There's no question that gaming on the Android platform has heretofore been relatively underwhelming, but that looks like it's all about to change. It seems that Sony Ericsson -- a company that has yet to even introduce an Android 2.0 device -- is at work on a project to redefine gaming on Google's mobile platform.

Lutris is a new gaming platform for Linux that aims at providing easy game installation, configuration and launching system for games. It is different from other services like PlayOnLinux as it integrates a large number of games from a number of different systems that includes console emulators also.

Syntensity isn’t a single game, but rather a platform that can run all kinds of 3D games. There are already a few games, and anybody can create their own. The main game is a multiplayer first/third person shooter (sort of like Quake 3 Arena), and there is also a simple drawing game (in which multiple people can draw and see what each other are drawing in realtime).

Valve is all too familiar with gaming folks out there. They are the guys behind the awesome STEAM online gaming platform. They were in a bit of controversy recently when they denied all reports of a Linux version of their famous online gaming platform. But once again, Valve is in the news.

Alien Arena, Wormux and Crack Attack and a lot of other free cross-platform games will be found in this comprehensive list. Some games may not work on all operating systems but most of them surely will. There are also games in my list that aren’t true Open Source software, but most of them are and all the games are at least completely free to download and play.

There's always numerous suggestions by different members of the Linux community on how to encourage mainstream commerical game developers to make games for the platform. Andrew Flenn asked EA why they ignore Linux as a platform.

I’m tired of people who are afraid to switch to Linux because of its so called “lack of games, or at least good ones.” What I think is they just want the games they like ported to Linux instead of trying new ones. Or maybe it’s because the games are free and that is already a sign the game is bad, but I’m beginning to think quite the opposite.

There are many software available that we can purchase and use to get our job done. But what do you think about those softwares that are cross-platform and available for free as well. In simple words, Cross-platform can be defined as any software that can work on more than one operating system and specially are available for Windows, Mac and Linux environment.

As we go about “realizing” our New Year’s resolutions were maybe just a bit too stringent, I’m going review the top five games in Linux. Once the great downfall of the platform, gaming can now only be considered a strength, in the hopes you take up this guilty pleasure and wait for 2010 before you give up on gaming.