video game

If you play Freespace 2 Open with the Freespace 1 Port, and you have version 3.0.3 and want to convert to 3.0.4, you are supposed to run a batch file to run bspatch and make the new VP file. You can do this on Linux if you have Wine (I imagine more or less any version would work, but I don't know) installed, with the following shell script.

It is considered axiomatic among gamers that a game that's good when it's new is always good - if it doesn't have staying power, it just wasn't that amazing in the first place. There's a few games that, years after their release, we're still playing - games like Tetris, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, the original Quake, or for that matter Asteroids. Each genre has at least one game that fits this description. In the space flight simulator category there are really three games which stand out significantly: Tie Fighter, which was really the first truly-3D spaceflight sim with believable capital ships; Wing Commander, various versions of which (especially Privateer) are still being played avidly; and Descent: Freespace along with Freespace 2, two titles from Volition that years later are still the benchmark for such games. The list would also not be complete without Elite, which is arguably the game that really defined the genre to begin with.

I bought both Freespace and Freespace 2 not long after they came out, and recently while looking for games to play on Linux I decided to try to run FS2 under Wine. This didn't work, but then someplace in the back of my mind I dimly remembered that Volition had long ago open-sourced Freespace 2. Back then, I didn't have a Linux system worth playing games on, and I was dual-booting Windows anyway, so it didn't matter. But today, I run only Linux (aside from virtual machines - which aside from VMware Workstation, don't support 3d graphics yet) and so the Linux port had become relevant.

I'm something of a science fiction freak. It's my genre of choice whether we're talking about novels, movies, or video games. Thus, when I encountered Gate 88 I thought I was in heaven.

Gate 88 is a fairly simple top-down realtime strategy game in which the player is represented in the game - by a space ship. As you fly about you can build structures (provided you have sufficient resources) and your goal is to protect your base. You can build factories to produce more resources, research labs to develop new technologies, shipyards which (shock, amazement) produce ships, and various types of turrets to protect your base defenses. The game is designed with a very console-game sensibility in that it is ideally played with a gamepad, and playing with a keyboard will drive you absolutely insane.

The below screen shot of DOOM for Intellivision is accompanied by some funky digital noise which I have no idea how to capture and put here from one of these emulators without installing additional software. I've installed three versions of it already. One of the emulators has an AVI capture mode on it, maybe I should try doing that. I generated the screen shot below with Nostalgia, a neat Intellivision emulator. I'm sorry about the dodgy quality, but I hit alt-printscreen a little too late, and I'd already spent too much time on this. It's not like it's really playable at these speeds anyway.