Goo Blimey, It's "Awesome"

MY nine-year-old son bellowed: "This is awesome.. world class!"
I was hooting with laughter. The source of this merriment? A game.

There's nothing unusual in finding the Lawson males playing computer games, but what is unusual is for the boy child to be playing a Windows version and me to be playing a Linux version.. of the same game.

The game in question is World of Goo, and it's brilliant.It's a physics-based platformer type of game in which you progress by manipulating blobs of goo into structures - bridges, towers, odd shapes, that kind of thing.

Now that all sounds nice but it's hardly revolutionary, is it?

No, what makes World of Goo so worth mentioning is the fact that I was playing it on a PC running Linux Mint 6.0, while my son was playing on the family PC which runs - and I apologise for this - Windows Vista.

But wait - because my Linux version was running better than his Windows version!

World of Goo is largely the work of two former Electronic Arts game developers, Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler, who between them form the indie games company 2D Boy. That's them below.
World of Goo is special for several reasons, most obviously for its gloriously wacky graphics, its enthralling gameplay and whimsical/dramatic soundtrack - it's a visual and aural treat this game.But what really makes it special, in my humble opinion, is the mindset that created it.

OK, the developers wanted to create a great-looking game that plays like a dream - and they've achieved that - but they also wanted to take a different commercial tack.

You see, World of Goo is truly cross-platform - it's available on Wiiware for the Nintendo console, for Mac, Windows and several Linux platforms.

It is also totally DRM-free which, apart from being something of a piracy gamble for the developers, means that once you buy it you can install it on as many machines as you like.

It's only $20 so I sincerely hope people won't take advantage of this liberated marketing approach.

For my Linux Mint 6.0 system I used the .DEB package but there's also an RPM version plus a .TGZ package available.

I noticed that on the 2D Boy blog the guys were reporting the following:

It’s only been 2 days since the release of the Linux version and it already accounts for 4.6% of the full downloads from our website. Our thanks to everyone who’s playing the game on Linux and spreading the word. Here are a couple of nifty stats:

* About 12% of Linux downloads are of the .rpm package, 30% are of the .tar.gz package, and 57% are of the .deb package.
* More copies of the game were sold via our website on the day the Linux version released than any other day. This day beat the previous record by 40%. There is a market for Linux games after all :)

I agree, there's a market for Linux games, especially when they're as good as World of Goo.

So do yourselves a favour and support 2D Boy by buying World of Goo; the boy child was right (if a little Pokemon-centric) - it's "awesome".