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101 Free PC Games
"Computer Gaming World" may now be "Games for Windows: The Official Magazine", but they haven't forgotten the little guys. Straight from the new issue, 1up is hosting an impressive list of 101 freebie PC games. Every genre and topic you can think of is covered by the exhaustive exploration of 'free'. From the article: "We've tracked down another 101 absolutely, positively, no-strings-attached free games that are actually worth playing, grouped them into handy categories, and put most of 'em up on FileFront.com. There's something here for everyone, from RPGs to real-time strategy to Asteroids Flash games, though we have to confess up front: There are actually more than 101 free games here. So no complaining that you're not getting your money's worth." My favorites include Ninja Loves Pirate , Tripline , Iris (HL2 Mod), Super Mario: Blue Twilight DX , and Star Control II .
Slashdotted before the first post. Tough luck. Free games post on slashdot...who would have figured?
I've always been a fan of conquest myself.
You'll have that sometimes...
I think calling mods to a game, free games, is a bit of a stretch. They're only free if you already own the original game. Hell, the main reason I bought half life 2 was anticipation of mods for it. And the ONLY reason I bought UT2004 was for mods. (Killing Floor sold that game for me) I'll still check the list out when I get home though.
But how many of them run on linux?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
(See earlier Slashdot story.)
Yeah, I know Vista will let you play them, but not easily if you want to have parental controls on.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
The game I've been spending too much time on recently is Battle For Wesnoth which is an open-source game that runs on Linux, OSX and Windows. Not surprisingly, it's on this list...
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
At first glance, the article title registered as a spam email or text ad in my brain. Took a moment for it to sink in that it was an actual article. Anyone else have that reaction?
tremulous > all
I wonder if Wulfram II is on that list? its freeware
WulframII - Free Online Mutiplayer 3D Tank Shooting Game
you misspelled http://tremulous.net/
A mouse is a device used to point to the xterm you want to type in
I enjoyed ET (Not as much as RtCW multiplayer itself) but its getting a bit long in the tooth these days.
Check out the ultimate Guitar Hero clone, Frets on Fire!
There are some important free games that they neglected to mention.
Nexuiz, for instance. High quality open-source deathmatch game running on the Darkplaces engine, which is arguably superior to quite a bit of the stuff currently on the market. (Read: Source.) There's also Warsow and Alien Arena, both with similar premises to Nexuiz. These all have excellent graphics, and make up in fun what they lack in imagination in terms of gameplay.
Easily the best free (oss) game in existence is Tremulous! http://www.tremulous.net/ Check the demo if you don't believe me http://mods.moddb.com/3449/tremulous/ Windows and Linux clients, as well as an independent Mac client, 100+ servers, all free. And the wallwalking ROX!
Hardly the best. It was decent a few years ago, but now the graphics are EXTREMELY dated compared to other games. It's essentially a standalone Q3 mod, which is, I suppose, nice, but not great.
"They're only free if you already own the original game. "
Own? What is this "own" you speak of?
How could they have forgotten this shining gem of indie retro gaming?
It's been years since I seen a copy "101 Free BASIC Games" on the bookshelf.
Why was Cave Story not on this list?
It's free, has an English language patch, and works perfectly in Wine.
Not to mention it's one of the best games ever made for any platform.
Shiny. Let's be bad guys.
...and a very nice tactical fps full conversion: http://www.truecombatelite.net/
Game Hippo
not always the best (they tend to be remise on some of the newer games/updates), but always worth looking through.
Also, check out Acid Bomb and Bacteria 2 if you really like logic puzzles. Both are easy to get into and verymuch on the addictive side!
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
Visual Pinball is better as it can use plugins like
vpinmame that lets you play real pinball games with the real game roms.
http://www.pinmame.com/
There is even an online play addon
http://www.vpplus.org/
http://www.pinball-originals.com/index.php?c=8
more info hear
http://www.vpforums.com/
I just want to put in my vote for Dink Smallwood. It's like King's Quest or Legend of Zelda, on drugs.
Last year, after years of collecting dust, the publisher released an update with some nice new features and bug-fixes. And (I just looked) it's now open-sourced.
There's a *huge* collection of mods, add-ons, extra levels, etc available for free and the people making them are just as twisted as the original author. Many of the mods I tried were really, really fun. Some were incredible in what they added to the original game.
I'm done with sigs. Sigs are lame.
Potentially OT. These roms are not Free nor even free.
The Iris mod installer is skipping every file and not unpacking. any thoughts?
Actually I think America's Army is better.
with out the roms there is still alot of cool free tables out there for vp
Greatest game of it's generation. Then X-Com.
I wonder if they have Rocket Jockey.
I love Visual Pinball and vpinmame can potentially be awesome, but ultimately it is effing lame because after almost six years of development vpinmame still doesn't work on multiprocessor systems. I wish those guys would get their heads out of their asses already. I haven't had a single processor system since 1999. Non-functional vpinmame makes the baby super computer cry.
+0 Meh
Free games play you.
They also left out the best single player RPG ever:
http://www.nethack.org/
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
That just about says it all.
How are people still unable to get this basic difference and allowed to write for these groups.
-Tim Louden
Where the hell is NetHack in that list?
http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tf_e. html
TUMIKI Fighters should have been on that list
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Looks like an independent version of Gloom, a Quake 2 mod (one that probably also inspired the Natural Selection mod for Half-life).
multiplayer games: http://euri.ca/games/multiplayerGames
and painfully indie games: http://euri.ca/games/indieGames
A12A.713 is the root of ASC('evil')
Visual Pinball needs to be updated for multiprocessor system and you only need to have Visual Pinball on one cpu and vpinmame on an other one.
But right now there is only one game that needs that much power and the next one is a few months away form being unlocked.
Cave Story is probably the only platformer I've ever played that actually had an engaging if simple story and characters that I gave a damn about. The art looks a little cutesy, but the story isn't exactly all daisies and posies. The synthetic music has a nice nostalgic quality to it without sounding dated. It's not orchestral, but it's not Nintendo, either. It is slightly on the short side--the game does, however, have multiple endings, which helps boost the replay value quite a bit. The (real) final level and boss are also quite tough, but getting a "good" ending doesn't require beating them.
You can get ROMs for most machines off the manufacturer's web site. Williams/Bally is a bit harder since Williams exited the pinball games market, but the Internet Pinball Database has copies of the ROMs as do many other websites.
So they're free, just not Free.
Actually, I went ahead and tried it again on my new system and I didn't even have to monkey with CPU affinity. The problem is still listed in the bug list, but it seems to work ok now. Maybe the problem is still there but this machine may be beefy enough to grunt right through it. Thanks for the info and the glimmer of hope. I finally can play again!
+0 Meh
I completely non-understand the controls of SC II/uqm,
but I second xcom as best game - in the form of ufo2000.
Other good games are Glest (singleplayer) and Anacreon 2 is a decent game too, although a bit on the unplayable side after you worked it out.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
I RTFA and it was complete bull. If they approve game demos and mods to their list why they didn't list any good games? :p
a mes_released_as_freeware e rson_shooters g ames
:p
There's lots of really good games available for free. For example old commercial games that have been released as freeware (I'm a diehard abandonware fan). Just to mention few: Betrayal at Krondor, Beneath a Steel Sky, Descent: FreeSpace, FreeSpace 2, Hidden & Dangerous, One Must Fall: 2097, Railroad Tycoon Deluxe. Then there's open source games like America's Army.
There's also free multiplayer games: Freeciv, Allegiance, Starsiege: Tribes and even MMORPGs like Anarchy Online, Kal-Online or RuneScape.
Check these Wikipedia lists for more great free games:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_g
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_first-p
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_
I'd say any of these is better than all the games mentioned in the article.
Poutsi
that bug is in pinmame not vpinamme and it may have been fixed by now.
http://www.plasmapong.com/
Liberated games has an extensive list of free, not to mention, legal games for download. There are the classics, old games and not so old games. Not abandonware, they've gone to great lengths to make sure there aren't any on the site.
Yep, Tremulous is pretty good once you get used to it.
Actually, the balance is god awful. The game feels like it's slanted against you regardless of the team you choose; matches regularly go to sudden death before they can even begin to be decided, making the first half hour of the game moot; and development is virtually invisible to most of the community and may have stagnated for all I know. So it's more like once you go through this initiation and begin to accept these facts, you may want to leave and save your soul, but you just can't abandon all the time you spent learning how to play.
It's not too late for you to save yourselves, Slashdotters. The world is burning. Run.
On second thought, it's GPL'd. WAN party tonight!
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
BTW did you know you can do something like:
By the way, try pressing ! for a shell sometime in mid-game
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
"I completely non-understand the controls of SC II/uqm,"
The arrow keys and two action buttons? It's not that hard, man...
You misspelled http://www.adom.de/ ;)
See the subject? I'd like to mention that I actually have the magazine and this is not a listing of the BEST free games. For those of you who don't get the magazine, every month they have 3 or so freebie games listed. I think a couple months back they had 4.. lol
Well this month (feb) obviously, they had 101 listed. Yes it includes some mods. So what. When I got the mag, being desperate for some entertainment (I don't play wow, there's not much else new right now) I began browsing through the freebies, I picked about 10 that looked the most interesting, tried them and pretty much gave up on all of them. I'm most interested in multiplayer games and none of the ones listed had anyone online playing them.
Anyway, the point as I said is that this is not a list of the *best* this is simply a small list of some.. free games.
Oh.. I did find one game that I played two nights in a row. www.veloci.dk/gamebiz/gb2 gamebiz 2 was enjoyable. Sadly there's plenty of bugs. However, it has some really nice potential if about 1000 additional features were added. As it is, it was a nice diversion for a couple days. I suggest anyone interested in simple sims try it.
Now.. if anyone finds a massive multiplayer free game that's similar to silentdeath online/starship troopers from gamestorm.. please let me know. *sighs sadly* There were a couple games that were ALMOST like that.. but turned out to be "click the target to target them" with autofire...
In case you don't feel like waiting for Supreme Commander or played the beta and didn't like it Spring is a good way to get your mass warfare RTS fix. Apply different mods for different results.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
...without Every Extend :
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