I felt a little uninspired today. Moving house, fighting with my laptop's wireless card, and the heat are all factors which didn't help my mood.
In the midst of my uninspired state, while looking for software to install and talk about, I stumbled upon a game called "Armagetron", available in Ubuntu's repositories.

Armagetron is a 3D version of the "popular" (depending on your age) game Tron.

I used to play Tron on a portable gaming machine when I was 8. I was about to have yet more surgery on my right hand (the joys of children and domestic accidents...) and my cousin gave me this tiny box which did one thing, and did it well: allowed you to play Tron. Don't expect fancy graphics - we are talking about 1985 or 1986 here! The screen resolution wasn't there - the screen was a grid of squares, similar to a calculator's screen with multiple lines. That was enough to make you see your car, and the trace you left behind. You could only play against the computer.

And boy, it was fun. Really fun.

Here I am, some 23 years later, sitting in front of a machine only slightly bigger than my Tron game, playing the same game in 3D. Who would have guessed?

More importantly, I am playing with Linux, a free operating system - and the game itself is free.

After playing for a few minutes, I realised that a computer is many different things to different people. A hard core gamer is not going to choose Linux or OS X because the software is just not there, for example. But this doesn't mean that Linux doesn't have any games. Maybe not the multi-million dollar games a hard-core gamer expects, but it definitely has enough to make sure that the average uninspired worker (err...) is entertained.

What games do you play in Linux? How important are they for you? And... why? I would be delighted to hear from you. Even better if the games are available in Adept/Synaptic - so that most of our readers can install them easily.