We had a great meeting with 14 members in attendance and one spouse. Our main presenter was Chad Nelson on the subject of playing games on Linux. He started out by showing us World of Goo, from 2dboy, which was part of the Wolfire Humble Indie game suite offering (which is now over). The game is still available from 2dboy. http://2dboy.com/games.php for $20. The Wolfire Humble Indie initiative was an "event" where Wolfire offered up a collection of 7 games for sale in a bundle but you could set your own price. Details of the event can be found at http://www.wolfire.com/humble. Wolfire considers the event a success and one of the results of the event was that members of the Linux community voluntarily paid the highest amount for the suite of games with $14.48 being the average where those in the Windows community only offered to pay an average of $8.05. The project netted over a million two of which almost four hundred thousand dollars went the Childs Play Charity. Next on Chad's list was BZflag (http://bzflag.org/) a 3D tank battle online game which Chad showed us a collection of screen shots; bzflag is available from the Ubuntu repo's and includes the server as well as the client application; have your own lan party!
Cube2: Sauerbraten was another game that Chad had installed on his computer and is a multi-player 1st Person shooter game (http://cubeengine.com/)
Pingus is a free clone of the popular Lemmings game that is also available for installation using Synaptic. In this game, your goal is to guide a horde of penguins through a world full of obstacles and penguin traps to safety. Although penguins (unlike lemmings) are rather smart, they sometimes lack the necessary overview and now rely on you to save them..
Demonoid (http://www.demonoid.com/) was also discussed as a site where you can get downloads of your favorite game ROM's, all that is required that you actually own the game console. One of the popular games was Gorf, an astroid shooting game. These can be played using GMAMEUI which is a front-end program that helps you run MAME, the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator and is available in the Ubuntu repositories as well as on Launchpad (https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/lucid/+package/gmameui).
Chad finished with a few comments about the Going Linux pod cast site and episode 91 which was broadcast on Jan 20 #091 - Linux Games-Advanced - http://goinglinux.com/shownotes.html#glp091
After Chad's presentation, we took a few minutes to for everyone to introduce themselves and Mike Brown mentioned the Child's Play collection of games which is now Schoolsplay (http://www.schoolsplay.org/) for children. It is still available for installation on Ubuntu Lucid as Childsplay using Synaptic.
Clint then commented on the SuperGamer 2 is 7.8GB in size. The LiveDVD can only run on Dual Layer DVD Drives so please be sure you have a compatible drive if you download it. The Supreme SuperGamer is the World's First Dual Layer LiveDVD. Supergamer2 LiveDVD was released on July 18th. Details on Distrowatch (http://distrowatch.com/?newsid=06193) and at http://supergamer.org/forum/index.php?topic=293.msg1241 where you find a complete list of the games included on this LiveDVD and it is installable to a hard drive.
Longtime member Doug Springer then showed an in-flight entertainment device that is "rented" to a passengers on a number of global airlines that he had a hand in developing which can be used for playing movies as well as for playing games during those long overseas trips and has a 14 hour plus battery life. He commented on the why in that he took one of those long flights and it really helps pass the time. He also issued a call for developers (GCC) as he knows of some opportunities.
The meeting then closed but several hung around for more discussion and conversation.
Next meeting will be September 2nd, agenda to be announced.