Skip to main content

Ubuntu Games: The Battle for Wesnoth.

    The Battle for Wesnoth is a turn based stratagy game set in your typical fantasy world.  Wesnoth is a ton of fun, as long as you can look past it's outdated graphics which granted most free open source games have.  It has a great style about it in my opinion and is fairly addictive.  This game is easy to get the hang of and could compete with many commercial stratagy games of the same style.

Campaign


    The campaign I have played so far has a fun classic fantasy story about a royal destined for the throne with an elderly wizard as a constant companion.  The two get into all kinds of hairy situations as they do battle against a wicked queen as she attempts to expand her evil empire.  The Battle for Wesnoth may seem at times to be telling the same old fantasy story you have heard over and over again.  However, it does it in my opinion in a way that is original and fresh.


Game play


    The game play reminds me a lot of civilization's combat.  Wesnoth has some RPG-like elements.  Your units (or characters if you will) level and you can choose different character classes as they advance.


    While your objectives vary from scenario to scenario, essentially your goal it to capture more cities, more gold and outmanoeuvre your opponent.  Often this involves either surviving a certain number of turns or killing your enemy's leader character or wiping out their army completely.


Immersion


    Wesnoth is very much your typical fantasy world, filled with all those wierd names you're not quite sure if you are pronouncing correctly.  It is full of maps, kingdoms, factions, races, characters and everything else you love about a completely made up fantasy world.


    While the world (from my perspective) is lacking lore, there is a whole community behind Wesnoth that is always creating more campaigns and history for the game and the world that it inhabits. Wesnoth doesn't take itself very seriously. It almost seems to poke fun at itself sometimes, which I personally like. However if you are looking for an immersive fantasy experience this is probably not what you are looking for.




How to get it?


    One of the great things about The Battle for Wesnoth is that you can get it on all major desktop platforms, but my focus of course is on how to get it for Ubuntu.  This is remarkably easy.  Wesnoth is available from the Ubuntu Software Center or from running the following in a terminal:
sudo apt-get wesnoth-1.8

Rating

    This game is great. The gameplay is a lot of fun and is fairly addictive. The campaigns have interesting enough stories to keep you into the game.  The world as a whole however could use some more development. I am giving The Battle for Wesnoth 4 group hugs out of 5, an awesome game with a lot of potential for further development.  

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ubuntu games?

    One of the things I have been doing very little of for the last several years is PC gaming.  This is probably mostly due to a complete lack of a Windows machine in my life.  Plus with all of the great games available for Android my needs as a casual gamer are more than met.     However, this years humble bundled has reignited my interest in PC gaming.  I got it and installed a couple of the games on my Ubuntu machine.  So far they are a lot of fun especially VVVVVV .  This got me asking "what else can I play on Ubuntu?"  Turns out there is a plethora of free open source games, some awesome, some not so much.  Many are available from the   Ubuntu Software Center and many you have to hunt down around the web.     One thing that keeps many Windows users from Ubuntu (or any Linux OS for that matter) is a supposed lack of games.  This is simply not the case.  While yes many of th...
2 comments
Read more

Writing Goals

  Recently I came to the conclusion that I should write more often.  That is, I believe, I should start to consider myself a "writer."  That's the main reason there's been a bit of an increase in publishing to this blog (going from zero over the past few years to a couple times a month is a pretty huge jump).     I, like most humans, have thoughts and opinions which are a product of the times and places in which I live.  I figure I can do my part for future historians and write a few of them down.  I also just might have enough creative juice to pump out a story or two. This blog   I'd like to post to this blog at least once a week from now on, or at a minimum once a month.  Really, anything at all would be better than what I've been doing.  I'll mainly write about my life, family, interests, and opinions about, current events and local and state politics (I'll try to steer clear of national issues for my own sanity).  Pretty...
2 comments
Read more

Playing Mari0 on Ubuntu 12.04

If you are looking to play Mari0 on Ubuntu you may have run into a bit of a roadblock because love 0.8.0 is not yet available for Precise from the love-unstable ppa.  No need to worry though the .deb file for Oneiric will work just fine.   First download the .deb from launchpad, either amd64 or i386 .  Then install dependencies by running. $ sudo apt-get install libdevil1c2 libmng1 libfreetype6 libgl1-mesa-glx liblua5.1-0 libphysfs-1.0-0 libsdl1.2debian libopenal1 libogg0 libvorbis0a libvorbisfile3 libflac8 libflac++6 libmpg123-0 libc6 libgcc1 libphysfs1 libstdc++6 Then install the love-unstable with dpkg ~/Downloads$ dpkg -i love-unstable_0.8.0~r1028-0oneiric1_<amd64/i386>.deb Run  love-unstable on mari0  ~/mari0$ love-unstable mari0_1.3.love Enjoy what is possibly the coolest crossover game of all time.
3 comments
Read more