Four more great games from the Raspberry Pi Store!

Over the past few months, I have released many articles about the Raspberry Pi. This can be quite time consuming, especially when things don’t always go well — the nature of this job is that you can run into problems while developing tutorials.

It’s times like these that I lean towards video games, and recently I’ve found that there are more and more games available for the Raspberry Pi.

If you thought Raspberry Pi gaming was limited to setting up emulators with RetroPie or watch other players on YouTube (perhaps with a RaspBMC media center solution) and then brace yourself for a surprise.

While you won’t find Halo on the Raspberry Pi, you will certainly find some interesting gaming alternatives.

Raspberry Pi Games

Perhaps unsurprisingly, games on the Raspberry Pi are booming, with more and more games hitting the Store each week these days.

Leading the way was a selection of polished games spanning a variety of genres. Previously, we looked at FreeCiv, the Raspberry Pi version of Minecraft, OpenTTD, and Little Crane, capable of creating four excellent examples of games for this small computer.

While the Pi Store lists more independently created games, there are four other top titles — including an excellent FPS — that you shouldn’t miss if you want a truly rich Raspberry Pi gaming experience.

Iridium Sunrise

Four more great games from the Raspberry Pi Store! muo rpigames2 iridium

Space combat games are very rare on existing platforms, but Iridium Rising provides the Raspberry Pi with real-time multiplayer battles in the skies for free. Developed by a team working in their spare time, this game is in constant development, but despite the occasional bugs, it’s definitely worth installing.

Becoming Iridium Rising, at the center of the battle for supremacy between the Eltan and Xilari space races, can be played against friends, other players and other players, as well as with AI, and showcases impressive 3D graphics optimized for Raspberry Pi.

Abandoned rural adventure

Four more great games from the Raspberry Pi Store! muo rpigames2 country house

If you ever fiddled with your keyboard for hours in the 1980s while typing code for a PC game on your 8-bit home computer from a magazine, chances are you were trying to program a text adventure.

These games—essentially role-playing games in which the computer plays the role of the game master—were extremely popular at a time when graphics couldn’t quite cut the mustard. However, with the passage of time and the advent of point-and-click graphic adventure, text adventures soon fell into a specialized niche.

The pioneering spirit of home computing in the 1970s and 1980s is evoked by the Raspberry Pi (see my interview with the device’s lead designer Eben Upton to see why), so it makes sense to find a text game in the Pi Store. That The Abandoned Farmhouse Adventure is no longer the only text adventure shows why this great genre is well represented in this title.

open arena

Four more great games from the Raspberry Pi Store! muo rpigames2 arena

While the text adventure might be considered a classic computing genre, FPS is without a doubt a genre in the modern era of gaming (even though it’s been around for over 20 years!).

A lot of great games have come out over the years, from Doom to Half Life 2, Bioshock and Halo. The Quake series has been particularly popular, and Open Arena is a free software clone of the online multiplayer release of Quake III Arena ported to the Raspberry Pi.

While the multiplayer internet option with this version is unfortunately unusable, the game still supports LAN gaming and the ability to connect to a local game server.

Apart from this downside, Open Arena is a must-have title for any Raspberry Pi gamer.

powder

Four more great games from the Raspberry Pi Store! muo rpigames2 powder

Coming to life in the Gameboy Advance, Powder is a classic top-down crawler robot that fights hordes of monsters with nothing but its wits, weapons, and magic.

Tactical thinking is important when it comes to attack and defense, as well as quick thinking — dungeons are randomly generated and death is permanent, so there are no second chances here!

Weapons and armor can be equipped, spells can be used to defeat enemies, and it’s all like the retro dungeon games of yesteryear. Hey retro games without an emulator — sounds good, doesn’t it?

Raspberry Pi: A sweet new market?

The titles featured here have been selected based on quality and playability. They are notable in that they all try different game genres and are available on the Raspberry Pi store.

Four more great games from the Raspberry Pi Store! muo rpigames2 pistore

However, more games have been added to the Pi Store in recent weeks — not all of which are free (although they are competitively priced). Could it be that the Pi is home to a whole new generation of game developers inspired by the usability of the computer and the provision of development tools?