The other day a guy I’ve regularly helped out with linux issues read my post on the whole Wine/WineX/Cedega thing and offered me access to his TransGaming account as thanks. It’s a year subscription so hell if I’m gonna turn that down. I’ve since spent the better part of this week installing, configuring, testing, fixing code, reconfiguring, uninstalling, reinstalling and I still haven’t gotten a single game to run. Granted I don’t have any of the latest and greatest games that undoubtedly TransGaming is putting all of their efforts into supporting, but I find it a little odd that NOTHING will run. Every time I install a game i get the same wine: Unhandled exception, starting debugger... error. Everything is working fine hardware wise. Installers with 3D content work flawlessly, but the games refuse to run. I can’t seem to find generalized documentation or howtos amidst of the mountains of World of Warcraft shite so if anyone has Cedega 4.4.3 with or without Point2Play 2.0.3 running games on Slackware 10.2, let me know. At least I know the free Wine will play fallout 1/2 and most other games just fine…

My take on the matter is echoed almost perfectly by threads on TransGaming’s own forum. TransGaming hyped WineX 4.0 as being the breakthrough in seamless windows gaming on linux that it’s clearly not. They only support the games in the media spotlight and as soon as they’re not the latest and greatest they drop them completely whether they’re working 100% or not. It’s pretty clear their only intention is to support the latest games in order to seduce more would-be linux converts into paying for Cedega with wildly exaggerated hype only to drop them as soon as their game of choice isn’t generating revenue. I’m really disappointed in Cedega, but at least I got to try it for free which is a lot more than most people can say. I’ll hold onto the account until Cedega 5.0 is released in about two week. If that flops and doesn’t work with a much wider range of games, TransGaming is going to see a huge decline in profits.