Recently I said that we weren't going to port Tidalis to linux, because it's just not a profitable enough game for us, and it's on a super old version of our engine. Well... man if I didn't boot this game up and just fall in love with it all over again. I get to say this, because I wasn't the lead designer on this one -- Lars Bull really did a stellar job with the design of this game (the only Arcen title I wasn't lead designer on).

Anyhow, as you can no doubt guess by the title of this post, the game charmed me into going back and porting it to linux despite my original intent. Also, honestly we wanted to have full linux support for ALL of our library, without unsightly holes here and there.

Here are the release notes. There are actually a few fixes in there, too, which is handy.

New System Requirements

The one big caveat with this release is that the newer version of Unity that we upgraded to has higher system requirements -- in terms of operating system -- than the much older version that Tidalis was on. Notably, on the Microsoft side, Windows 2000 can no longer be used -- you have to have Windows SP2 or higher, now. On the Apple side, you can't use PowerPC computers any longer -- you have to have an Intel-based CPU.

But wait, what if you already bought it and can no longer play it!? Got you covered, of course. :) Version 1.017 is marked in Steam as having a "beta" version that you can opt in to that is named "OldSysReqs." I'm not sure if Steam itself honestly is able to hit the system requirements that Tidalis used to be able to, though...

License Keys No More

Another nice thing about this version is that the license key that was previously required is now optional instead. The game won't ask you for the CD key anymore, and Steam actually no longer even gives you one, since that was only confusing and pointless. But if you have one from the past, you can still use it if you... for some reason want to. ;)