The game play experience Cedega provided was perfect. The audio was flawless and as silky as it could be, albeit that Quake III's aural experience is really too raw and edgy to classify as silky. The graphics coming off my NVIDIA GeForce MX200 framebuffer were smooth and beautifully textured. The speed was there, too. Quake III ran as fast under Cedega as it did on my long-gone Windows system. I expected some roughness in the experience, but it simply wasn't there.

I couldn't tell the difference between running Quake 3 on Linux and running it on a Windows system; I didn't encounter a single moment where a Linux artifact imposed itself on the game. In short, the gaming experience of Quake III under Cedega was terrific. Let me put it this way: the gameplay was good enough that I missed the deadline for this review because I got so immersed in the game!

Quake III is not the only game in Cedega's bottle. It lets you play many of the newest, most popular games, including, but not limited to:

• Morrowind (see Figure 1)
• Battlefield 1942
• City of Heroes (see Figure 2)
• Diablo II
• EverQuest
• The complete WarCraft series
• Max Payne 2
• Medal of Honor
• Battlefield Vietnam (see Figure 3)
• Star Wars Galaxies

Chances are pretty good that your favorite handful of games, such as Pain Killer, shown in Figure 4, are supported, or will be soon.

Although this was a media preview, so you wouldn't expect the support staff to be responsive, I was surprised when, within hours of downloading the initial beta, I was able to grab an update that resolved problems with Dark Age of Camelot, mouse support in WarCraft III and Grand Theft Auto III, and a quick-save problem in Max Payne 2.

Next: Preventing Problems »