As many of you will know, I have been playing Enemy Territory for a few weeks now, and thoroughly enjoying it. So much so, that I decided I wanted a copy of Return to Castle Wolfenstein, the single-player game upon which it is based. Here starts the fun.
The Linux installation instructions advise that there are 2 type of RtCW – the ’standard’ edition and the ‘Game of the Year (GOTY)’ edition. These differ in 1 major way – the ‘normal’ edition requires that you install it on a Windows machine, download a hefty binary, and then copy a set of files from the Windows machine to my Linux box. Not impossible, but not fun either. The GOTY edition, however, just requires you to copy across the .pk3 files, and download a ~10MB binary.
However, the GOTY edition does not appear to have been marketted in the UK – we have the ‘Extended’ and ‘Special’ editions. But which of these is the same kind of file format as the GOTY edition, I hear you cry. Exactly!
I emailed Activision via their website, asking this exact question. They then emailed to tell me that UK questions should be directed to Activision UK. They didn’t bother to simply forward my mail, or even (shock horror) send a quick internal message to find out. No. They emailed me to tell me to email their other branch, and closed the ticket. Activision UK simply said that they didn’t support Linux. I emailed back saying that this was not really a Linux question, but rather a question about the marketting of their products. I have had no reply.
At the weekend I bought a copy of the ‘Extended Edition’ from a local PC shop (thus providing Activision and id Software with a bit of income) without knowing the answer. I now know the answer 
The Extended Edition of RtCW follows the same format as the ‘GOTY’ edition, and thus you can perform a Linux only install using the relevant GOTY binary, which is available to download from a few places – I got mine from 3dgamers.net IIRC.
A quick footnote should go here to say that this game is excellent. I mean really, really good. The levels are short enough to keep you really addicted, and the enemys and puzzles get just a little harder each time. I didn’t really like any of the zombie stuff, but am very much looking forward to a couple of the more stealthy levels, which I should hit by the weekend Installing on Linux is a doddle, and it runs perfectly.
mrBen
