Hanford Lemoore recently wrote about the low sales figures for the indie game Gish. in which the player controls a gelatinous blob of tar, navigating subterranean coridors and traps, dealing with monsters, etc. They actually have a Linux version (as well as Windows and MacOS X versions) and a free demo; the full game only costs $19.95. I don’t buy a lot of computer games, but an inexpensive game with a novel concept, available for Linux , and with a free demo is definitely the way to tempt me.

I had a bit of trouble with the demo that was solved by a tip on their support forum. For Fedora Core 6 Linux, install the freealut package, and invoke the game using the command line:

LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libalut.so.0 ./gish

The demo was a lot of fun, so I’ve purchased the full version.