“Looking at the Soldier of Fortune box, I was initially struck
by the number of warning labels visible, each proclaiming such
things as “Violent Subject Matter” and “Animated Blood and Gore”.
And who can forget “Low-Violence Installation Option Included”.
Inside, the CD-case itself was also littered with these warnings;
clearly, this game has some self-esteem issues. Without reading the
manual, I loaded up the software, started the game and was met with
the main menu screen. Yet even more warnings here (I was up to
about nine at this point), including a scrolling text window at the
bottom of the main menu whose message informed me of the game’s
“MA” rating and even how to access the parental controls in an
appropriate menu. The net effect of all these warnings was perhaps
the opposite of their intention; I felt a distinct urge to see what
the heck these people were going on about.”
“Loki, as usual, did a spectacular and totally seamless job
porting Soldier of Fortune to Linux. SOF does require a 3-D
accelerated video card and uses Mesa/OpenGL to support 3-D hardware
acceleration. Loki lists the Voodoo Banshee, Voodoo2, Voodoo3,
G200, G400, RIVA TNT and TNT2, and the GeForce 256 as supported
chip sets. I had no real difficulty getting the software to install
cleanly on a standard VA Linux Systems 6.2.3 load (a Red Hat
6.2-based system) with a Matrox G400, or on my Debian (woody)
system with the XFree4 CVS tree and a GeForce GTS. The footprint of
the install is a bit hefty (about 700MB for the full install, which
is the only option) and comes with both text and graphical install
modes. Loki’s minimums include glibc 2.1, a 2.2.x series kernel and
an OSS-compliant sound card and driver. Obviously, if you want
multiplayer games, you’ll need a network card and either TCP/IP or
IPX support (for LAN games) enabled in your kernel. Joysticks are
supported. Minimum box hardware, according to Loki, is 64MB RAM,
and a Pentium II processor; I had very nice performance on both a
400MHz PII and a 550MHz PIII, each with 128MB system RAM.”
“I’d have to say that I totally dig Soldier of Fortune. It’s
fun. It’s got character. It’s definitely not afraid to get in your
face. Most of the things I found lacking in it also are the
things that make it such a great first-person shooter game. Did I
mention how fun it is? If you’re looking for some middle ground
between Quake and Rainbow Six, this is probably your game.”