Intel NUC 13 Pro Mini PC Running Linux: Gaming

Retrocycles

In Retrocycles (also known as Armagetron Advanced), you ride a bizarre vehicle that can never stop and leaves a deadly trail behind. In the most basic game mode, you can only make sudden right angle turns and are trapped with others in an inescapable arena. The last survivor wins. It’s essentially a remake of Tron, a coin-operated arcade video game manufactured and distributed by Bally Midway in the early 1980s. Retrocycles started development way back in 2004 but it’s still under active development.

Retrocycles has souped up graphics and gameplay. There’s offline single player mode, splitscreen multiplayer for up to 34 players, and online multiplayer for 16+ players per server. With four builtin game modes, there’s plenty of variety. And like SuperTuxKart, it’s open source too!

System requirements for Retrocycles are low. Any OpenGL 1.2 capable card should be sufficient. The NUC didn’t even have to get out of first gear. FPS rates are so high we didn’t have any monitors that could reach the figures seen.

Having a game running with say over 350 FPS on a monitor only capable of displaying 144 FPS is just wasting electricity. Given the current high price of electricity, this is hardly thrifty. Step forward, libstrangle, a really useful utility which offers a convenient way to limit a game’s FPS. It works well, and is very useful when playing Retrocycles on the NUC.

Next page: Page 3 – Team Fortress 2 / DOTA 2 / Summary

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – SuperTuxKart
Page 2 – Retrocycles
Page 3 – Team Fortress 2 / DOTA 2 / Summary

Complete list of articles in this series: