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Games Entertainment

Friday Means Free Games 60

Posted by Zonk from the that-means-you-don't-need-money dept.
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."
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Friday Means Free Games More

Friday Means Free Games

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  • I for one have been waiting for a grand list of free games for a while now. There have been a few small lists here and there, but nothing all that grand. I hope these lists get properly maintained, unlike some that I have seen.
    • It's not really a big list. And most of them are released source code that are unplayable without the original data game files. You might have more luck browsing the abandonned ware sites that are poping here and there on the web. Still it's a start. One day we might hope that the old classic games that only geeks could remembers would be free and ported....
    • Ditto. Thanks for this article :)

  • Lacking in cowbell (Score:3, Informative)

    by B00yah ( 213676 ) on Friday July 29, 2005 @08:33PM (#13199855) Homepage
    otherwise known as KOL (Kingdom of Loathing) [kingdomofloathing.com]

  • Not trying to look a gift horse in the mouth... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by KingSkippus ( 799657 ) on Friday July 29, 2005 @08:38PM (#13199872) Homepage Journal

    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 [freeciv.org].

  • Guild Wars? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Nasarius ( 593729 ) on Friday July 29, 2005 @08:38PM (#13199875)
    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!
    • Yes of course ... but in comparison to other MMO's with which you pay for the box AND pay a monthly fee it could be considered "free-to-play"

      Kleedrac

      Next time think first
    • By that logic Neverwinter Nights (plus expansion(s).. or just the platinum edition..) is free. No monthly fees. :b

  • Other sites (Score:5, Informative)

    by hackwrench ( 573697 ) <hackwrench@hotmail.com> on Friday July 29, 2005 @08:43PM (#13199887) Homepage Journal
    Home of the Underdogs [the-underdogs.org]
    C:DOS [cdos.org]
    http://www.google.com/search?q=%22abandonware [google.com]

    • Re:Other sites (Score:1, Informative)

      by Elshar ( 232380 )
      "Abandonware" isn't free anymore than warezed games are (which is basically what the vast majority of that abandonware is, old warez). I think the jist of the submission were games that were actually free. As in released into the public domain, or have some sort of 'free' license associated with it.

      Abandonware isn't 'free'. Its warez.

    • The sad thing is that people are missing (or don't care about) the distinction between what Liberated Games and the abandonware sites do. Abandonware sites find games that are no longer published or sold (but probably still under copyright protection) and make them available. Some sites like Underdogs are cool about taking games down if the author or copyrightholder asks them too, but still, abandonware isn't legal in most countries. Liberated Games is giving us free games with the permission of the copy

  • It would be nice to point out on the list which of these games have a Linux version.

  • Links (Score:2, Informative)

    by Enthused ( 23344 )
    This article and the article on Joystiq it links to need LINKS to the pages themselves!

    http://www.gameogre.com/ [gameogre.com]: Free MMOGs
    http://www.liberatedgames.com/ [liberatedgames.com]: Free Single-player Games

  • C8, maybe? (Score:1, Informative)

    by FearTheFrail ( 666535 )
    GameOgre's list is missing the platformer recently covered by Slashdot and resurrected by enthusiasts, Castle Infinity. [castleinfinity.com] Though they do request donations.

  • Open-source games are not generally free (Score:3, Informative)

    by Have Blue ( 616 ) on Friday July 29, 2005 @10:10PM (#13200218) Homepage
    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.
    • I believe what is important is the engine. To you, perhaps the game data is the most important thing, but I tend to view it as the opposite; the data is the least important. Some games are old, and the data of the full game can be had very easitly. If you're really dedicated to getting that data, you can lay your hands on it in any number of ways, not excluding purchasing a copy.

      Why the source is important is because even if you did download the game without paying anyone, how are you going to play it?

      • That's a completely valid way of looking at it, but generally the reason to play a really old game (say, Doom) is that you enjoyed the content. If you are interested in creating your own data, use a more modern, powerful, and flexible engine that doesn't have as many limits (ZDoom and friends are a huge improvement over the original engine, but it would be silly to compare them to something like Unreal).

  • Not Free! (Score:3, Informative)

    by DavidD_CA ( 750156 ) on Friday July 29, 2005 @10:38PM (#13200316) Homepage
    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/ [dragonclawstudio.com]

    Unless you pay, you only appear to get about 5% of the game.
  • "FaitH does not support the browser you are using. Please bend over, pull down your knickers, and use IE 5+."
    • I love it when sites tell you to use IE and they work perfectly fine in other browsers. Oh, and they didnt even bother to check for Opera; it doesnt give you a warning if you're using it.

  • Free MMORPG (Score:3, Informative)

    by vga_init ( 589198 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @12:17AM (#13200635) Journal
    My favorite online RPG is Daimonin [daimonin.com]. 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)! :-)
    • Thats my favoite RPG to I cant wait for the new beta to come out. I dont know much about the cross fire code or what the heck isometric means but I do kno that when it gets outta beta I ambuying two copies.
  • I would suggest to everyone to try out the Fish Fillets from the collection of the librated games. If you are running debian, its as easy as: 'apt-get install fillets-ng'. I love it and not just because bunch of my friends put the game together and I can imagine the people behind these voice overs. Anyway, really try it out. And if you like it, you can get the Original War from those guys for $5 at Fry's. Its definitely a good deal.
  • any of these games have good skill based pvp?

  • Very strange list. (Score:3, Informative)

    by S3D ( 745318 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @03:36AM (#13201065)
    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 [wesnoth.org]
    Steel Panthers:World At War [matrixgames.com]
    Steel Panthers:Main Battle Tank [shrapnelgames.com]
    FreeCiv [freeciv.org]
  • As links to the actual sites, why aren't there link to the actual sites?
  • http://www.medievia.com/ [medievia.com]

    Brief overview:
    Medievia is a multiplayer online text based role-playing game that has been in development since 1991. Medievia is a free virtual environment that offers imaginative game play and an environment so compelling hundreds of its users have continued to log in and play daily for five or more years. Imagine a game that has the intuition to track your happiness, pride, sadness, and fear, and then changes the game to fit your needs. Imagine a world in which intelligent mons

    • "Medievia" is one big license violation (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      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.

  • if we had sensible... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by KillShill ( 877105 ) on Saturday July 30, 2005 @05:07PM (#13204243)
    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.
    • Good luck to cutting small business expenses by shortening the intellectual property term limits. You think if patents expire in 10 years instead of 20, businesses won't be just as quick to pollute the system up that keep the just expired technologies under bay, with new patents? Instead of x amount of patents in 20 years that a small business needs to review in fear of infringement, now they have to review 2x patents in 10 years. 6 million USPTO patents in 2005? Try 12 million, in 2008. It's all about jobs
    • The idiot was a mouse, actually. The Mouse [wikipedia.org].
  • Does the second link go to Joystiq, which then refers you to another website? Why didn't somebody just post the second link as the list instead of commentary on the list?
    For those lazy people, the Actual List [gameogre.com] that was referred to.

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