To say that I began playing Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power with low expectations would be an understatement. Immediately put off by the 3D viewpoint, the game acquired such a poor reputation that Frozenbyte went as far as to publicly apologize to quell a significant fan backlash. Four years on though, how does Trine 3 fare as a game?

Lacklustre Linux sales and internal restructuring appear to have taken Frozenbyte out of the Linux market for good, and with even their old games struggling to run well on the Mesa graphics stack, it marks a sad end to a series that once provided so much colour to our platform.

Continuing on from my previous articles on how to get both Doom 3 and Quake 4 running on modern Linux systems, I felt the time was right to look at Prey, another id Tech 4 based game with a native Linux port. It did not take me long to discover that the main issue people were likely to run into with Prey had nothing to do with the game itself.

Having already gone to the trouble of getting the original Doom 3 binary working on my modern Arch Linux system a few months back, it made me wonder just how much effort it would take to get the closed source Quake 4 port up and running again as well.

With the release of the source code to both Doom 3 and the later BFG Edition, there now exists three options for Linux users wanting to play the game. Having gone through Doom 3 again, I decided it was time for me to compare them and give my thoughts on both the game and which of the three versions are best for Linux users in 2017.

Classic first-person shooters are without question my favourite video game genre, and it would be nice to be able to sit down and play more Indie games that can satisfy both my classic FPS craving while at the same time pushing the genre forward. Ziggurat attempts to do both, and it wins my respect for that.

Hard West is a hard game to recommend to anyone unwilling to subject themselves to a trial by fire. If it were a horse I would say that it tried to buck me at every possible opportunity. It almost succeeded too.

Strife: Quest for the Sigil was both a critical and commercial disappointment for Rogue Entertainment in 1996, and the source code to the game was mislaid by its developers. Years later work begin on reverse engineering Strife using the released Doom code. Night Dive Studios would later use this community project to craft The Original Strife: Veteran Edition.

Shadowrun was not only the first CRPG series I found compelling enough to play through all the way to the end, but one that I also found myself invested in enough to purchase additional instalments soon after playing the first.

Age of Conquest IV by Noble Master Games is a strategy title that manages to go far beyond its roots in family tabletop gaming to become a lightning fast war game where you must do or die to succeed.

Duke Nukem 3D. Shadow Warrior. Blood. All built on the Build engine, these three games when taken collectively are often referred to as the Big Three, and they are now all available for Linux from GOG. But just how well has GOG done in bringing these classic '90s shooters into the modern era?

More bad news has emerged surrounding Desura, with its parent company Bad JuJu Games filing for bankruptcy only two weeks after it emerged that they were behind in paying developers and only seven months after it was announced that they had acquired Desura from Linden Lab.

Several years ago I made a number of standalone Linux binaries for the Chzo Mythos using the then closed source Adventure Game Studio runtime as a base. Now that the source code to AGS has been released, I have updated the builds to use the superior free software engine.

After hearing plenty of heated feedback, GOG.com has now backtracked from their use of encrypted RAR files in their Windows installers, something which has raised concerns about the potential for encroaching DRM on their service as well as causing technical problems for some Linux users.

In the second of a two part opinion series, I will offer up my own personal conviction that the Amnesia games do not actually live up to the full potential demonstrated by their predecessors.