This evening I was going to sit down and play Age of Empires III with my mom.  We have it installed on two computers and just trade discs.  Then my little brother said he wanted to play.  That’s great, but the problem is that neither his nor my mom’s laptop runs fast enough to play it well and my laptop runs Ubuntu.  I checked and it wasn’t supported by Crossover Games, my beloved commercial WINE software, but after googling on a way to play AOE on my Ubuntu laptop, I found Play On Linux.

http://www.playonlinux.com/en/

Play On Linux is an application that supplements the WINE translation software that allows some Windows applications to run on Linux.  It contains and applies scripts that provide the best configuration for a game.

One of the things that I love about Linux is that there’s always a community, open-source project that makes things work even when an upstream project like WINE doesn’t work by default.  It’s by no means perfect – WINE is just a stepping stone to building Linux market share so applications like games would be native – but it’s encouraging when you look at all the junk that’s available for Windows to do a little thing (I looked over programs to encode video to/from OGG in Windows and it was a nightmare of shareware and spyware and uggggg!)

So as I wait for Age of Empires III to install, good luck to the people at PlayOnLinux!

Theoretical, I say.  Yes, it’s a beta.  Yes, it’s virtualized.  Yes, it’s amazing that the idea even kind of works.  But I can’t play Civilization.  Ergo, it sucks.

But I’m just playing with you.  Pats on the back to the guys at VirtualBox who decided that it was high time to give VirtualBox Windows guests experimental DirectX support.

Here’s how it works:  VirtualBox is virtualization software.  This lets you run one operating system inside another.  I run Ubuntu Linux 9.04, but I virtualize Windows7.

Of course, virtualization has a catch:  you have to run the “host” (your main OS), the “guest” (The virtualized OS) AND account for inefficiencies (because the system isn’t perfect).  This means that you can’t play 3D games, because special drivers need to be written to allow that in the guest OS.  VirtualBox has written some of those drivers, but they’re not commercial quality (no 3D…).  One has been able to use 3D in Linux host/ Linux guest arrangements for a few months – experimentally of course.

Now, VirtualBox has announced VirtualBox 3.0.0 Beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux.  The most exciting feature – for the end user – is *experimental* DirectX support.  DirectX is Microsoft’s framework for 3D games that is one of the major developer tools for game companies on Windows and a major reason that it’s hard to port/emulate games in UNIX environments like Mac and Linux.

So this is exciting, and I decided to take it for a test run with Windows7 and Civilization IV.  I just installed Windows7 and VirtualBox’s Guest Additions, which enables DirectX and preliminary graphics drivers.  So I started up CIV and waited for the fireworks to start.  When I got to the start screen, CIV started complaining about my speech/playback devices, which were non-existent because I was using Windows7 and not a better supported OS.  I just did Play Now with all the defaults and got this:

Ugly.  But DX support is experimental, after all, and they’re still working on it.

Until then, I eagerly await being able to play CIV without switching computers (though I really should try Crossover8 on Civilization to see if I can just run it on Linux)

So this game looks really interesting:  http://2dboy.com/games.php

It’s a game called World  of Goo, and it’s a physics-based game for Windows, Mac, and (luckily) Linux!  I’ve always really wanted to play a physics based game because my mind works like that and my reflexes are particularly rusty… (you should see how badly I pwn^-1 at Halo.  +1 if you get the math reference)

Now, I’ve recently been rowing with some of my friends at UO over the merits of Windows vs Linux (guess which side I took) and gaming was the weak point for Linux.

Now, this game looks really really good, and they say it runs in 64 bit Linux, but the demo doesn’t seem to…

UPDATE:  Okey dokey!  I just downloaded and used the TAR and it worked as soon as I turned off Compiz (which is a consistent problem for Linuxers…  The Fusion team should fix this hint hint…)

Great game.  Just amazing.  I played the first few stages in the demo and it’s a funny, amusing game that keeps your noggin working.  There are set physical rules like elasticity and it’s fun to be waiting to see if the little bridge you made will bounce up again but not get sliced by the Swinging Saws of Death.

Amusing game, it’ll be worth my $20 when I actually HAVE $20 (well, that’s $20 US, so it’s about my life savings in CAD right now).  The game powered down my X session when it quit, but something tells me that was related to Compiz…

FURTHER UPDATE:  No, it doesn’t crash my X session… I have a utility called CompizSwitch now which toggles compiz so I can play games.  Good as gold.

YET ANOTHER UPDATE:  Finished the demo.  No bugs that I found, excellent game.  Really challenging and I can’t wait to do the other levels.  The level called “Tower of Goo” where you have to – yes – make a tower of goo took me well over an hour.  Sad?  Yes, but totally worth it.

Windows, Mac OS, and Universal Linux.