With the recent release of Alien Swarm, I’ve had a bit of a craving for more free gaming. You’d be surprised how much fun you can have out there without spending a penny. You simply don’t get this in other industries, and not at this calibre – let’s face it, most free stuff out there in the real world is free for a reason: it’s unwanted, out-of-date, or just crap. As for free entertainment, imagine if your local cinema had free showings of some films? I can’t, frankly. Plus, if it’s anything like my local, going to the cinema is becoming an increasingly more expensive way to spend an evening. Why not save your cash and try some of these brilliant (and surprisingly sophisticated) free games.
So, where to start. There’s pretty much a free game in every genre these days – you’ve got free-to-play MMO’s, first person shooters, point and click adventure games, third-person action multiplayer games, and an absolute tonne of browser-based flash games. Lets have a quick look at some of the best ones, and since all of these are free, they’re well worth checking out if only briefly just to see how good we gamers have got it these days.
Battlefield Heroes
The Battlefield series has always had a focus on fun multiplayer carnage, in which 2 teams fight it over large maps for control of territory, and can use a variety of weapons and drivable vehicles. Battlefield Heroes was a risk for EA and Dice, since it moves away from the relatively serious nature of the regular series, and into a cartoony, Team Fortress 2 style online-only game, with customisable avatars and persistent stats. It has optional paid-for content if you’re into that sort of thing, but the big selling point is that it plays in your browser. This isn’t strictly true, since the game does have to download a big dump of game-files to your pc before you can play it, but it does launch from the browser and has relatively small system requirements to play.
Alternatively: Quake Live
Wolfenstein Enemy Territory
This was the first ‘real’ game that I ever heard of as being completely free from day one. It’s based on the classic Return to Castle Wolfenstein, in that its a class-based FPS set in WW2, but it focuses on multiplayer objective-based maps, in which teamwork is essential. Pick your class from the now rather standardised soldiers, medics, engineers and the like, and “DISARM ZE DYNAMITE!”, etc. It has aged a bit since it came out in 2003, but its still very fun and you can always find a server full of people. It paved the way for the more recent Quake Wars Enemy Territory, which follows a similar structure to its class-based multiplayer with objectives.
Alternatively: FEAR Combat
Lord of the Rings Online
This MMO is one of the best examples of an alternative to World of Warcraft, and will be, as of September, free to play. It’s based on the Lord of the Rings books (not the movies) and is chock full of refrences to Tolkien’s classic works, some of which you may not be familiar with if you’ve only seen Jackson’s epic trilogy (Tom Bombadil, hoorayness!). It’s a very polished, well-balanced, beautiful and downright fun MMO. There’s absolutely heaps of free-to-play MMO’s out there, but this for me will easily be one of the best. Amongst all the Asian grind-fests that have found their way over here, LoTRO will stand tall as a much more lovingly crafted MMO experience. Again, there’s optional micropayments, but there’ll be nothing to stop you from playing through the majority of the grand story without paying a bean.
Alternatively: Runescape
Flash Games
Far too many to list here, but there are literally thousands of amazing indie-developed Flash games available for nothing on the ‘net. Two of my favourite ‘portal’ sites for these sort of games are Newgrounds, which is one of the first, biggest and best Flash portal sites around with loads of animations and games to keep you entertained for literally weeks. Then there’s Kongregate, which focuses primarily on games and has a huge collection of browser classics, and a login feature to collect achievements for almost anything you play. In the Flash gaming world, there’s some amazing titles ranging from simple 2D platformers, to addictive puzzlers, to epic RPG’s. Just take a look at those two website’s highest-rated lists and you’ll see such gems as Fancy Pants Adventure, Desktop Tower Defence, the SHIFT series, and millions more.
Well, there are countless others, but this gives you a small taster of what the gaming world has to offer on the ultra-cheap. I will try and keep an eye out for other free games, as it seems to be a bit of a trend in the industry right now, and post about them here. Everyone loves a bargain, and you can’t get a better deal than a free lunch…er, game.
Dome Keeper is an excellent little spin on the tower defense game, in which you play the role of a jetpacking miner defending his base from swarms of aliens, whilst searching for a hidden relic buried somewhere beneath him. And now, with this huge free update, you can play it with friends.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
Is bingeing bad for us? It seems an obvious question, but I have been thinking about it lately, while revisiting Lost, the tv show that started 22 years ago (cripes, I feel old). Back when it was airing, my friends and I watched it religiously every week, talked about it in great detail, eagerly awaiting the next episode. It was the definitive show of its time, sparking debates and endless theories. It felt great to be a part of that, the sense of all experiencing the same thing together over a long period of time – most seasons had over 20 episodes, which is way more than most shows get these days – and they aired one by one, every week for several months. In today’s age of bingeing a show from beginning to end, I wonder what we are missing by not taking our time.
A friend on Facebook posted a list of their favourite movies, listed in the year they came out, which I immediately followed up with my own list. There’s only one rule: you must pick your favourite for all of the years that you’ve been alive, and you can only pick one per year. I decided to give it a go for videogames. It’s a lot trickier than you might think! Some years have featured an abundance of incredible titles, whereas other years it’s easy to pick out a clear winner in your mind. So, without further ado, here’s my list of favourite games, one per year since I was born. This was insanely difficult…
Last night I finished Firewatch. It’s a first-person mystery game, being rudely dubbed a ‘walking simulator’ by some of the reviews I’ve seen elsewhere. While it’s true, the game has you fulfilling various tasks in a forest in which you navigate solely by hiking, that description completely ignores the beautifully told story and the reason you are there at all. Having completed it, I want to recommend it to everyone because it’s fantastic. I also would say that the less you know the better, so don’t read the rest of this review, just go and get it.
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