Linux GLGames

This is a list of Open GL-accelerated games for Linux.

Free Open Source Games

Get 'em, play 'em, then hack 'em to your own ends.

trigger Racing game. Fun for a few minutes.

foobillard This has a number of rendering options, some for fast computer, and some for even faster. The game play is superb, once you get the hang of all the controls.

neverball waaaa wooaaaa woooooooo.

Slune This is fun race game with a tutorial campaign based on getting AIDS drugs to Africa.

Oolite Excellent version of the classic space trading game Elite. Question: is Vegastrike a better game?

vegastrike Space trading game (Elite-like) with pretty graphics. Quite involved.

Armagetron The best TRON game, forget gltron, this is far more playable.

Transcend "A retro-style, abstract, artistic game of visual and auditory collage building." This game needs the package glutg3-dev to compile, but can't tell you this itself. This is a very pretty game, well worth a look, but needs more to it.

Penguin Planet Racer A downhill racer with multiple courses and modifiable race conditions. Complete the course as fast as you can while gobbling all the herring! Great fun for all; can be played using the the keyboard or joystick. Used to be called Tuxracer.

Danger from the Deep Also known as dangerdeep, this is a World War II German submarine simulation. The game has support for multiple languages, but currently only English, Italian and German are implemented. Download it from Sourceforge.

First person shooters

tremulous What a classic, aliens versus humans, fun, fast, you don't need mega hardware to run it, and it just generally rocks.

The Cube Game Fast, easy on your hardware and very addictive. Couldn't recommend this more.

Sauerbraten And if you thought that was hot, try this! It's an very much enhanced version of the Cube engine, and is sometimes referred to as Cube 2. There are some really beautiful sceneries and effects in this game, with excellent game play taking on from where Cube left off.

Nexuiz Probably the most sophisticated graphics for a open source game, but you need a big fairly new computer (preferably 1.5+ GHz processor, 256 MB of RAM and for graphics a Radeon 9600 or GeForce FX 5700 card) to play it. A wiki is available.

Warsow Very interesting graphical sytle indeed, well playable too.

Alien Arena Said to be graphically on a par with Nexuiz

OpenArena Huge Quake3 based game.

Free to Download

Search and Rescue A helicopter-based air rescue flight simulator. Using a simple flight dynamics engine, it is targeted at the "average" player rather than the hardcore gamer. It is not designed to be a cutting-edge realistic simulator, but rather a flexible game that can be played and enjoyed by everyone.

Not so hot at time of writing

plane shift I walked about a bit then got stuck on a roof, couldn't get off. Very involved, but seems to be mainly lunched out character standing about. Not really production ready, but getting there (March 2007).

glest No Linux binaries available.

Other (unreviewed)

critical mass, boson, tuxkart, supertuxkart, egoboo, crack attack

Eternal lands

Educational

Celestia A real-time 3D space simulation which lets you travel through the solar system and to over 100,000 local stars in our corner of the universe.

open universe is similar to Celestia, but with a full screen-type interface.

Stellarium is an Earth-based star viewer, showing views of the heavens for a particular date and time. What makes this different from Xephem or the excellent Kstars is that all the rendering is in openGL and can be scrolled around fluidly. When you add constellations to the view, they are actual pictures of the objects portrayed in the skies. Has to be seen to be believed.

Commercial games

PomPom Games Fun free trials of free games, only two offering, the fantastic Mutant Storm and the pretty damn good Space Tripper. Retro has never been better done.

Neverwinter Nights. Although originally developed for Windows, this visually stunning role-playing game can also be installed and run natively in Linux. Details and goodies available from Bioware. A third party installer is also available from ravage. Like Nexuiz, the better your machine's specification, the better the game will run and look.

tribal trouble comedy tribal war fare - bad taste, but fun, did crash also, shortly before I was about to be trounced by the oposing tribe. If you pay for it, it shouldn't crash.

Cedega

Cedega (formerly WineX) is a proprietary version of the Wine emulator that allows you to play Windows games using Linux; you will need to use the command line and follow these instructions if you want to use Cedega.

See also: LinuxGames