Are you an avid gamer with a thing for horror and great puzzles? If so, you now have a great chance of winning all three games in the Penumbra series! The series represent the very best in native Linux horror gaming - or dare I say the best horror gaming on any platform? The games are available for Windows Linux and Mac OS, but I’m only able to give away either to Mac or Linux versions here.

As you may know, I’m currently working on a 2D point-and-click adventure game, currently called Project Subterranean. While the success of an adventure game may depend on a good story, great puzzles are almost equally important. Therefore we’re looking for your help to come up with puzzle ideas!

In order to compete for the grand prize, you need to submit an idea for a puzzle to be included in the game once it is released. Whomever comes up with the best idea will receive all three Penumbra games for Linux or Mac, depending on which version they want.

Rules

1. Come up with and formulate an idea for a game puzzle. The first chapter of the game will be set in an office environment, so that could be a good starting point for you.
2. Fun and humor will win you major points. We are after all not making a horror game.
3. Submit your ideas by emailing them to me.
4. Leave a comment letting me and everyone else know that you’re in the competition.
5. Your idea has to be original in the sense that you can’t straight out copy it from some other game. However, you can of course draw inspiration from other games.
6. Multiple entries from the same person are most certainly allowed.
7. Any entries may be used in the game, even if the author did not win this competition.

The winner will be announced in around two weeks, so if you haven’t heard anything from me yet - keep sending in those ideas!

Please do help spread the word about this competition by using the social media buttons below, telling your friends, posting a link here on forums and mailing lists, or any other way you can come up with! I would really appreciate it.

After a few weeks of frantic coding by me and Brad Smith, the original author of the Caffeine Linux port, Caffeine 0.2 is now officially released! If you have somehow forgotten what Caffeine is, or if you never read my blog post on it at all, here’s a link to it.

In a nutshell, Caffeine is a coffee cup that sits in your system tray, waiting for you to click it. Once you do, it fills up with coffee and keeps your computer from going to sleep or activating the screensaver. This could be really useful for when you’re playing fullscreen games that don’t inhibit the screensaver, or when you’re watching a long flash video.

Any new features for the 0.2?

There sure are!

• New icons. Although I’m not so very happy with them. They might receive a makeover for the 0.3.
• Full support for gnome-screensaver and Kscreensaver
• Support for the old notification system as well as the new one.
• The ability to choose a time interval from a list, and have Caffeine be active during that time.
• The ability for the user to set the duration for the interval freely.
• Mutiple bug fixes.
• A new project page at Launchpad.

Sweet! Where do I get it?

We actually have a PPA now, so it’s easy as pie. Just follow these steps to add our PPA to your list of repositories, and then download and install Caffeine:

sudo bash -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bnsmith/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys B7DEAC3C

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install caffeine

Of course if you’re not running Ubuntu or another distribution that doesn’t make use of the Debian package format, you can get all the files you need by running this command:

bzr branch lp:caffeine

Depending on your distribution, the process for having Caffeine automatically start when you log in is different. But here are instructions for Ubuntu:

1. Goto System → Preferences → Startup Applications
2. Click on Add
3. Enter “Caffeine” in the Name entry and just type “caffeine” in the Command field (the command should be in all lower case letters).
4. Log out and back in again, and Caffeine should be running in your system applet!

For instructions for other distributions, either consult your distribution’s support forum/IRC channel/Mailing list. Or shoot me or Brad an email. My email address can be found on the contact page, and Brad’s can be found at his blog.

What are the plans for 0.3?

The plans aren’t set in stone, but we’re hoping to rewrite the entire application and make it a bit more organized and  overall easier to work with. We’re also planning on making use of GtkBuilder to separate the graphical stuff from the logic. That will also allow us to use Glade, which will make creating the user interface a million times easier.

We also want to get proper support for Xscreensaver as well as stand-alone DPMS. Getting DPMS support is actually fairly trivial, but we have to create a preferences dialog first - as there’s no way to detect whether or not DPMS is running on its own or being managed by another program. Xscreensaver is a little bit trickier, so we’ll see how that goes.

As always, we’re interested in hearing your thoughts, ideas and your criticism. If you have tried Caffeine out and have something to say about it, you’re more than welcome to either leave a comment here or on the announcement post at Brad’s blog. I’m sure Brad would like to get some love as well. After all, it was he who started the development of this application!

You know how Linux really lacks in the gaming department? Well, the people over at Frictional Games and Paradox Interactive have certainly done their part by porting their popular horror game triology, The Penumbra Series, to Linux! That’s right. No Wine, no Cedega. A native port of one of the most well-made horror game series ever made!

But not only that! They’re actually selling all of the games in the series for a total cost of $5! For the cost of a pizza you’re getting three very high quality games, running natively in Linux.

Any screenshots, trailers or anything?

Sure thing! Here are the trailers for all three of the games, along with some screenshots and a review.

Penumbra Overture

• Screenshot #1
• Screenshot #2
• Screenshot #3
• Screenshot #4

Penumbra Black Plague

• Screenshot #1
• Screenshot #2
• Screenshot #3
• Screenshot #4

Penumbra Requiem

• Screenshot #1
• Screenshot #2
• Screenshot #3
• Screenshot #4

Review by Adam Templeton:

Players immerse themselves in Penumbra’s chilling world through a plucky, inquisitive physicist named Phillip. After his dear old mum kicks the bucket, Phil receives a letter from his father, Howard, a man supposedly deceased. The message is full of cryptic directions to somewhere in Greenland, as well as a plea to destroy all evidence leading to it. Instead, Phillip decides to journey to the ends of the earth to determine what exactly mortified his dad.

The biggest draw of Penumbra, aside from its creepy, subterranean locales, is the real-world physics engine players use to solve puzzles. While exploring a vacant mineshaft whose tunnels house a highly advanced research facility, players can mess with the world around them in a simple, logical fashion.

[...]

The story matches the characters, boasting a top-notch narrative and a tendency to wax philosophical (anything that calls human existence banal gets brownie points in my book). The ending to the first episode is anti-climactic at best, and the third episode is devoid of plot advancement all together. Still, the tale told in episode two makes up for everything.

[...]

Penumbra brings back everything good about Survival Horror and Adventure games at a time when the first genre is dying and the second is already a corpse with an occasional, involuntary muscle spasm. The game rewards scheming and advance planning over the more conventional “make ‘em all dead” approach the big studios cling to like gospel.

At the risk of sounding pretentious (which with me is like saying there’s a chance reading the Nation/World section of a newspaper could depress you a tad), Penumbra is a thinking man’s — or lady’s — Survival Horror Game.

Read full review here.

Sweet! Where can I buy the games?

You can either go to the website and navigate your way from there: http://www.penumbragame.com

Or you can go directly to the store: https://store6.esellerate.net/store/checkout/CustomLayout.aspx?s=STR9929807578&pc=&page=OnePageCart.htm

Either way, I hope you’ll support this brave move. The best way to show developers that it’s worth their time to make games for Linux is to buy the games that are already available. At only $5 there’s really no reason whatsoever to not buy them. So hurry up and get yourself some of the best Linux gaming available before this offer expires (July 19).

I try very hard not to come off as a Linux zealot. I do recognize that it has a lot of flaws and functionality yet to be implemented. However, in my opinion its positive sides far outweighs its negatives, and that’s why I use it as my primary system.

But it’s not the only platform I use. While I don’t have any dedicated Windows boxes anymore, I still have at least one dual boot system for those applications or games that I want to use - just not every day. Right now I even have an iMac that I use every now and then (I do not own it, however).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewtopia/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Whenever I use those systems, there are some things that make me think “Why doesn’t Linux have this?”. Things like Time Machine, for example. But more times than not, I get extremely irritated over tiny things that Linux does, but the other platforms don’t.

Contained within this post is a short list of little Linux things that I miss whenever I’m not using Linux. I’m not going to include big things like being able to install software from repositories, or anything like that. Just the tiny things that I can’t stand not being able to use.

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Regardless of what operating system, desktop environment or computer architecture you’re using, your computer is at one point or another going to freeze up on you. It might be due to a single application going crazy, causing your processor to eat electricity and piss heat even more so than before, or it could just be because you’re using Windows. Regardless of why it dies on you, it can cause even the most doped up valium user to go berserk. Luckily, Linux provides you with a way to get out of most of these situations without having to restart your entire computer.

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