Any shooter will love this game. It is fast on Linux and the graphics rendering is great. And the best part is no crashes or screen lock ups as in Windo$e.

Now for the bad stuff. It is extremely hard to install and to be frank, if you are a beginner to Linux I wouldn't even try it unless you got a pair and are willing to spend at least several hours cruising the net forums for help (or if you are lucky enough to follow my advice at the very end of this review). The initial problems were (and I must emphatically state that at this price for an oldish game, one would expect it to install flawlessly), at least in Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty, inadequate write privileges for installation and other folder and file privileges inadequate to write necessary configuration files, cd key and to gain access to the sound.

Particularly, the pathetically short and poor instructions provided for installation suggest installing and running it in administrative mode (a grave security risk), yet Ubuntu is one of the few Linux distributions that makes it almost impossible to run the desktop in administrative mode or even get to the system prompt in administrative mode. Great for security, and yes it is good to get used to using sudo, but this complicates installation significantly to almost insurmountable proportions. But even before you get to the part of using sudo to change a bunch of folder and file permissions ya have to get the setup.sh script to work.

So the VERY first problem ya will run into will be that the instructions assume that you use the sh shell rather than bash. So ya got to put a link in the sh path to bash, so bash will start when ya type in sh. Not too bad but annoying. I mean how many disto's use sh still. I've never seen a distro use sh and I've been using Linux for ten years. Then ya can run sh setup.sh and the setup script will start . . . but oh boy, your problems are just starting because the setup.sh cannot find your libGL files.

After hours of fumbling my way through sudo commands, I was able to get the game to run at least, although I had to use the command "sudo quake3 +set r_gldriver " to do it. But no sound which I will explain later.

The real glitch is the part . So unless you are intimately familiar with the file structure of your Ubuntu distro ya got to fumble around until you stumble upon a web page that gives a clue to where it is or what file name form it has. Anyway, I finally decided that the Glib file the game needed was libGL.so.1 although there were several other possibilities I could have chosen to try like libGL.so.0. Good guess.

So the game starts with no sound and I put in the cdkey . . . but, what? It gives the message that the key is no good. I check it again, and then again. What gives. Well, despite the cdkey being in capital letters on the diamond case the program wants the letters in the key all lower case. Now there is no, I repeat no excuse for this BS. So I enter it in lower case.

Well, when I start the game again, it asks me for the cdkey again. Evidently, there is a write permission problem to the file that stores the cdkey. I won't say how I solved this because its all BS and the solution I'll come to will solve all your problems.

Anyway, I finally play the game without sound for a couple hours, then, understandably, I want the sound. So, once again, spending hours on the Internet finding other people trying to solve the same problem I'm having, without luck I might add (because quake3 uses something called mmap sound and ALSA, the universal sound protocol now used by Ubuntu and most other distro's isn't compatible with that) . . . NO SOUND.

By this time I'm about to give up and install the game on windows (the CD comes with Windoze binary executables). . . what? Did I say that? Well, I won't do it. I'd rather suck pus through an old straw I found in the garbage.

I was desperate. There is no excuse for a game that has been around so long as Quake 3 Arena to be so hard to install. I mean . . . the developers couldn't write a script to query the system about its configuration and accommodate it. Open Source programmers are too stupid to do what game programmers for the Windo$e O/$ do ALL the beeping time?

Well, happily this is not the case. Because I found a site that a group of Open Source programmers had created an installation engine for "Quake 3 Arena for Linux" and an engine to install the maps. The only foot work ya have to do is to physically copy the PAK0.PK3 file from the baseQ3 folder located on the cd to the location specified. Easy enough. And . . . bingo. Quake 3 Arena is running from my users (no administrative privileges) account with full sound with no problems at all!

And it ROCKS. Windoze . . . suck algae off dead fish. I'm playing Quake 3 Arena on Linux. Yes!

Okay . . . so here is the url that will solve all your installation problems with this game . Just go to that site and do what they tell you.

Was it worth it. Well, uhmmmmm . . . yes. I'd crawl on my knees across miles of broken glass and tacks to avoid using Bill Gates' putrid abomination of an O/$$$$.

Now . . . if I could only watch screwattack.com in my Firefox browser in Linux . . . its something about the url in the flashplayer files. I wonder if I Google . . . .

Okay, now ya got the dope on how to setup Quake 3 Arena on Linux.

Micro$oft . . . eat it!

It's been more years than I can remember since I bought and played this. It was great at the time. Nice to have a game on linux for a change. I stick to consoles now. Have gone mostly Mac too.

Quake 3 runs GREAT on my Linux system. That's not saying all that much, I suppose, until you realize that my Linux machine has a 3dfx Banshee as its video card, yet I can run at 1280x1024 without a single stutter or hickup.

On a technical merrit, this game gets a "5."

On a gameplay merrit, this game gets a "3." That is, I really enjoy plots... feeling like I'm playing a key role in some momentous event. Half-Life... System Shock (1&2)... Deux Ex... all great examples of this. It's fun, but it's not "absorbing."

So, I give the game a "4."

The main thing to take away from this is that the Quake3 engine works GREAT in Linux. I recently installed the Linux binaries of Return to Castle Wolfenstein onto this machine. It also uses the Quake3 engine. Wolfenstein, so installed, is beautiful, and it DOES have a plot.

ID Software, who developed the binaries for this port and who developed the Quake-series engines, have singlehandedly proven that Linux is a great gaming platform, yet again. The Quake3 engine is being used everywhere these days, and there's no fundamental reason that ANY of them can't be easily ported over to Linux.

Well, that's not entirely true. It's true that there's no TECHNICAL reason that we can't have those games. And it's true that there's no MARKET reason that we can't have those games (minimal effort to create the port using all the same content, then a secondary distribution channel).

However, there is ONE reason... the illegal marketing practices of Microsoft. Will this play out like all the other "Competition with Microsoft" activities of the past few years? Stay tuned...