We are starting a new service at BoilingSteam, in collaboration with the talented porter ptitSeb, well known in the OpenPandora and Odroid communities! While you probably have a great amount of commercial software available (see our recommended games list!), there’s also a good amount of FOSS or Freeware games out there. You may have some of them in your favorite distribution, but you may sometimes face the following issues:

• It’s outdated (not the latest version of the game)
• It’s not compiled with any kind of optimization (for compatibility reasons)
• It’s just not available!

The solution is often to go and grab the sources, compile them yourself, and hope for the best. Now we bring you another option, with ptitSeb’s packages, featuring:

• Mojo Setup for a user-friendly installation (and uninstallation) process
• Compiled for amd64 architecture (no 32 bits)
• Including necessary libraries to make it work without the need of multiple distro-specific dependencies.

Our first package is Hydra Castle Labyrinth by E.Hashimoto, also known as Buster in the dev gaming world. Hydra Castle Labyrinth (original title: 迷宮城ハイドラ) is a metroidvania kind of game with 8 bits graphics. You just need to get the installer here, make it executable (chmod +x in a terminal, or through the properties of your favorite windows manager), and there you go.

After installation you can check for the shortcut in the Games/ category of your distro’s menu, and it should be right there for you to launch. The game will start in full screen, and can be played either with the keyboard or with a X360 pad. You can change the in-game language in the options, between English and Japanese.

This package has been tested on Debian, Linux Mint and Solus without issues.

This is just the beginning and we hope to bring more packages like that on a regular basis. Let us know what you think!