Slashdot Mirror
Friday Means Free Games
Joystiq has two posts up linking to sources of free games. Liberated Games offers up single player experiences, while GameOgre's list of free MMOGs will ensure you can get together with other people on the cheap. From the post: "Liberated Games is an online catalog of games that have been released for free in one way or another. This may be the full game, like Grand Theft Auto. Or it might just be the sourcecode, like Doom. Either way, this is a huge list of games that can, in some way, be had for the grand price of zero dollars and zero cents."
otherwise known as KOL (Kingdom of Loathing)
How Jaded Are You?
This is a great idea, but the Liberated Games list is a bit skimpy. I noticed that a bunch of the games were shareware demos, such as Wolfenstein 3D and such, but I remember downloading hundreds of fun shareware games from BBS'es. Anyone remember William Soleau's games? God, I played Oilcap until my fingers bled...
Also noticably absent are the amazing collection of open source software games, of which my favorite at this time would probably be Freeciv.
By what bizarre logic is Guild Wars "free"? Sure, it doesn't have any monthly fees, but you still have to pay for the boxed game!
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Home of the Underdogs
C:DOS
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22abandonware
Well the writeup says "on the cheap", so I'd guess free as in beer. But then again, it's called "Liberated Games", so I'd guess free as in speech. But then again, it says "for the grand price of zero dollars and zero cents", so I'd guess free as in beer. But then again, it says "released for free in one way or another", so I'd guess it's time to start reaching for the paracetamol.
At least we have the Slashdot editors that do their jobs and fix the writeup to clear up any confusion.
http://www.gameogre.com/
http://www.liberatedgames.org/
The stories don't appear to even have links to the sites they are talking about!
This article and the article on Joystiq it links to need LINKS to the pages themselves!
http://www.gameogre.com/: Free MMOGs
http://www.liberatedgames.com/: Free Single-player Games
Usually, what gets open-sourced is only the core engine. The game data files, which would be required to recreate the game experience, remain under their original license and may not be freely distributed; you'd need to own an original copy of the game and use its files with the newly compiled engine.
Is this some kind of crazy advertising gimmick?
FaitH, mentioned in the article with a screen shot, is only free as a limited version according to the company's website:
http://www.dragonclawstudio.com/faith/upgrade/
Unless you pay, you only appear to get about 5% of the game.
-David
My favorite online RPG is Daimonin. It's a good project; very stable. It's multi-platform, and a new beta will be released soon that fixes all the things I dislike about it. Give it a look; it's bassed on crossfire code, and it's isometric (whatever that means)! :-)
Looks like list auther is not very well versed in PC gaming. A lot of old/mediocre games in the list but not best free or free open sourced games like
wesnoth
Steel Panthers:World At War
Steel Panthers:Main Battle Tank
FreeCiv
Further Overview: Medievia is based on stolen and misattributed Mud source code and is widely reviled by the Mud community as petty thieves. Search Google for the details.
copyright laws, which didn't extend to infinity (and beyond), these games would be public domain, including their source code.
copyright originally, in the industrial age, lasted 14 years. then someone got the idiotic idea of introducing, get ready for it, EXTENSIONS. back then 14 years was almost 1/2 or 1/3 of most life expectancies. that bone-headed move made it possible for low life greedy scumbags to introduce the idea of further extensions (and to top it all off retroactively).
in the age of information, copyright shouldn't last more than 5 years. most products (not including in-house software which is never distributed) sell the most in the first year anyway and it trickles down to nearly a standstill in 5 years.
if copyright holders won't respect actual, real copyright term limits, then frankly, they have no right to expect customers to respect their copyrights.
being the law doesn't make it right. prohibition as an example. when virtually everyone in a society doesn't want it, then it goes against the wishes of the populace, aka the voters. this is a democracy after all.
patents also need to be revised. 17(20) years is just too long these days. it needs to be proportional to the times we live in. these are not devine laws but manmade (for greed no less). patents on software is definitely a no-no. i'm thinking something less than 10 years. the fact is, the western world is choking itself and shooting itself in the foot at the same time over these issues. pissing off the end users and costing honest businesses (what few there are) massive expenses and headaches.
and these are quite favorable changes; it makes the end users happy and therefore the companies happy (the ones that care about customers, the real ones). it would in fact make real innovation something of a possibility again. we've been stagnating quite a bit in the last 75 years or so.
copyright/patents are not natural laws, they are wholly unnatural. the only way that it could work without massively harming the entire situation is to keep it limited in duration and scope. which clearly hasn't been the case for the last 2 centuries or so.
horse and buggy manufacturers seem to come to mind, not sure why.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source