pick it up for just a few bucks and it is Unreal Tournament…

This was a stroke of genius: build a shooter that simulates as closely as possible modern squad-level military tactics and release it free as a training and recruitment tool for the US military. It’s actually a damn good game too: built on the Unreal 2 engine, so it looks quite nice even though it’s not exactly current. You’ll need stealth and good battlesense as much as shooting ability to do well at this one. A nice touch is that whichever team you play on, you and your team look like the US army, and the other team look like “terrorists”, which I’m sure the social scientists among you can have a field day with. No longer supported on Linux after version 2.5, which is a shame, however given that version 3 is apparently a bit of a dog, maybe that’s ok after all…

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Beyond the Red Line (demo)

• License: Proprietary
• Cost: None
• Development status: Unsure

A lot of Windows-only shooters also work well in WINE. Crossover Games specifically supports Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike (& Source), and Call of Duty 2, so you should get pretty decent performance out of any of those.