Often I read or hear the comment that Linux will not be a Windows replacement until it can run games. Well I do, often, and with minimal hassle.

I used to work in an internet cafe way back when and I have a soft spot for some of the older games. Recently I got a proper AGP screencard from a friend (GeForce 6800gt 256mb) and decided it was time to revisit one of my old favourites – Unreal Tournament.

Now I had heard horror stories of people trying to run games using wine, and I was not in the mood for issues with games not working as they should.

I decided to scour the intarwebs for Linux versions of my old favourites instead. I happened on playdeb.net

I came across a few like Alien Arena that looked promising, but I opted to install two racing games. Getting bored with these soon I realized I needed a fix of some pure gameplaying adrenaline. Don’t get me wrong, the freeware games written for Linux that are out there are often good products, if a bit behind the newest releases as far as visuals go. Some of them are plain crap though.

So back to my quest – I had downloaded Crossover for Games a while ago and decided to give it a spin. Browsing through their supported titles I was surprised to see some rather new releases available – including a whole bunch of steam releases, and of course the steam client itself!

Thus emboldened I went scouring through my brothers game collection to see if I could find something that would satisfy my craving for the good old days, and be compatible with Crossover.

And there it was… Unreal Tournament 2004!

I just HAD to play it! Being a Linux geek I decided to Google a bit and make sure that Unreal Tournament would run on Linux.

Great was my surprise when I found out that Epic includes a Linux installer  for their games!

I popped in the Unreal Tournament 2004 disk and launched the Linux installer.

Installation went without a hitch – besides me needing to run it as root – and soon I was in the old familiar UT interface. Gaming was smooth, and on my old-ish hardware it ran well enough. I only have 768mb of DDR ram, so adding 20bots in a domination map starts to slow things down. I average between 30 and 60 frames per second depening on the map and the amount of bots I have in.

When a lot is happening in large domination maps framerates drop as low as 15.

Now here is the moral of my story – playing games on Linux can be a pain in the rear. The newest offerings rarely work well with Wine or Crossover Games until a while after release, and often some things like multiplayer is not supported.

And then along come games like Unreal Tournament, that includes a Linux installer. There is no “Linux Only” or “Windows Only” version of the game – the same disk can be popped into two different machines running Windows and Linux and it just works.

Why don’t other game studios follow suit?

Surely if Epic can put in the extra effort of creating a Linux installer for their games? Surely it is not that hard if one games studio can do it?

In any case, next up I will be trying Left4Dead, Crossover Games will get a nice workout with that one

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