With a little hunting, you can find some fantastic games on Fedora if you look. Recently, I unearthed OpenTTD and have been having a great time playing it!

I haven’t been playing games regularly for a few years now – specifically since I moved completely off Windows. Back then I used to dual boot my laptop to play popular games like Counterstrike and AOE with my friends. Since I destroyed my Windows partition, not only have I gotten busier, I’ve also been too lazy to find good games on Linux.

With Richard, Ryan, Mairin and other awesome community members working tirelessly to improve software listing in Gnome Software, it is now much easier to find applications, including games, on a Fedora system. Now, since Gnome Software also shows screen shots for a lot of applications, it saves me the trouble of visiting the application’s website to see what it’s like. Look under the “Games” category, see something you like, click to install – that’s all it takes.

openttd-gnome-software

About a week ago, I went on sort of an installation binge – I randomly installed about 10 games that looked good to try out. Yes, I was incredibly bored.

Finding OpenTTD

One of the first games I fired up was OpenTTD. I used to play a lot of Airport Tycoon on Windows, which is another Windows only game. In Airport Tycoon you build airports, get flight contracts, and manage these flights. I’ve been looking for another tycoon game and hadn’t run into many – the only one that I can list off the top of my head being Linux Tycoon.

OpenTTD is a lot of fun! The game carries so much detail that there isn’t a limit to what you can set up. Firstly, it gives you all available transport modes to invest in: road, rail, air and water. On top of this, you’re to service both industry – coal, power, oil, steel and others; and people – mail, goods, passenger transport. Here’s an example of the level of detail that you can play at:

A..er..”cyclotron”.

I haven’t built enough train lines to employ that, yet. Here’s the long list of aircrafts in the game.

I really can’t tell you much more. I suggest you install the game and give it a whirl! OpenTTD has a thriving community that documents a lot of tips and tricks on the wiki. There’s a good in game tutorial to teach you the basics of the game too. Have fun!