As the summer slowly begins, I find myself in the position of having some amount of free time on my hands. Granted I work WAY more than I used to, but even so, spare times comes about once in a while. During this time, I'd usually entertain myself with some crappy Korean Grind game for a few hours and then go to bed. However, now that I've switched to Linux, a fair amount of these games have been closed off from my reach, mostly because of the GameGuard utility that so many MMOs make use of these days. Therefor, I must now fill this void with searches for games that run in Wine.

I tried for a very long time the other day to get Saga of Ryzom working. However, the installer utility didn't seem to connect to its intended server. I tried this in a vbox instance of XP and it still didn't go through. I didn't try natively, though. It would be nice to poke my head into Ryzom's world after so much time has passed since my first play with it. Wow... I think Ryzom was actually the first MMORPG I'd ever tried. Ever. That's quite a few years ago.

I then tried Saga (hur hur, yes, the two names are similar). I still haven't gotten to actually play this one yet, either, as the patcher doesn't seem to work correctly, even after acquiring the correct dll (MSVBVM60.DLL). It, like the Ryzom installer, just appears to hang after being started, never connecting to a server. I will attempt to manually patch that right after this post.

If I DID get Saga working, though... oh man... I think I would be playing that one for a while. I need to work on my RTS gaming ability.

Speaking of Wine, the program is at rc4 for it's first "stable" release. I wonder how far they are from the full release and what this will mean for the project. The program is far from perfect, but it has made great progress in time I've been watching it. Perhaps some day we will see certain programs running 100 percent as well as they do on Windows under Linux.