Red Eclipse is a free, open-source shooter based on the Cube 2 engine, the engine on which two other popular games, AssaultCube and Sauerbraten, are based. The game was initially launched on March 15, 2011, and the latest release, Red Eclipse 1.4, was put out on March 22, 2013.

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Alien Arena is a free, open-source first-person shooter built around the CRX engine, an open-source, Quake-based engine. It features a fast-paced gameplay taking place in a Sci Fi universe over dozens of maps. Alien Arena provides both single-player and multi-player modes.

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SuperTuxKart
Or STK for short, is one of the most popular racing games available freely and open-source on Linux. You can find install it in any major distribution with the default package manager. SuperTuxKart comes with several game modes, like single racing or Story mode, vehicles models, inspired by mascots in the free software world (you can drive with Tux, FreeBSD devil, GNU etc) and a whole bunch of maps, which you can unlock by completing missions in the story mode. STK also includes weapons to slow down your opponents. There is an in-game add-on menu from which you can download even further maps and models.

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Here is an overview of 10 clones of the game after which a syndrome was named, some graphical and some running in a console. Hopefully you will find these enjoyable (maybe while still trying to avoid the Tetris effect).

Atris
Alizarin Tetris, or Atris, is a 2D graphical Tetris clone with some very neat features. I find it easier to handle since moving the pieces to left or right is done instantly, faster, without the short delay typical Tetris games have. It is also possible to use accelerated speed (default key Down Arrow) and then, when the piece is near the bottom, quickly move it left or right. It provides fullscreen or windowed mode, has graphical configuration options (except for the resolution), keyboard shortcuts, color schemes and pieces schemes. It seems that it doesn’t save the toggle fullscreen option between sessions, but this can be fixed by manually editing the ~/.atrisrc file and setting full_screen to 0 or 1. Press Q to quit a running game.

Alizarin Tetris

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I was pretty reluctant in trying Steam on Linux ever since it was made available, but what made me install it was that Counter-Strike is now available on Linux via Steam too. I used to play this a lot a few years back and CS for Steam was put out on February 6. So I bought the Counter-Strike Anthology pack during this weekend deal and decided to give it a try.

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0 A.D. is a strategy game that has been around for quite some time now, and it reached a decent level of completeness despite the fact that Wildfire Games are releasing only alpha versions. It’s free, open-source and available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X and the latest alpha, codenamed ‘Ides of March’, comes with a whole bunch of new features and fixes.

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I’m used to making a review for each of the new major Wesnoth release, and so it is no exception with the latest version. It’s been almost two years since the last stable release, which was Wesnoth 1.8 released on April 1st, 2010, and 1.10 brings a whole bunch of new features, new graphics and tons of improvements regarding every aspect of the game over the previous versions.

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Introduction
Although this is a well known issue and has been said countless times before, I’ll say it again: games are not the strong point on Linux. Still, there are several very good projects out there, but the choices are pretty limited. The same is the situation in the case of real-time strategy games. There is a lot of fuss around projects like 0 AD or Oil Rush, a promising, yet closed-source RTS game. However, even though these get more attention lately, let’s not forget the other good choices out there, and one of them is the game I’m going to talk about in this article, namely, MegaGlest, and more exactly about the latest version released by the team behind it, which was put up yesterday.

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Battle for Wesnoth
Battle for Wesnoth, or BfW for short, is a popular turn-based strategy game which takes place in a fantasy universe and has support for singleplayer and multiplayer, official campaigns (and more available to download), hotseat games. The game comes by default with 6 factions and takes place over hexagons, each player deploying his army and trying to kill his opponent. Wesnoth can be highly modded via WML (Wesnoth Markup Language), and the add-ons server includes many more maps, factions, eras and campaigns. Beside for the usual mode which allows up to 9 players to battle against each other or forming teams, there are also the rumble maps (very small maps), or the survival ones, or the multiplayer campaigns or role playing maps. There is also an unofficial ladder available. Wesnoth is really an awesome, complete game, with a great community, great online playing, music themes, map editor, a great helping system, and much, much more.

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Xonotic is a free first-person shooter game for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The Xonotic project started as a fork of Nexuiz, a game which was popular for many years on Linux. The fork was created because Nexuiz was licensed to IllFonic game studios, and it is to be used as a platform for developing a commercial game for Steam, Xbox and PlayStation.

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After Warzone 2100, I decided to take a look at MegaGlest too, another 3D open-source strategy game.

MegaGlest is based upon the original Glest engine, but offers a lot of new features and capabilities, extending the original Glest (which is rather poor in options in my opinion) to a whole new game, including support for graphical resolutions, new factions, tech trees, tilesets and maps. It is available for Linux and Windows and it’s licensed under the GPL v3, while the game data is licensed under another permissive license, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.

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I must agree, there aren’t many native strategy games for Linux, especially not those who can usually match the commercial ones for Linux. Actually they are so rare, they could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. I could include here games such as the very popular Glest, Spring or Tribal Trouble.

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A few days ago I reviewd WarMUX, a free and open-source Worms-like game for Linux. Today I’ll take a look to Hedgewars, another free Worms clone with funny characters, good playability and support for online multiplayer.

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