ltrace is a program that simply runs the specified command until it exits.
It intercepts and records the dynamic library calls which are called by the executed process and the signals which are received by that process.
It can also intercept and print the system calls executed by the program.
Also noteworthy is that you can simply press s key in htop to immediately attach a process and inspect it, which was handy many times for me.
I've been using this simple script on OS X for quite some time now. It works like a charm and is using git for that exact reason, to be able to quickly disable/enable and also keep track of exceptions, changes, etc.
I ran a pet project website back in 2010, userdesktops.org, with the sole aim of collecting all desk shots from the top forums back in the day, posted in the infamous and usually pinned threads, titled "Post your desktop" or "Show off".
I compiled a pile of scripts on top of wget, curl, httrack, ImageMagick and customized a Firefox build to allow for easy scraping from the most common bulletin scripts in use at the time.
As the project's sole aim was pure nostalgia and server hosting and bandwidth were quite expensive back then I quickly put it to rest after no more than an year I think. Now I'm kinda sorry for not leaving at least the scraping to go on for longer, I'm pretty sure the forums queue was cut short of at least a couple hundred potential targets and god knows how many desktops.
Anyways, I've scoured for my old server backups and lo and behold, here are 2362 pure shots of geeky nostalgia:
I'll mention here a blog post of mine written a while back on the subject of Open Source Games entitled "Cool Open Source Games you should contribute to". It lays out a dissemination of issues OS games face and how you could help(touching most of the issues debated in comments here), along with a nice list of projects to get you started.
Also noteworthy is that you can simply press s key in htop to immediately attach a process and inspect it, which was handy many times for me.