ManiaDrive describes itself as “an arcade car game on acrobatic tracks, with a quick and nervous gameplay (tracks almost never exceed one minute)” and also as a clone of Trackmania.

What I can tell you is that ManiaDrive is a lot of fun, and extremely addictive at that.

Download the game from the site and on Linux, simply extract the archive and run ./mania_drive.sh. You will need 3D support enabled in your Linux distribution, or the game will run with terrible performance.

Once you’re up and running, you can get started straight away with the Beginner’s tracks. You drive a clapped-out Renault Clio around a simple track. The aim is to get your car through all the checkpoints and to the finish in the quickest time possible (beating the ‘Gold Time’ on each track unlocks the next, and is how you can progress through).

Once you’ve been taught the basics of the checkpoint system, how to run, jumps and more, you can progress into the real levels (under the Pro heading).

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You’ll have to forgive me, this is the second game review I’ve done in the past two days, after yesterday’s look at Battle Tanks. After discovering this gem though, I simply couldn’t not share.

The game is Wormux - and it is basically a clone of the Worms series of games originally by Team17. For those who aren’t in the know, Wormux (and the Worms game) put you in control of a team of worms armed to the teeth with an arsenal of weapons. The aim of the game is to use those weapons against worms of the enemy team. Each worm has a set amount of energy, and being shot at, blown up etc. will reduce that energy until that worm dies (or if you can get a worm to go for a swim or fly off the edge of the map, it’s instant death). The last team standing wins. It is turn-based, so while your team is in control, everyone else stands still for you to take a potshot at.

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It’s about time we stopped talking about all this sensible software stuff for a moment and got down to what it should all be about - some good, fun, open source games. Today’s serving is Battle Tanks, which as the rather inventive name suggests, involves controlling a battle tank and thoroughly blowing things up.

At the time of writing, most distributions don’t ship Battle Tanks in the repositories, so you may have to find a pre-built package. For Ubuntu (I’m running Gutsy for this tutorial), download these two files (builds courtesy of Miriam Ruiz):

btanks-data_0.5.4740-2_all.deb
btanks_0.5.4740-2_i386.deb

and install like this:

$ sudo apt-get install libopenal0a
$ sudo dpkg -i btanks*.deb

Once you launch the game, you can very easily and quickly jump straight into a map. From the home screen, you can select a map and add additional computer-controlled players (or human players) on the right so you have some opponents.

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