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What games are available that run natively on Ubuntu?
Please limit one game per answer - and include why you enjoy the game.
An excellent puzzle game that runs natively on linux, DRM and region free.
It's $20, but there is a free demo available to see if you like it. If you do like it, note that it's developed by a small independent studio who trusts you enough to keep it DRM-free, so please buy it and your $ will be going to the right place!
A turn-based multiplayer strategy game.
I play this game almost everyday with my friend. This game is superbe with a beautiful music and a never boring gameplay you can play a map for 5 min or for hours, you can download a infinite number of addons and there is always players online. You can play it on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux so you don't need to have all your friends on Linux.
Here a screenshot :
Try it, you will not regret it.
Genre: Sim
An Open Source clone of Transport Tycoon Deluxe.
You will probably want to install the additional free sounds and graphics too so tick the Add-ons openttd-opengfx, openttd-opensfx & openttd-openmsx in Software Centre
€20Genre: Sandbox
If you follow gaming news site, you've likely heard about this one lately. It runs on java, and thus on Ubuntu.
Minecraft is a game about placing blocks to build anything you can imagine. At night monsters come out, make sure to build a shelter before that happens.
It's a funny little game where open-source mascots declare genocide and try to kill each other, bugs bunny style.
Try it, it's a lot of fun and runs well on old PCs. I get 15 FPS on my Pentium 3, which is perfectly fine, seeing as the game is turned-based. It's also in the software centre, but there's an offical PPA you should add, considering netplay only works with the latest version.
Beware: the name will soon be changed to Warmux.
and FreeCol Those two games are inspired from Civilization and Colonization. I really enjoyed those 2 games in the past, I don't play much nowadays.
They are both strategy games, turn-by-turn.
FreeCiv
FreeCol
Both are available in the Ubuntu repositories, so you can install them via Ubuntu Software Centre. However, on Ubuntu 10.04 the package are a bit old. You could try to use PlayDeb to get newer version.
You can give a try at FreeCiv online without installing it.
$10Hemisphere Games
Genre: Puzzle
It has a very nice and relaxing atmosphere, but it's still very challenging in the later stages.
The goals and gameplay are hard to describe so it is best watch the video on their website.
Your objective is to grow by absorbing other motes. Propel yourself by ejecting matter behind you. But be wise: ejecting matter also shrinks you. Relax… good things come to those who wait.
Wildfire Games
Genre: Real-Time Strategy (RTS)
0 A.D. (pronounced "zero ey-dee") is a free, open-source, cross-platform real-time strategy (RTS) game of ancient warfare. In short, it is a historically-based war/economy game that allows players to relive or rewrite the history of Western civilizations, focusing on the years between 500 B.C. and 500 A.D.
The project is highly ambitious, involving state-of-the-art 3D graphics, detailed artwork, sound, and a flexible and powerful custom-built game engine.
$20Frictional Games
Genre: Adventure
From the website :
The last remaining memories fade away into darkness. Your mind is a mess and only a feeling of being hunted remains. You must escape.Awake... Amnesia: The Dark Descent, a first person survival horror. A game about immersion, discovery and living through a nightmare. An experience that will chill you to the core.
You stumble through the narrow corridors as the distant cry is heard. It is getting closer.
Explore... Amnesia: The Dark Descent puts you in the shoes of Daniel as he wakes up in a desolate castle, barely remembering anything about his past. Exploring the eerie pathways, you must also take part of Daniel's troubled memories. The horror does not only come from the outside, but from the inside as well. A disturbing odyssey into the dark corners of the human mind awaits.
A sound of dragging feet? Or is your mind playing tricks on you?
Experience... By using a fully physically simulated world, cutting edge 3D graphics and a dynamic sound system, the game pulls no punches when trying to immerse you. Once the game starts, you will be in control from the beginning to the end. There are no cut-scenes or time-jumps, whatever happens will happen to you first hand.
Something emerges out of the darkness. It's approaching. Fast.
Survive... Amnesia: The Dark Descent throws you headfirst into a dangerous world where danger can lurk behind every corner. Your only means of defense are hiding, running or using your wits.
Do you have what it takes to survive?
Nice fast paced online deathmatch.
From the Nexuiz website :
Nexuiz is a 3d deathmatch game that has been in development since the summer of 2002. The goal of the project is to create a high quality first person shooter that can be played freely across all platforms in one package: PC, Mac, and can be even included in Linux distributions. The game is entirely open source, with the sources of the engine, gamecode, map files, and compiling tools, all included with the download, all under the GPL license.The gameplay is deathmatch with the most excessive possible speeds and weapons, giving incredibly intense fast paced action. Along with deathmatch, there are multiple gamemodes such as team deathmatch, capture the flag, domination, and many mutators and weapon options like rocket arena and instagib. The user can fight through the single player campaign, going through over 20 levels, or play online with our server browser.
A turn based strategy, artillery, action and comedy game, featuring the antics of pink hedgehogs with attitude as they battle from the depths of hell to the depths of space.
As commander, it's your job to assemble your crack team of hedgehog soldiers and bring the war to your enemy.
Game Features
- Hilarious and devistating turn based combat for up to 6 players
- Both local and network multiplayer, with optional AI opponents
- Battle on an infinite number of randomly generated maps, with over 20 environments
- Utilise 47 (and counting) devistating weapons! Including the piano strike and explosive robotic cake
- Play the game your way, with 18 different game modifiers, tweak almost every aspect of the match
- Customize your team, with over 120 costumes, 30 graves, 12 forts, 100s of flags and unique voice packs
- Huge battles with up to 48 hogs
- Play both singleplayer and multiplayer minigames
- Plugin your own custom maps, costumes, and other artwork
Hedgewars has a similar game style to Worms and Wormux.
Machinarium is a point-and-click adventure game by the Czech independent studio Amanita Design, edited in 2009. It is the story of a cute little robot which living in a poetic futuristic city. The entire environment is really beautiful and charming.
It runs natively on Ubuntu, although it needs Adobe Flash to run. There is a freely downloadable demo, and the full version of the game is only worth $20, including all its mp3 soundtrack.
Genre: Arcade
Chromium is a classic top down scrolling shooter game where you pilot a spaceship attempting to deliver packages and supplies to troops on the front line.
The game features many levels - increasing in difficulty and a variety of unique enemies and bosses. There are also various upgrades available in game between weapon systems and health
Genre: FPS
Urban Terror is a game based on the quake3 engine. It uses io-quake3 engine which is free and runs on all major platforms including 32 bit and 64 bit Ubuntu. To quote the Urban Terror website:
Urban Terror is a multiplayer FPS game. It is set in rather realistic environments, and is hence named "Urban Terror", where "Quake meets Reality". Its supposed to have the same game rules as Quake3, with similar game types like assault, deathmatch, team deathmatch, Capture The Flag, capture and hold, bomb mode, Free for All, Follow the Leader, etc. But it looks rather like Counter Strike, and has almost exactly similar weapons. Weapons are chosen at the start of the round, and you can have acceosaries like Kelvar vest, kelvar helemet, lazer scope, scilencer, etc.
Genre: Roguelike
NetHack is a single player dungeon exploration game. Unlike many other Dungeons & Dragons-inspired games, the emphasis in NetHack is on discovering the detail of the dungeon and not simply killing everything in sight - in fact, killing everything in sight is a good way to die quickly. Each game presents a different landscape - the random number generator provides an essentially unlimited number of variations of the dungeon and its denizens to be discovered by the player in one of a number of characters: you can pick your race, your role, and your gender.
The above link installs Nethack Qt version but there is also an X11 version.
Is a Tron styled "Light-Cycle" game that has many gamemode, it has a lot of servers on-line and on each servers can have a completly diffrent customized environment, and gameplay.
I usually play on the server ===<<<[ 2Fast2Dangerous ]>>>===. I like this game because, I is simple, but can take a while to become good and learn all the tricks.
From the website :
Cube 2: Sauerbraten is a free multiplayer/singleplayer first person shooter, built as a major redesign of the Cube FPS. Much like the original Cube, the aim of this game is not necessarily to produce the most features & eyecandy possible, but rather to allow map/geometry editing to be done dynamically in-game, to create fun gameplay and an elegant engine.
$9.99Genre: Puzzle-Platformer
And Yet It Moves is an award-winning physics-based platform game in which players rotate the game world at will to solve challenging puzzles. Tilting the world turns walls into floors, slides into platforms, and stacks of rocks into dangerous hazards. Players navigate through a paper collage world created with colorful pieces of cardboard and set to distinctive music. With four different environments and unlockable modes, And Yet It Moves is a platformer that will provide gamers with endless challenges.
A really surprising game.
Genre: RTS
Inspired by DOTA (custom mod for warcraft3), where you pick one of the 70ish available heroes and team with 4 other people to compete against another team of 5. Gameplay is incredibly rich, it is a game that you can play for years without ever tiring of it because playing with and against other players makes the experience much more deep.
However I must warn you that the learning curve is pretty steep, you will be called a noob, you will get yelled at, it will take you a couple of weeks to get used to all the heroes, their abilities and the various items available. However, the guys at S2 have added a new game mode, which is supposed to be much easier, with a smoother learning curve - casual mode. The game becomes overall more forgiving of mistakes, for example there is no more gold penalty on death.
Definitely one of my favorite games on PC
Genre: FPS
Take Quake 3 remove what is bad, improve what is good mix it with great graphics and you get Warsow. In Warsow it's a little easier to do strafe jumping and you can wall-jump and get speed easily so that make that you'll hardly find slow noobs but it is still hard to become good at this game and it'll need a lot of training.
In this game there is a lot of gamemode and one of this is race, that the same as the DeFRaG mod for Quake 3, if you don't know DeFRaG you probably don't know why so many people love Quake 3 and that's a shame, so I play this gamemode most of the time even if there is not a lot of server on this gamemode. When I get my friend to play Warsow I usually play on instagib deathmatch.
$28Old-style tower defense strategy game. It was part of Humble Indie Bundle 2.
there is an ubuntu wiki where you can find a lot of games :
From the website :
Tremulous is a free, open source game that blends a team based FPS with elements of an RTS. Players can choose from 2 unique races, aliens and humans. Players on both teams are able to build working structures in-game like an RTS. These structures provide many functions, the most important being spawning. The designated builders must ensure there are spawn structures or other players will not be able to rejoin the game after death. Other structures provide automated base defense (to some degree), healing functions and much more...Player advancement is different depending on which team you are on. As a human, players are rewarded with credits for each alien kill. These credits may be used to purchase new weapons and upgrades from the "Armoury". The alien team advances quite differently. Upon killing a human foe, the alien is able to evolve into a new class. The more kills gained the more powerful the classes available.
The overall objective behind Tremulous is to eliminate the opposing team. This is achieved by not only killing the opposing players but also removing their ability to respawn by destroying their spawn structures.
Genre: RTS
A free 3D real-time strategy game, where you control the armies of two different factions: Tech, which is mainly composed of warriors and mechanical devices, and Magic, that prefers mages and summoned creatures in the battlefield.
Glest is not just a game, but also an engine to make strategy games, based on XML and a set of tools. A few mods already exist.
Genre: FPS
Another game based on the CUBE engine, very fun FPS. There's no campaign or something, but the online multiplaying is great, very fast-paced.
Genre: MMORPG
A free-to-play MMORPG with native Linux and Windows clients. Only the Linux client has a 32 bit and a 64 bit version. It is developed by the Argentinian NGD Studios, which also manages the international servers. There are dedicated German servers hosted by Gamigo, although people there have been complaining about Gamigo's service and policy. There are three realms you can choose from—Syrtis(mostly elves), Ignis(mostly dark elves) and Alsius(mostly dwarves and Utghars)—and there is an invasion system.
$15Introversion
Genre: Real-Time Strategy
Defcon has a native linux client available.
Like a graphically beautiful, real-time version of Risk. It gets generally excellent reviews.
Genre: RPG
It is a great game played like diablo, but the setting is in the future. Try it out.
Doom 3 runs natively on linux... and lots of idSoftware games too :)
