Do you run Linux?  Do you like gaming?  Do you mope when your friends invite you to play World of Warcraft?  Gave up years ago on downloading cool trial games because the best thing available on Linux is Wesnoth?

Linux gamers have two great options for running Windows games and they both work great.  (Editor's note:  That's great! --Tank)  One is free but requires you to have a copy of Windows.  The other is under forty bucks and doesn't need Windows.

Crossover Games

Crossover is a project to improve Wine.  Wine stands for "Windows Is Not Emulated."  Wine is nifty, but it tends to fail on the best stuff, like games.  Crossover Games is $39.95 and offers a free trial.  It has definitely-gonna-work support for World of Warcraft, DCOM98, EVE Online, Guild Wars, Half-Life, Spore, and Steam. 

I've had about a 50/50 success rate with games not on the list, but your mileage may vary.  My quad core runs WoW nice and fast using Crossover Games, and the game rarely crashes.

VirtualBox + Windows

If Crossover won't run your game, there's still a solution.  Download Sun's free virtualization software, VirtualBox, and dust off your Windows XP installer.  VirtualBox is free open source software produced by a major software company with a track record for the best freebies.  Use VirtualBox's nice clean GUI to setup an XP machine.  Install XP, then install the VirtualBox "guest extensions" which make it run far better.  Next you'll want to tweak the settings for 3D accelleration, video memory and RAM for best performance.  Then, get on with some gosh darned gaming! 

This is native Windows, running in an app that thinks its a whole computer.  And if there's one thing Windows is great for, it's running Windows games.  Except now you don't have to soil your disk...

Enjoy!