Continuing the topic of "games that you can easily play while pretending to listen to a Zoom lecture".
The life simulator, from the creator of The Sims, SimCity, and other sim goodness. You start as a cell, then evolve to an animal, then a tribe, then a civilization, and then an interplanetary space empire. Each stage is pretty basic, but the game is famous for its customization: you create your own animals, vehicles, buildings, spaceships, even your own space missions. I've heard that this game was a commercial failure in the West, due to horrible DRM, and too much hype. But here in the Russian-speaking world, the game was hugely popular. We don't care about DRM, because we just pirate everything, and we don't care about hype, because we don't watch E3. Many Ukrainian kids grew up playing this, me being one of them.
Yes, kinda! As I said, this game is more or less just 5 games bundled into one. Creature stage is a survival game, civ stage is a real-time strategy, space stage is an empire builder, and so on. Each of the 5 games is extremely basic (aside from the Space stage), but they interconnect in fun ways, like how an animal from the Creature stage can reappear as an evolved species in the Space stage. Or how you can have multiple save files inside of a single galaxy, and then have 2 Space empires which are allies to each other. Still, at the end of the day, Spore is just 5 mediocre mini-games. It's the worst strategy game I've ever played, it's the worst survival game I've ever played, etc. *I would not say that Spore is fun, but it is kinda interesting, kinda cool, and kinda cute. 7/10*
Spore is not a new game, and it runs decently well inside Wine. There are occasional random crashes and glitches, but Spore is notoriously buggy even on Windows 10. Linux perfectly replicates all of its crashes :D. The one new bug that's introduced if you play it through Wine is that, if the game window loses focus, then the terrain will glitch out for some reason. This actually affects gameplay, and it becomes really hard to navigate the glitchy terrain if your creature doesn't have wings or a jump ability. You can avoid this bug by enabling Wine virtual desktop, and keeping the game's window in there.
