For the first time ever, Super Gamer has released a full sized dual layer dvd version of their much loved Linux gaming distro.  So instead of just 4.7 gigs worth of games, you get the full 8.5gb of gaming madness!  But despite this new bonus feature, is Supreme Super Gamer worth having?  Let's see.

Getting Started

The first thing you'll need to do to get a copy of Supreme Super Gamer is to go up to the Supreme Super Gamer download page and grab the torrent for Supreme Super Gamer.  (Oh, alright.  I'll be nice and post it here for you.  )

Because of its size, you'll need to download the entire dvd via bittorrent.  If that's not possible for you, then they have an alternative option, allowing you to buy a copy of the gaming disk directly from On-Disk, a supplier of low cost Linux disks.  If you choose to download it from bittorrent, you'll need the better part of a day, maybe 2 to get the entire disk.  (maybe even more depending on your connection)  

After burning it to disk (you'll need a dual layer burner and a dual layer dvdr disk to do this), just pop it into your dvd drive, and tell your PC to boot the disk.  It'll take about 30 seconds or so to get to the initial startup screen where you'll be asked what your standard resolution is.  Pick the one that's best for you, and then select OK.

Next, pick your video driver.  My test machine was my laptop, since my regular test machine can't run this disk. (too old I guess)  So in my case I was presented with the ATI driver selection menu.  I'm not totally certain how many brands of video card are supported in Supreme Super Gamer, but I know that Nvidia and ATI are for certain.

When you're presented with the driver selection window, you're given three choices:  The proprietary FGLRX ATI driver, the Radeon open source Radeon driver, and the generic ATI open source driver.  The choice is yours which you want to pick, but be advised that your experiences will vary depending on your choice.

For grins and giggles I chose the proprietary ATI driver.  (yeah, shoot me because I did a "naughty" and went proprietary.  lol. )  As the disk is installing the driver, you might get a couple prompts to select things for the driver to use or interact with, so be sure to read and know what it's asking.  But from what I saw, that shouldn't be too hard to figure out, even for a complete beginner.  

In most cases, when in doubt, you should be able to just hit enter and accept the default choice, since it appears that SSG does a pretty good job of choosing the right one for you already.  You might also have to agree to some licenses.  You can't continue unless you do, but you don't necessarily have to read them.  Just hit enter to exit out of them and/or agree to them to keep going.

The whole process of licenses, drivers, and whatnot will take you about 2-5 minutes, depending on how fast your machine is, and how quickly you choose to continue.  But the fastest I've ever gotten through was about 2 minutes.  After that the disk completes its boot and puts you up onto a volcano dragon themed desktop with a launcher bar at the bottom.

That bar has all your games on it, rather than on the desktop.  You still have the standard XFCE toolbar at the top that you can do things with, but the rest of what you need is at the bottom.  Now, let's look at the system itself and see how it handles.

Taking the dragon for a spin

Just for reference, my test system in this case is my laptop, which has a dual core Athlon 64 X2 TK-57(1.90GHz), a 15.4" Wide XGA screen, 2 GB of DDR2 667, a Super Multi DVD+R drive, and an ATI Radeon X1200 IGP.

Supreme Super Gamer is built on XFCE 4.4.1, Xorg 7.4, Kernel 2.6.30 and, interestingly enough, 3 different FOSS licenses.  Namely the BSDL, LGPL, and GPL.  Another advantage of the design of Supreme Super Gamer is the fact that it's also a fully working Slackware based desktop OS as well.  So if you want to install this distribution to your hard drive, you can.    You can even install this to a usb pen drive, although you'll need an appropriately sized drive or flash card (10gb or larger.  8gb is just a hair too small).

As for the list of applications included, it's got a pretty standard compliment of programs, including K3b, Gimp, Mplayer, Xine, XMMS (so you can jam to your tunes while gaming), Limewire (yes, you can pirate too while gaming.  Although you wouldn't really do that, now would you? ), Xchat, Firefox, Open Office (yes, OO is here too!) and many more.

It's also got good wireless support (saw my Atheros card immediately and got it working without any fuss at all!), and has some pretty darned good response speed for a LiveDVD.  Of course, by now you're likely chomping at the bit asking, "So what about the games?"  Well, I'm getting to that.  So have patience young padawan.    

Anyhow, as I said before, the system is setup such that you can use this as a desktop OS too if you should desire so.  Software installation might be a tad tricky, as I didn't see any immediately obvious software package managers, but I'm pretty sure one is there, even if I didn't find it.  Now, since you're so anxious, let's move onto the gaming side of things.  

Getting your game on

In total, Supergamer has 33 games ready for you to use.  Here's a list of what's available.  Note, demos are marked accordingly.  But if you have the full game, you can simply uninstall the demo, install the live game with the Linux client, and play to your heart's content.  

However, if you do, you'll need to remaster the DVD so that the changes stick.  There's just one drawback to that.  If you do remaster with completely full games, instead of a bunch of demos, it'll exceed the size of the dual layer dvd and you'll then need to spread out into a USB stick, likely 16gb in size or larger, depending on how much space the files for each of the games takes.  So be aware of that if you do choose to remaster the dvd and swap out any of the demos for full versions.

Anywho, on to the list.

Included Games:
ET Quake Wars (Demo)
Doom 3 (Demo)
Prey (Demo)
Unreal Tornament 2004 (Demo)
Quake 4 (Demo)
Savage 2
Postal 2 (Demo)
Enemy Territory
Penumbra Black Plague
Sauerbraten (aka Cube 2)
Urban Terror
Soldier of Fortune (Demo)
Torcs
Tremulous
Alien Arena
True Combat
America's Army
Nexuiz
Open Arena
Plane Shift
Drop Team
Frets on Fire
Chromium B.S.U.
Mad Bomber
X-Moto
Bzflag
MegaMario
Glaxium
GL-117
NeverBall
NeverPutt
SuperTux
PPRacer

Quite a list, eh?  It just goes to show you that the name "Supreme Super Gamer" isn't a boondoggle.  They've made sure you've got enough games to keep you busy for months, or even longer.  Guaranteed you won't be running out of gaming fun anytime soon.  

Now, given how many games are on this disk, 33 in total, it would be a bit superfluous to actually attempt to review the performance of ALL of them, and you likely don't have *THAT* much patience, so I decided to cover just a few key ones to see how they handled, using them as representatives of the other games in the process.

Planet Penguin Racer was my first choice.  It ran, but crashed when trying to enter any events or practice runs.  SuperTux played flawlessly.  Not a hickup or a glitch anywhere.  NeverBall worked flawlessly as well and never once showed an ounce of lag at all.  GL-117 ran pretty good on my machine, besides having known lag issues.  (it bawks badly on my XP-3000 machine, but ran flawlessly here)

Glaxium ran perfectly as well.  So of the first six games, only Planet Penguin Racer was a wash.  Another I tried was Chromium B.S.U, a game that plays a lot like the old RaidenX games.  It not only ran so well and was so much fun (I've never actually come across this game before) that I almost got a little too caught up in it.  

Next I took Open Arena, Nexuiz, and Alien Arena for a spin.  Open Arena played beautifully, Nexuiz repeatedly coughed up its guts, resulting in a full restart (It completely corrupted the video), and Alien Arena had some really wicked lag issues.  Then again, given that this is Alien Arena, that's not all that big a surprise.  It's had some performance issues for a while.

ET, Sauerbratten, Savage 2 and UT2k4 also played well.  Doom and Quake 4 had performance issues however that made them unplayable.  Otherwise, of the test set, they all played reasonably well.  I suspect that with a slightly faster machine, the ones that had performance issues would play better.  Otherwise though, it really was a good experience overall.

Conclusion

So what's my conclusion?  It's good.  Supreme Super Gamer does a bangup job of providing a good quality gaming experience on Linux, and is definitely worth checking out.  On a slight side note, SSG is one of two releases from the Super Gamer crew of late.  The second is Super Gamer 4, the 4th iteration of the Super Gamer series.  I won't be reviewing it, because I couldn't get the dvd to boot on my system, but you're welcome to try it out if you like.