Review: SuperGamerVL
Written by Steve Lake
Posted on: 08.03.2007 at 01:53pm
Section: Gaming

SuperGamerVL (aka SuperGamer3) is the next generation in Linux gaming live dvd's that aims to bring the fun of Linux gaming to a PC near you and help Linux geeks everywhere demonstrate to their friends that Linux really is fun and can be used for gaming. And they can do all this without installing Linux. Just boot the live dvd, answer a few questions and you're ready to go. But what's so special about this new version of the live gaming DVD from the guys who brought you the original SuperGamer dvd's? Well, the first big change is the distribution it's built on. SuperGamerVL is built on Vector Linux Standard (hence the VL in the name) and is essentially just a remastered Vector Linux live cd with lots of enhancements, the proprietary Nvidia or ATI 3D graphical drivers and a boatload of Linux compatible games put together in a way that makes Linux gaming easy. Or at least as easy as can be done with a live dvd. The original two versions of SuperGamer were based on PcLinuxOS 0.9.1 and received rave reviews on the first version, but not so great reviews on the second. Then by popular demand the DVD moved to Vector Linux and may move again as the developers are considering another version based on SimplyMEPIS. With that said, let's look at what this new DVD offers and what you might benefit from it should you decide to take it for a spin. (no pun intended of course)

The initial bootup of the live DVD seemed fairly routine, and while it took about two to three minutes to load up, counting a brief stop to tell Xorg how to set the screen size, it loaded into what is surprisingly a fully working desktop environment (Vector Linux 5.8 standard uses the latest version of XFCE for its desktop environment) complete with a web browser (firefox), a simple office suite, multimedia tools and programs (xine, xmms, etc), as well as a number of tools to make your desktop experience quite enjoyable. Think of it as getting two things in one. A live cd for troubleshooting and productivity, and a Linux gaming DVD to make your day fun.

One thing to be aware of with this DVD though is that not all the games available to you are setup as icons on the desktop. If you go into the XFCE menu, you'll find that there's another 7 more games under the "games" section you can choose from. The list of games are as follows based on their type. (aka open source vs proprietary)

Open Source:
BzFlag
Chromium B.S.U.
GL-117
Glaxium
NeverBall
NeverPutt
Planet Penguin Racer (yeah, this is really here!)
Drop Team
Nexuiz
Sauerbraten
Torcs
True Combat Elite (an open source, stand alone mod for Enemy Territory)

Proprietary:
America's Army (full)
Doom 3 (demo)
Enemy Territory (full)
Postal 2 (demo)
Quake 4 (demo)
Soldier of Fortune (demo)
Unreal Tournament (demo)

So as you can see, the list of available games is quite long and there's at least one kind of game for every person. There are also two ways to play these games. You can either play them from the live dvd, or you can actually install SuperGamerVL right to your hard drive and play it from there! Honestly, this is the first time I've seen something like this. I thought it was so neat that I decided to give it a try. And to say I liked the installed version is an understatement. But since I did test both of them, the live dvd and the installed version (you'll need 7.9gigs of freespace on your drive to install from the live dvd), I'll also be covering how each one did in my test system because there are some differences in performance and other things between the installed SuperGamer distribution and the live dvd. So first, let's look at the Open Source Games and see how they faired in the two environments.

Game

 Installed System Live DVD
BzFlag Good performance overall, but tended to lock up the entire system at random. Lockup and lag problems everywhere.
Chromium B.S.U. Very good stability, great gameplay, and not a single problem. Well, unless you count how bad I suck at the game. ;) Ditto.
GL-117 Kinda laggy, but as long as you're in freeflight it's ok. But when you get into combat, it lags. Approximately the same, but the lag is a bit more noticeable.
Glaxium Gameplay was very smooth, no lag, no bugs, glitches, etc. Ditto.
NeverBall Very smooth gameplay. Great sound. Great graphics. No glitches whatsoever. Ditto.
NeverPutt Couple of minor sound issues. Mostly scratchiness in the sound. Gameplay was ok though. Ditto.
Planet Penguin Racer Gameplay was good, graphics was good, sound was good. No lag anywhere. Ditto.
Drop Team Some texturing issues and gameplay was a bit jumpy. Otherwise it played well. Ditto.
Nexuiz Crashed Xorg several times and had some rather unpleasant rendering and lag issues. Ditto. Also had really bad mouse control problems. Couldn't get the options to change either.
Sauerbraten Smooth gameplay, quick load times, no real issues found in the practice area. But when you load single player mode, it locks up the system. Ditto.
Torcs Gameplay was choppy and controls were inconsistent. Ditto.
True Combat Elite Sound was good, but the weapons had some aiming problems. There was also a few odd control problems as well. Menus also had some weird issues. Ditto. Also had no sound, some control problems.

That's the general overview of how the Open Source games did on SuperGamerVL. Now let's look at how the proprietary games included in the DVD did.

Game

 Installed System Live DVD
America's Army No lag or gamplay issues that I could find. Ditto.
Doom 3 Gameplay was incredible, however it lagged a bit, but played decent overall. Load times weren't that bad. Graphics felt a bit pasticy, but that could be due to the Nvidia driver. Relatively the same, but had a bit more lag than the installed version, but still very playable.
Enemy Territory Gameplay overall was very stable and no noticeable lag. Sound worked great. Ditto. However had problems with sound. Couldn't get sound to work at all.
Postal 2 Good gameplay, somewhat questionable graphics, slight lag, but otherwise ok. Kind of the same, but has a bit more lag.
Quake 4 Very laggy, but playable. Cinematic played ok, but gagged for periods of time in several places. WAY, WAY too laggy to do anything with. Game would get stuck on a single frame for several minutes before moving onto the next one in the cinematic. Gameplay was near impossible.
Soldier of Fortune No real issues found. No real issues found.
Unreal Tournament Unplayable. Kept crashing to the desktop. A little bit of lag, but overall it played like you'd expect it to. It did have a couple cases of random crashes to the desktop.

Well, that's how the proprietary games faired overall. The desktop system itself wasn't bad, but XFCE seemed a bit flaky in the installed version. I'm not sure why, but it just didn't feel like it was completely stable. It kept acting weird as though it wanted to crash at some point. I didn't however have that problem with the live dvd, so I'm not sure why that was. Now I've tested the regular Vector Linux Standard Edition which this is based off of and the regular version doesn't have that flaky feel. In fact, the regular version felt miles more stable than this. It's still decently stable, but not stable enough for my taste. Too many weird, unexplained things went on to call it completely stable. I also saw problems with caching on the installed version that wasn't there on the live dvd. One thing that stood out was the caching of fonts. It's not THAT big a deal, but it did kind of bug me since it works fine on the live dvd version. The other was that the firewall didn't quite start right. On the live dvd it worked fine, but not on the installed version.

Overall SuperGamerVL isn't a bad live dvd distribution or even an installed gaming distribution, but I feel as though the developers could have worked a slightly longer to put a bit more polish on it before releasing it. Especially because of some of the issues I mentioned above. Not everything needs fixing in this distribution, but there are a few really little pesky problems that should have been addressed before release. But I'm sure most of those will get addressed in the coming months. The downside is that if you've already downloaded the DVD, you'll need to do it again when the updated version comes out.

To get the current Live DVD, you'll need to either download the 4.3gb iso file via bittorrent and burn it yourself, or talk a friend into doing it for you. You can also get copies from On-Disk.com who provide a lot of great linux distros on cd for you, shipped directly to your home.