Jets 'n' Guns Enters Beta On Linux

A week ago we shared that Linux Game Publishing, the company that has ported games to Linux such as Cold War and X2: The Threat, was bringing Jets 'n' Guns to Linux. Just a week later this 2D side-scrolling arcade game is now being distributed to LGP's closed testing community. We have our hands on the first beta of Jets 'n' Guns for Linux and in this article are a few screenshots.

As would be expected, Jets 'n' Guns ships with LGP's latest Linux game installer that is derived from the much-popular Loki Installer.

Back in June we broke the news that LGP was introducing Linux game copy protection for their future titles. This Internet-based DRM protection had enraged many users, but Linux Game Publishing felt it was a necessity with very high rates of pirating of their ported Linux games. This protection scheme was first integrated into Bandits and X3: Reunion -- both of which are still in LGP's closed beta program. Jets 'n' Guns has adopted this piracy-prevention software.

For being the first beta, Jets 'n' Guns is running quite well on Linux. In fact, there was only a single bug mentioned by LGP's CEO, Michael Simms, thus far. During our evaluation this game was running fine on Ubuntu 8.04. The version of Jets 'n' Guns that is reported is 1.222 gold.

Linux Game Publishing is hoping to ship Jets 'n' Guns starting December 1, 2008. Hopefully they are able to meet this deadline, but all of their recent Linux games have experienced delays to varying extents.