A heaping helping of Linux games

I said once, if you want toast, you buy a toaster. The context was playing Microsoft-published games, which makes the toaster something in the XBox line.

By extension it makes sense to say if you want PC games you get a PC, and if you want Linux games, you get Linux.

It must be my recent addiction to Icewind Dale (ironically, a Windows-based game I was playing in Wine 🙄 ) but I had a hankering today to play some Linux-based ones.

Rather than sift through AUR for the umpteenth time, I scouted out the LinuX-Gamers Live DVD. And was quite pleased.

I don’t have any screenshots to show that the home page or DistroWatch or any of a number of third-party sites can show, but I will vouch for a smooth run and clean performance.

It’s Arch-driven, which means its i686-only, but if you’re going to run a DVD of high-end Linux games, you’re probably not going to do it on a Pentium Pro. (I did it on this.)

And the game selection? Full and frothy, in the “big” version. Short of the few games that my pitiable graphics card just couldn’t manage, I got more than my share of action.

Personally, rather than write out a DVD and suffer sluggish stops-and-starts, I wrote the ISO straight to an external drive with dd, and booted from an external enclosure. Performance? Magnificent.

Best of all, I got a taste of a few games I hadn’t seen yet — the demo for Osmos, for one, was particularly innovative, and Widelands I barely remember trying a very long time ago.

Either way, I suggest it for your high end machine, to keep you entertained while you wait for your old one to … to do something. 😉 Enjoy.