Spring (formerly TA:Spring) is a full 3D RTS. The game is played by getting one or more mods for the engine (which is completely GPL). The original goal was to run all Total Annihilation mods and 3rd party stuff. It seems to have passed that long ago and is now a damn complete game.

The best part of the game is the ability to control specific units from an FPS perspective. Selecting the unit and pressing ‘C’ puts you into FPS mode and you can control that unit directly. This is really cool when you try it out on aircraft in fierce dogfights and adds a really clever element to the gameplay, especially since full 3d air combat means you can fly underneath and above other aircraft (unlike most other RTS games) . There can be thousands of units in the game at the same time, but micromanaging isn’t a problem because some units have a rudimentary AI inbuilt which you can set. The terrain is great and deforms with sufficient damage causing craters and the like.

There are units in every medium and with the BA and other similar mods you’ll have units on sea, air, and land. The mods are usually well constructed and the sides balanced, so the multiplayer aspect of Spring (which is the most important part) is rarely neglected.

Getting the AIs to work seems to be non-trivial, so single player missions may not be extremely easy to setup, but the Random Enemies scripts should keep you busy while you learn. The Setup Guide is well written and easy to follow and they even have a Debian package repository to make installation of the binaries simple. There’s also a section for Ubuntu in the Setup Guide, so things can’t be much simpler.

Slingshot is a 2-d turn-based game with some really nice gravity simulation. The objective of the game is to destroy the other ship by controlling the power behind and angle of your projectile. The projectile then flies under the influence of the gravity field of that particular map. The planets vary from gigantic ones that can pull your particle into themselves easily if you shoot too close to smaller ones that will barely deflect it unless it is very close. It’s great fun to play this game against yourself and sometimes you can have fun by trying to make the projectile make lots of orbits before the time out kills it or by making it make really neat twisty orbits without hitting the other player. Hitting yourself is an even cooler thing to try when you’re playing against yourself, though if you’re involved in a close match with your younger brother the -2000 points may not be to your advantage, cool factor notwithstanding.

If you’re attempting to install the .deb on a vanilla Feisty Fawn installation, you will need the python-pygame package first. In a terminal, type:
sudo aptitude install python-pygame
Or use the GUI Package Manager (Synaptic) to install that package.

Little useless note: You can use a composite manager to adjust the transparency on the game window and it will still work.

Xmoto is a motocross game with some neat ragdoll physics. The driver of the bike swings around, moves forwards and backwards and leans back and forth when the bike impacts or when you do loops. The best part of the game are the levels which are all quite professionally made and use various aspects of the game’s engine. Some of the levels have to be done with the bike upside down, and some need stylish flips.

The game doesn’t need much of a graphics card either, and if you can get direct rendering going, you can play it on low end onboard graphics. I’ve managed on a Unichrome that shared 8MB of main memory, and it does play on older chips although it is much slower except on parts without many textures.