RutSum

Top Open Source Games For Old Hardware

All of these games have been tested for speed and quality gameplay on a machine with a 32-bit Intel processor, 256 MB of RAM and an onboard ATI video card.

1) Frets on Fire - A clone of Guitar Hero for your PC, written in Python. Absolutely addictive, and for all those guys who find themselves air-guitaring in front of their bedroom mirrors, it’s a dream come true. Now people would say that is lame, and in the end you are pressing keys instead of pulling strings, but the feeling is something that only a non-guitar player can understand. Only 3 tracks are included in the default package, but thousands of community developed tracks are available online. It also supports importing Guitar Hero™ I and Guitar Hero™ II songs. Almost everybody’s immediate favorite would be ‘Defy The Machine’, because it’s easy to beat, and the music is a horribly pleasing electronic guitar. In the end, a total entertainment package, probably more so for music lovers.

2) OpenArena - OpenArena in a first person shooter, built on the Quake III engine, but does not require Quake III, thus functioning as a standalone. The gameplay is fast, adventurous, full of blood and gore, though not very visually appealing.

The game has 2 modes - Single Player and Multiplayer. Multiplayer can be either through a LAN or the Internet. OpenArena, at any time has 90-100 servers online, a lot of them having as many as 20 players each. The fact that makes OpenArena more playable than other FPS games out there is that it is astonishingly lightweight, without compromising much on gameplay.

3) SuperTux - A classic 2D Mario like arcade game, which has Tux jumping around, facing the dangers and evils of the closed source world. This is one of the oldest games I have seen on Linux, aging back to 2003. Even though you have practically millions of games, with bleeding edge graphics, DirectX 10 games, but nothin beats the good old 2D fun. Very addicitve and a great way to pass time. And absolutely no violence involved.

4) The Mana World - This is a 2D MMORPG, just 12 MB in size. TMW is set in an suburban backdrop, and the aim of the game is to increase your skills, interact with others around you, exchange, buy, sell and form a community. You can kill maggots, talk to the NPCs scattered around to gain quests, sell/buy weapons to/from other players, and kill more maggots. But in all, more than being an RPG, TMW is more of a social platform, and it is this aspect which makes it entertaining. The only limitation is that you eventually run out of things to do. So enjoy it till you can.

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