Here are some games that I miss and would like to play on Mint somehow. If you know of any links to instructions or reviews on getting them working, that'd be super. Even if you don't know of ways, you're welcome to commiserate if you feel nostalgia for the older ones.
- Starcraft II - sadly I bought the game and both expansion sets from Blizzard shortly before erasing Windows, I didn't even get to finish part 1 of the 3 single player campaigns that are available after buying both of the expansions.
- Arma 3, the Multiplayer Experience - actually there is a Linux port, but due to being a version or two behind, there are no multiplayer servers I can join I missed the hilarity of "Altis Life RPG" which I mostly played under Arma since I'm not a first-person-shooter fan.
- GameBoy Color emulator - I am an old-school fan of the original Pokemon Red, Blue and Yellow and I had an emulator for Windows years ago that allowed saving games. I still have all the real hardware, but the button cell batteries for saves are dead and I don't want to break the seal on the game cartridges, reducing their value.
- Warcraft II and Starcraft (Original) - I have both CDs purchased back in the day, and I love them so much that I even ripped the Vista license stickers off a few old laptops to create a virtual machine for running them. With a VPN, multiplayer games can still be possible over the Internet, but I couldn't convince any gamer friends go through installing the same setup on their end (I knew Vista was bad for everyday use, but was it really that bad?). Even with one CD key, both games had a "spawn install" mode that allowed installing on a friend's computer. Spawns were multiplayer-only, client only, and I think they could only connect to games hosted by the person with the same CD key. But hey, that's more than you get with a game purchase nowadays.
- SimCity 2000 - I loved this game so much I got it in both PC and Mac versions (for the M68k architecture) I guess this could be run under a virtual machine, but since there is no requirement to have the CD-ROM present, I'd like to find a simpler way. (I have no experience with wine, but it appears to be enough of a learning curve that I have been avoiding it)
- Olive Wars! - This one is only because of nostalgia and my personal quirks about finding certain ideas way too amusing. I have other old games but they are so old that they can be run under DosBox. Olive Wars! is a windows program that came bundled in a suite by a company called Expert, and I expect that both the CD installer program and the game itself will be cranky about running under Wine - not because it is demanding on CPU or graphics, but just because it probably has stupid expectations that a more sophisticated piece of software would be more flexible with.
- Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004. This was a birthday present and it is the metal box retail version. I never even played it because back in 2004 my family was too poor to buy a PC with a sufficiently powerful GPU, but my mom didn't know that when she spent too much money on it. I recently was going through boxes of my stuff in storage and was reminded that I never got to playing it. (read: my life has been very turbulent in the past) So I guess I can't really "miss it" but now that my gaming PC is no longer running Windows, I know I won't be able to check it out easily.