Description: the article will present an overview of 19 free turn based strategy games (empire building or war games). The games are: FreeCiv, TripleA, Stick Figure Strategy, Weewar, Eight Kingdoms, PhpDiplomacy, C-Evo, Advanced Strategic Command, Project W, Conqueror, The General, TriChromic, FreeOrion, People’s Tactics, Lgeneral, Crimson Fields, 1848, The Battle for Wesnoth, and Risk.

I’m a big fan of turn-based strategy and war games. If pressed I would go on record as saying that Sid Meier’s Civilization series are the best ever created… and while I’m at it let me also venture my opinion that turn-based strategy games offer an inherently better design that real-time strategy games, even when the latter profess to be a better representation of what happens in the real world.

This posting could have been entitled “19 games I really would have liked to
play had I had the time”; I wanted to present an overview of the many free turn based strategy games that I’ve come across. Note that although I usually personally try all the software I post on Freewaregenius, I only played a sub-set of these. Finally, it took a while to research and write this article, so please Stumble and/or Digg it! This list assumes the following guidelines:

• Will include empire building and/or war games only; no squad based or shoot em ups (e.g. Worms-style), or role playing games.
• Turn based: no real-time-strategy (RTS) games will be included.
• Focus on standalone, playable games rather than game engines. Read more »

Description: Over the past few months there seems to have been an explosion of games released as freeware. This posting will present a sort of meta-index of freeware games-lists that I have found on the net.

At first when this posting was conceived I was going to put together a list of my favorite freeware games; however, I was thinking why create another list when there are so many out there? Here’s a collection of my favorite freeware games lists:

1. Freewaregenius’ reviewed freeware games category (scroll down, multiple pages).
2. 1UP.com’s 101 Free games 2008
3. 1UP.com’s 101 Free games 2007
4. 1UP.com’s 101 Free games 2006
5. Gamespot: Adrian’s guide to 2007 freeware games
6. Wikipedia’s list of freeware games.
7. Wikipedia’s list of commercial games released as freeware
8. Wikipedia’s list of open source games
9. Wikipedia’s list of free first person shooters
10. Open source games at the Open Directory Project
11. IndieGames.com: best freeware games 2007 and 2006 . Categories include shoot em ups, platformers, arcade games, etc.
12. TIGsource: best freeware games of 2007
13. Indygamer has their own best of lists 2007; whaddyaknowit.
14. GameTap free games: you have to download and install the “GameTap Player”, and you will have to watch an ad before you play, but it’s worth it for some great games. The fantastic Psychonauts is available for free (although it’s a 1.5 gig download).
15. Caiman Games: top 60 ranked freeware games
16. The Random Gnome’s Lair: Our freshly hand-picked free games selection.
17. Another Random Gnome’s: Oh no! More hand-picked free games.
18. Also Gnome’s Lair: 100 excellent free games in bloom
19. Finally Gnome’s: bouquet of hand picked games with dirty commercial pasts
20. Home of the underdogs’: list of freeware [games] recommendations.
21. Ghacks also has an ultimate free games list.
22. Über 100 kostenlose Games!
23. Cnet’s: 10 most addictive flash games ever made.
24. Butterblog: neverending list of best free games
25. MarcoFolio: best freeware first person shooters
26. Last one — I’m going to bed.
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Description: this posting will compare a number of different possible ways to convert PDF files into Word Doc format, including freeware programs and free web and email services. Six different programs/services are tested: (1) PDF2HTMLgui, (2) the Koolwire email PDF to DOC conversion service, (3) the Zamzar web service, (4) Free PDF To Word Doc Converter, (5) Adobe PDF to HTML email conversion service, and (6) the MediaConvert web service.

In order to do this test I created a PDF document using Open Office’s export to PDF function that had the following elements (1) a two-column table with special formatting, which contained (2) three thumbnail-szied jpeg images. My PDF document also contained (3) working hyperlinks; and (4) it featured text that was bolded; (5) contained bulleted points, as well as (6) a numbered list.

For the sake of simplicity my PDF was only a single page. To see what the document looked like click on the screenshot to the right.

The objective: was to get a converted document that could be loaded into MS Word where the text/contents could be edited and subsequently saved as .DOC format, which is to say any of the following formats would be satisfactory: .DOC, .HTML, and .RTF.

Comparative results: look for them at the bottom of this positng.
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Description: I recently clean installed Windows XP on my laptop, and this meant that I had to re-install all the essential software that I use. It also presented an opportunity to write a posting about how you can outfit your computer with all the essential (and non-essential) software you need using strictly 100% freeware and/or open source titles.This posting could have been titled any of the following:

• How to never use a paid program again (aside from Windows).
• 53 essential freeware programs that can take care of the majority of your computing needs.

I am writing this from the perspective of myself clean-installing Windows and re-installing all the software I find to be essential afterwards. This post took a long time to write, please Digg and/or Stumble it ;).
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