I preordered Savage and was able to join their beta due to it. The game is actually rather fun and even at that early beta stage the game has top notch linux support. I am happy to finally see a commercial game development company actually supporting linux properly.
Even if the game is still beta is it running extremly stable for me under Linux, haven’t had a crash yet. Experienced one bad bug yesterday, but I discovered that it is shared between Win and Lin versions of the game and is something the developers are working on.

One thing that made a really good impression on me was the fact that they had a great patch system also on the linux version. When I start the binary it checks if a new patch is out and if it is then it downloads and installs it. No manuall intervention needed.

The combination of real-time strategy and first-person-shooter is also very interesting. I have to admit I was a bit sceptical at first, but I think it works out very well. I don’t know how fun it is to play in commander or real-time strategy mode yet, considering that your subjects are rather autonomous (other players) and I got the feeling that it wasn’t perfectly balanced out yet in terms of how to play, but I think the remaining beta testing and even post release patches will probably iron this out.

Been discussing a lot with my friends here in Norway the importance of games for the adoption of Linux as a desktop solution and the impact of things like Transgaming. Personally I don’t see Transgaming as such a problem as some people do, I mean yes of course I prefer ‘native’ versions if nothing else to help promote the development of gaming related functionality and libs under GNU/Linux. But as long as transgaming can become good enough to support 95% of new games out of the box then I think they will be a force for good. Some people also bring up OS/2 and its windows compatability as an example of how these things can go bad, but I think the problem with OS/2 wasn’t its windows compatability, but ineptitude of IBM of getting it distributed and gaining mindshare. When you don’t even bundle it with your own computers and also through promotion make create an image that the best quality of the system is its ability to emulate windows then you can’t do anything but lose.