ChortleVision

It seems the the commercial game ’savage 2′ (which has a Linux version) has gone free (as in money, not software). It may not be to everyone’s tastes but its an okay game. https://savage2.s2games.com/main.php for more info. The slight catch is that there exists ‘prime accounts’ which cost $9.99, but if you are playing the free version so much that you want a prime account, you’ll probably not mind paying.

Savage 2: A Tortured Soul is totally free to play, but you have the option of creating a Prime account for just $9.99. There are multiple advantages to a Prime account, such as two additional inventory slots, unlimited play as Hellbourne units, access to player statistics both online and in-game, and the ability to download a replay of every Savage 2 match ever played! Spread the word, help the development community by supporting companies that want to make unique and innovative games.

Its always nice to see game companies not only supporting the Linux platform but actually looking towards the future of making money from games. slapping a thousand different types of drm onto your game will only get it pirated. thinking up clever new oss inspired business models will make you money.

Of late the gaming situation on Linux has been… well, fairly dire. whereas before games were actively getting ports to Linux and there was a genuine interest in porting games to Linux these days we are ‘lucky’ to get a port. epic gaming however, the people behind such diverse titles such as unreal and unreal tournament and unreal tournament 2003 and unreal tournament 2004 and unreal 2 and unreal tournament 3 have always supported linux fairly actively, we got Linux versions of all the unreal games.. apart from unreal tournament 3.

Unfortunately even though the port to linux of unreal tournament 3 was completed weeks after it shipped legal issues regarding a middleware company refusing to licence its code to run on linux have resulted in there being no linux client for almost a year now.

Now i am no lover of the unreal games, i don’t dislike them but i just prefer other types of games these days, however the lack of a linux port does not bode well for future linux ports of games (i don’t care if your not a gamer and go ‘meh’ towards the whole issue, gaming on linux is important for the linux and open source operating systems ecosystem as a whole), but lately, after months and months of no word from epic or the fantastic Ryan C Gordon (who ports a lot of commercial games to windows) we finally get some ‘its nearly here’ and some nice screenshots of ut3 running on ubuntu. sure its late, but at least its delivered.

ryan C gordon’s blog post