I was rifling through my top desk drawer when I chanced to spy the CD case for an old copy of Quake II. My mind raced back to years ago when my brother and some friends would frag each other for hours in the dark on our makeshift home LAN yelling and laughing in Deathmatch games. GoodTimes! So, I hoped I'd be able to get it running on my Ubuntu machine for old times sake. My first thought was to use DosBox, since I've always had good luck with that and old Dos games, but I decided to take a quick look around to see if anyone had a Linux engine that would run the old pak files instead. Luckily I found the Yamagi Quake2 client and was able to easily install that using the precompiled Debian packages from here. Then I just had to copy the baseq2 folder from the CD over to /usr/share/games/quake2/ directory, and it fired right up. I managed to get it set up on the other two Ubuntu machines the kids use pretty quickly as well and pretty soon I was blasting away happily with my eldest for a good couple hours. We quickly tired of Deathmatch and decided to play Co-op and soon had gotten through 4 or 5 levels together (and she only shot me in the back a few times ;) I was a little worried about the gorey aspects of the game, but it was so cartoonish compared to modern games its almost a non-issue. We saved the game, but I haven't been able to get it to come back up to the save point without crashing so far.

Of course, a native Linux first person shooter like OpenArena is awesome and all, but there's just something special about reliving Quake II.