For some reason, my mind recently got onto the track of old video games I miss from back in the day. One of my favourite city builder / real-time strategy games is Settlers II. Unfortunately, the old games in the Settlers series are only available for Windows, on GoG, so I am not interested.

So, looking around these, I somehow stumbled upon Widelands: An open source clone of Settlers II, in development for over 20 years, which has now gone far beyond the original. Downloaded the AppImage to play around with it and I am very impressed. Much of the feel of the original is captured but the interface feels a bit more inline with current idioms (although not fully), the performance and graphics are great, and the content goes much further than the original.

In my list of "open source game clones which surpassed their originals", this now gets added next to other greats such as FreeCiv (originally a Civilization clone which quickly surpassed the original) and Thrive (a Spore clone which is much better at being what the original claimed to be, albeit not yet fully fleshed out).

It is nice to see that good old fashioned open source desktop software is as kick-ass as ever, even though it doesn't get the attention it really should,
...Nights