Bit funny that you use "Steam-junkie gamer buddy" as a example since Steam is apparently going to be officially released on Linux within a few months. Of course, time still have to prove whenever it's good or not (GPU drivers is still somewhat problematic for Linux).

But I have to agree that you need to introduce Linux (and OSS) where it makes sense to.

I like Nethack, thank you very much. It's steep learning curve is part of the charm, and the fact that lots of things can kill you. It's not a game for the impatient.

You might want to check out the Diablo series. Blizzard themselves admitted that they were inspired by Nethack (and Angband) when they made Diablo, AFAIK people still play it and is very hyped for Diablo III.

If you want to see popular games with awful UI, you might want to check Dwarf Fortress. Manages to be way worse than Nethack (with even steeper learning curve), but is very popular. Not open source however.

I don't try to claim that the average open source is innovative, rather I was trying to point out a huge exception (innovative dosen't mean it have to be mainstream friendly). I have a feeling it's much easier to get developers together to make a clone of a already loved game (which then can be improved upon), than something new and original.

For innovation, I'd personally rather look amongst what the indie developers offer.

What about Nethack? It's probably still one of the more original Roguelikes out there, with a long legacy. :) I believe some "original commercial" games was actually inspired by Nethack.

I see. But I seem to recall there was (or just has been) a large RAM shortage around the time (1994) Transport Tycoon was released. :)

Indeed. After you been spoiled with various custom trainsets (UKRS, NARS, 2CC, the upcoming PJ1K) industries (FIRS is very promising), aircraft (AV8), ships (FISH) and road vehicles (eGRVTS), it's really hard to go back to the original vehicles. Most of the custom stuff feels more balanced (Aircrafts/trains are somewhat less profitable, road/ships are more profitable) and more interesting (with the default vehicles you always just pick the fastest vehicle for your line...).

The only bad thing with those sets is that they generally make the game a bit harder, so I help newbies to learn with the default stuff.

You have to keep in mind of the system requirements at the time too. Originally Transport Tycoon was coded to run on 486 computers. While they vastly improved the pathfinding of both networks and AI's with A*, I'm not even sure if it would work as well on the old 486 computers the game was originally made for (Amusingly, some of the largest rail networks in openTTD slows even down the fastest computers).

I don't know the computational powers needed for A* (other than it majorily increased openTTD system requirements when it was introduced), or if it could been simplified to run better for the hardware at the time.

Freeciv 1.0 was released 1996, so no this is not the first "open source clone" to reach 1.0.

And then you have games like Nethack that's been worked on since the 80's and is a timeless jewel and that nice turnbased medieval strategy game I forgot the name of. I am a huge gamer and I mostly play commercial games (Team Fortress 2 being my current favorite), but I wouldn't sneeze at the open source games.

Keep in mind that generally, open source projects only reach version 1.0 when a major milestone have been reached. It doesn't mean that 0.x versions are unusable or buggy/unplayable, openTTD have been rock solid throughout it's history as far I know (the only bugs I stumbled upon was in the nightlies... which is to be expected).

This gallery have some examples of TTD AI stupidity.

Have a explanation why the orginal AI is poor, note that the "glitches, cheats and bugs" mentioned in the FAQ have been fixed in openTTD since a long time ago. ;)

I remember back in 1994 or so on my first computer when I got a demo of Transport Tycoon from some British UK magazine we imported. You were only limited to few (five?) years of building and I had no idea what to do. I later got the very first original version of Transport Tycoon, the one with the real vehicle names, I honestly don't remember much what I did with that version.

I then got the Transport Tycoon Plus version, the one with the "mars terrain" as alternate graphics. I remember spending most of my childhood with that version, looking at envy at the "Deluxe" version which had maglev and one-way signals. You can bet I was happy when I eventually got the deluxe version, and I thought anything was possible with one-way signals... I had no idea about pre-signals or path signals yet. ;) I used TTDPatch to run Windows TTD under Win XP, then later got openTTD 0.3.x. That's when I was hooked again. One of the best things with openTTD compared to TTD or even TTDPatch is a fully working multiplayer. In both TTD and orginal transport tycoon, you were lucky if the game went past thirty years as it desynced very easily. OpenTTD is much more stable in that degree, and fails more gracefully if it does desyncs (which is rare, and the orginal versions would just crash or glitch up).

openTTD supports custom AI's written in the scripting language Squirrel. See http://wiki.openttd.org/Noai . There's a quite few AI's to download, of varying quality and personality.

The original (now removed) AI did indeed suck badly, but it's stupidity did provide players with some amusement at the same time. ;)

"It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried." - Winston Churchill

3D glasses used in modern cinema is Polarized, not tinted with red/blue.

Just keep in mind that Civ IV is different from earlier Civilization games. Especially when it comes to terraforming, it's way more varied and requires more thinking than "irrigate all grass/plains".

There's some silly but cute effects like the battle animations, but those can be turned off if you prefer seeing the results right away. :)

Before Alpha Centauri there wasn't any notable differences between the different civilizations. With Alpha centauri they wanted to have different factions with way different strategies and "beliefs". I thought this was intresting, especially seeing how people picked a diffrent faction depending on their playstyle.

The backstory of Alpha Centauri tries to explain why there's different factions. Perhaps Alpha Centauri is a little campy, but I always thought most of the technologies in the tech tree seemed rather realistic for me (although some of them are probably in a odd order).

I personally find the best Civilization to be Civ IV. In hindsight, Civ III is probably the most "disapointing" version, but I still think it's better than the previous one. Nowadays if I feel like doing old-school civilization I just play FreeCiv with it's default ruleset. Similar enough to Civ 2, but way more balanced (especially for multiplayer),

I love Alpha Centauri too, but it suffers from a few gameplay problems. Such as that the game is usually decided relativly early on in the tech tree (compared to other Civ games), yet there is a long road to the end... which is annoying. Plus I got a strong feeling it was suffering from feature overload, which explains some of the balance problems.

The social engineering system was slightly more interesting than the Civics one in some aspects, but on the other hand the Civics system made more sense as a replacement for the old "goverment" system of Civ I-III. I found out that as I got better, the civics was more balanced than I first thought.