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What (And Where) Are The Classic Free Games?
An anonymous reader asks: "I'm flying from the US to Europe in a few weeks and am taking my iBook along for the ride. With a seven hour flight looming, I'm wanting to take some games along to play. But I don't want to download a bunch of freeware that may or may not be junk; I just want the classics. What are the classic free games? I've already downloaded Nethack and am looking into Freeciv. What else is there? I need something that's multiplatform (or at least has a Mac port), something that's stable and has stood the test of time, and something that is more complex and engrossing than a Tetris clone. Thanks!"
SNOOD!
"Bold as Love"
The last time I loaded up nethack on my Mac, I was stuck in front of the computer for about 30 hours straight.
If you can't get through an eight hour flight with that, you've got bigger problems than finding free games...
Nearly every platform has an interpreter for the old Infocom text games. Zork I, II, and III are available for free legally from ActiVision,
and once you have a z-machine interpreter for your Mac, you can use any of the other Infocom games you can find. There are also many (legal) free z-machine games available on the net, and I think that Activision recently sold a CD-ROM with most of the old Infocom collection, including Hitchhiker's Guide, Enchanter, and the others.
Any one of these will keep you busy for the whole flight and taxi ride to your hotel, and you'll probably stay up and keep playing once you get there instead of sleeping off the jet lag. Just remember to bring a pad of paper, pencil, and eraser for drawing maps and working out mazes.
With all of the Sept 11th "security measures" I would recommend that you have your laptop ready to turn on just in case at the airport terminal. Also, they will ask you take your machine out of its case and then they'll pass it through their x-ray machines. Make sure you don't have it stuffed at the bottom of your carry-ons. I don't know how good your battery life is, or what class you will be flying but if you are going in economy make sure you bring at least two batteries. If you are in first or business class, you can always buy their on-board power cords that hook up into the plane (depending on airline). As for games, I would suggest the old simcity, tetris, pinball, etc. You don't want some massively 3d game sucking up your battery power. Also, I don't know what kind of rechargers come with your laptop but be ready for an inevitable bump in line voltage in europe (220v). And, you can save your on-board modem some trouble by buying a line testing kit/adapter. This saved me from frying my modem on a trip to Saudi many years ago (their teleco line voltage is much more than it is here).
I believe the stipulation was "FREE" games. Most of the ROMs used by MAME are copyrighted and are NOT free.