Open Source: The future

Xmoto

If you think there aren’t enough cool games to be played on Linux, I’d ask you to check out Xmoto: The 2D motorcross game. This one is the game that I find most immersing after I switched to Linux. Since I don’t have a 3D accelerator card, I couldn’t play most of the 3D games. But this one, I found was very light weight, and runs smoothly on my 512 Megs Intel Celron M machine.

Xmoto has got a number of different levels varying in difficulty. In some, you just have to drive around on plain ground. In others, you even have to climb walls! It’s a great experience playing Xmoto and clearing levels. There is an online database for Xmoto, that stores high scores of various players around the globe. If you can cross that high score, you can be on top of the list. Now this is what makes the game  even more worth playing. The challenge is just worth taking. There is also a ghost feature, which will show a ghost of the high scorer and will show how he played the level to get the high score. This is very helpful when you’re stuck in some place and are unable to figure out how to get out of it.

The next release of Xmoto will be released with a new feature: The chipmunk feature. It adds a ghost

Xmoto Chipmunk feature

with motion blur, which looks awesome. You can check out the two videos that are ready to be downloaded from their home page. This makes the game even cooler.

Xmoto Armageddon theme

Apart from all this, if you get bored with the same visuals everyday, you can change the theme to get a new bike, and a new biker costume. Even the surroundings like the strawberries and the thorny balls will change. I have tried Armageddon, Block Rider and Modern themes. Each was better than the other.

Coming to the details about the program, Xmoto is available at http://xmoto.sourceforge.net. Xmoto is available for a wide variety of platforms, including Windows, Linux(native packages for Suse, Ubuntu and Slackware) and FreeBSD. The MAC OSX release is not out yet, because the developers are still waiting for someone to package that. The source package is also available in C++, so that if your OS is not listed, you can simply compile it, provided that code specific to your platform is written in it. There is also a level editor integrated with the famous Inkscape vector graphics editor. It is named Inkmoto. I could not find any licensing information on their site. But one thing that I know is that it is Open Source. Well, that’s because they have given out the source code right away on the site.

Although Xmoto could be really boring at times, yet it is one of the best. You can just move on to the next level…

Xmoto Screenshot

References:

• Me of course, from all the levels I have played.
• X-Moto: Open Source Motocross Platform Action

TIP: If you have a very slow computer (even slower than mine), and don’t care about nifty graphics, then you can just run xmoto with the -ugly argument.