Enemy Territory: Quake Wars

One of the games that I’ve played through several times in Linux is Quake 4, so when the news came out that ET:QW was going to have a Linux client as well, I picked up a copy. I mostly just play easy bots in single-player games, and after the trauma of Quake 4 I haven’t bothered trying to play as an accursed Strogg. The game is very good, in my opinion, and is the closest of the various games I’ve seen to tempting me to play on-line.

We watch a lot of Stargate, so the Slipgate map below has seized John junior’s attention.

Asian Dynasties

The second expansion for the Age of Empires III game was released recently. It adds Chinese, Indian, and Japanese civs. Sadly, as the game is published by Microsoft it’s unlikely it will ever run in Linux. We play this just about daily if we have the time, EB and I vs the machine over our local network.

X3 – The Reunion

One of my all-time favourite games is Elite, from the days of the C= 64. While waiting for UT3 to be published, I found this game, which shares some of the basic principles of Elite. X³ is fairly open-ended, although the movement between systems and the number of them is relatively limited, and unlike Elite’s sequel Frontier, it is not possible to land on planets. It looks and sounds great, has a variety of ships and weapons, and presents a rich and immersive environment.

Apparently there is another company working on publishing a Linux version of the game, but at the moment I am playing it in Windows, which severely limits the amount of time I can put into it. For a few months now my pilot has been making a hard living forcing pirates to abandon their ships.

Gears of War PC

Epic, who make Unreal Tournament, have ported their Gears of War game from the consoles to the PC this year, and I think it is superb. Like most other games it only runs in Windows, and it has a knack of losing my progress, but it looks great and handles fairly well. It is a cover-oriented shooter, which means that in casual mode it’s a good deal less frenetic than UT. The normal flow is broken up with different gameplay from time to time, like the accursed Berserker scenes, which can get a bit intense.

My weapon of choice is the Lancer, a machine-gun with a chainsaw bayonet, followed by the Longshot sniper rifle, then a revolver that can replace the default pistol.

In additional to losing my progress, which may be fixed by a recent patch, the game has a couple of other annoyances. It requires the DVD to be in the drive to play, and since it’s a DVD that’s pretty inconvenient to copy to an image for use with DaemonTools. It also seems to require a Windows Live login to track progress properly, even playing the campaign off-line. That the DVD wasn’t smashed to bits after it lost my progress in act 4 speaks to the game’s attractions outweighing its annoyances.