Funny how things work out
Started my interaction with computers and information technology at the age of 14, with a ZX Spectrum 128 by Sinclair Research Ltd. It was a fairly BASIC machine by today's standards. It was a load of fun for a 14 yr old, and my first introduction to the world of magic and power. Things came to a head when i got suspension from school over intrusion shenanigans and had my ears boxed by the principal.
So, chastised and suitably reformed i re-embarked on my painfully interrupted journey through the world of zeros and ones. Magic took on other names Intel, 386.. 486.. wow. Something called a Pentium, then MMX tech..
It was about the time i was just graduating from college that i discovered a game called Diablo. Gaming prior to that had held little interest for me since all the games available to me were first person shooters [if you could call them that] Wolf 3D and Doom bored me a lot, Duke was hella fun. But yeah, Diablo was the first game to hook me. So many items to find, so many weapons, so many armor types. treasure trove! In all its isometric beauty.
The next game to get its hooks into me was a RTS. Command and Conquer. It was like i had died and gone to heaven.
So the games i really dig till date are either RPGs or RTSs. One of the best that i played was Homeworld. I also had purchased a copy of Homeworld 2. However playing Homeworld 2 was another story altogether. I never could get to play that game, it installed flawlessly, it started up well and then 2-3 minutes into the actual gameplay it would give me an error and die. I tried everything, updated drivers, updated DirectX, changed Graphics Card, every damned thing. Patches from the publisher [sierra] did nothing and i got mroe and more pissed off with the sordid state of affairs. More so because i purchased it day one, and it cost me like 2 weeks wages at the time.
It has since been lying there in my game collection, gathering dust, and inviting baleful glances from me ever so often, whenever i happen to notice it. Yes, i held onto the grudge.
Then, recently, i was on one of my usual sojourns into *nix land. I typically install some flavor of linux on my laptop at least once a month, and tinker about. It started when i was in college and fell in love with the Unix world. Forced to work with Micro$oft products as part of the work environment, it was like a secret fetish, indulged in surreptitiously and on the down low, every now and then.
So yeah, i installed Ubuntu recently, and for the first damned time in so many years, i tried Wine. Because i wanted to install and use the corporate remote-logon software. After a couple of days of that, i tried running Civilization4 in Wine, it was not easy, and i never got it to run perfectly. It ran, but some of the stuff never showed in game, like the native resources on the tiles, like ivory/gems/horses etc. Then as i was at the closet, putting away the Civ Disc, i happened to notice the Homeworld 2 box, and i was like... "why the eff not"
I installed it, ran it, played it for 10 hrs straight. Worked like a !@#$@#$ charm. Jesus motherlovin Christ. The performance was much much better than i remember it on my WinXP box [it did run for a bit before crashing, remember?].
Since then i have tried most of the games i had in my collection with wine, and those that run, do run better in Linux with wine than they did in Windows. There is no lag to speak of, even on the higher gfx settings, no frame skipping, no clipping, no.. lockups, no unceremoniously being dumped to desktop with the ubiquitous dll or OpenGL or DirectX errors.
Among the games i have tried out and enjoyed on the Ubuntu box so far have been C&C 3, Teamfortress2, Oblivion, Diablo 2 - LoD., Sacred, Evil Genius and a lot more.
Funny how things work out, eh?
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