Ubuntu offers games, not only the educational ones, but also the purely fun and amusing ones like these aircraft shooting genre. You will find both 2D and 3D ones, Astro Menace and Chromium BSU, as examples beside the others. All of these games are libre software licensed and available on Ubuntu repository. This article offers short descriptions and instructions to install them. Let's see them all and play!
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Astro Menace
A beautiful, 3D space ship adventure battle game. You can customize your ship, buy/sell weapons, defeat all enemies and clear all levels. You can upgrade your ship to the better ones over the time!
Chromium BSU
(Not to be confused with Chromium Browser)
Love arcade? Chromium BSU is for you. It's a true arcade style modern aircraft shooting with health point (HP), dropped items, and of course a lot of enemies. Your ship won't be destroyed just by crashing one or two enemies as you have HP but when your HP is empty it destroyed. You play with mouse alone to move the aircraft and shoot the enemies level by level.
Endless Sky
Adventuring, trading and battling space ship game with a lot of stories. In short, press M to view map and select a destination, J to jump, N to select nearby space ship, and T to talk to that ship aside from TAB to fire. It is a complex game and you are suggested to read the how to play first.
KOBO DELUXE
An old-school arcade space shooting with map, front-rear fires, and a lot of space mazes and enemies to defeat. It offers 5 lives with no HP, so when you bump an enemy your ship will be destroyed (unlike Chromium BSU). To play, hold Ctrl by quickly repeatedly pressing arrow keys.
Kraptor
This game is made in Argentina and proudly created with free/libre game making tool called Allegro. It is a classic, arcade- or SEGA-styled aircraft shooting game with HP and weapon buying/selling features. The story begins in the future where world war happens and our objectives are to defeat the imperial by piloting battle aircrafts. Use mouse to move and shoot, while Z and X and C keys as your friends. Bu default you carry a gattling gun, but you can buy bomb and missiles as additions. Be careful, as you lose when your HP is empty and your weapons are not unlimited.
M.A.R.S.
Ridiculous, that is this unique space shooting game. You will move a spaceship ruled by gravity to destroy enemy spaceships or a second player's. You are offered with various game mode including deathmatch. Use keyboard arrow keys to move (except Down) and Ctrl to shoot but be careful not to crash a planet. You are suggested to play the tutorial first, reduce game speed to minimum, and change the control keys to your convenience before playing the real matches otherwise you might find it difficult ("ridiculous") to play.
Open Invaders
This game will remind you to the golden era of SEGA and Nintendo consoles! This is a classical, retro game to shoot all enemies with our space ship. Use keyboard arrow keys to move and Shift to shoot, P to pause and Q to quit. Thanks to its simple gameplay, your kids may love to play it too! Defeat all enemies and unlock the locked items. Lastly, this is also developed with Allegro like Kraptor.
Powermanga
It is a classic, for kids-looking spaceship shooting game. You are equipped with HP and score bar to the top and weapon choices to the right. It just plays, no preferences whatsoever, with keyboard arrow keys for movements (no mouse), Space to shoot, and Ctrl to enable a highlighted weapon. There are gems and your task is to grab as many as you can to power up your ship. Uniquely, you'll find it's very interesting to see a casual game with great dedication to Free Software Community under its "Order" menu. Lastly, despite its name this game contains none of nor related to Japanese comics at all.
Val and Rick
Lastly in this list, one more space adventure shoot them up game with interesting gameplay and weapons. Hold Ctrl and use arrow keys to move to destroy all space enemies by avoiding every single enemy's fire.
How To Install
Ubuntu comes without any of mentioned games. To play one, you should install it. Press Enter after typing a command line below to install each game and change the name with the game name you want to install.
$ sudo apt-get install chromium-bsu
Change chromium-bsu above with either one of these:
- astromenace
- marsshooter
- kobodeluxe
- kraptor
- open-invaders
- powermanga
- val-and-rick
Further Information
Libre Game Wiki -- the home of all FLOSS games.
Allegro - the game programming library which created some games above.
This article is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.