The Open Racing Car Simulator

I have been satisfied with the range of games on my Linux systems for a while, but recently I've gone hunting for new games again.

Although there seems to be no lack of Linux native first person shooters, the number of 3D racing games seems to lag behind a bit (unless Tux Racer fits all your needs). My favourite Windows racing game has always been Need for Speed III, but even though I've been able to run it with Wine to some extent, I wanted to try something more stable. I had heard of Torcs before, but never managed to play it properly (most likely because of a lack of patience). Torcs uses OpenGL and it seems to work fine on my Slackware 12 installation with my (now) older NVidia card, using its proprietary kernel module.

Torcs has a number of racing modes, such as quick race, championship race, endurance race and a practice mode. By default there are 50 cars to choose from, some better looking than others. There are road tracks, dirt tracks and oval tracks to choose from, so one is able to choose a track which best fits the type of race that's about to start.

There are also a lot of different camera views, after all this is a 3D game. One of them is a view from up above, which makes the game look somewhat like the first two of the GTA games. Check out the screenshots that I made of the game and download the game from the Torcs website at SourceForge to give it a try. The game is distributed for Linux, FreeBSD, MacOS X and Windows. Oh, of course this is an open source project, so its free for download and you can also obtain the source code if you're into that kind of thing.