Now the playstation is great for gaming, buy isn’t really suitable for casual play, not to mention the fact that as its plugged into the big tv downstairs, I have to make sure I don’t monopolise use of the living room.

All this has driven me to explore the current state of gaming on linux. To my surprise I found quite a few games in the Ubuntu repositories. A few of the picks are listed below.

• Battle for Wesnoth – an excellent turn based strategy game.
• Tux Racer – a classic. Simple but addictive.
• Aleph One – the open source Marathon engine. Marathon was the FPS game series released by Bungie studios before their Halo success. Great story line and world creation in this game.
• Frets on Fire – a guitar hero clone that is surprisingly as addictive as the real thing.
• Nethack – gets a special mention. No fancy graphics, bloody confusing at first and huge learning curve, but once you grasp it – surprisingly addictive and very fun . Play on the public nethack server on alt.org.