Description: Kong is a free 2D top-down shoot em up in a full 3D environment. It can be played single player or multiplayer over LAN or the internet, and features all the usual game modes such as capture the flag, deathmatch, and team deathmatch. It offers a variety of weapons to use and objects to interact with.

I am often amazed at the amount of effort and attention to detail that is put into creating some free games, and Kong is a good example of this. Viewed top-down from a 2D perspective, it could be a 2D clone of Unreal Tournament or Quake 3. Except technically the environment and everything in it is 3D-modeled, which means that if you have a good 3D card you can get the game to look really good. I’ve also seen screenshots where the game is depicted in more of a first person shooter mode, although I’m not sure how to get that (or even that it is desirable in the first place). Here are some notes on this one:

• The game experience: is fast paced and furious, as you might expect from this sort of game. I will say that the game has somewhat of a learning curve; stick with easy bots to begin with or you’ll be toast. One thing I would suggest is to go to the controls section in the settings and set the mouse sensitivity (there’s also a "look sensitivity" though I’m not sure what that is).
• Single/multi player: you could play single player against the computer (you need to add the bots once the game starts) or you could find a LAN or internet multiplayer game. The game will quickly find internet games for you if you are connected to the internet, but there aren’t many of these on account of the game being so new, but I was able to find them nonetheless. Although playing against the computer is cool, playing against humans is much more fun.
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Description: Bonesaw is a platform game which in terms of graphics, sound, and even the gameplay has a retro look and feel. The fast-paced action involves travelling through 30 levels of the game, solving puzzles and fighting bad guys.

I was informed about this game by a reader (hi Bill), who described is as "a little 2-D scroller that makes me think of Kirby and Megaman. You go through a bunch of levels as a hockey player trying to free his teammates from the evil referee, who has had it with the team making the crowd rowdy. You journey through dozens of stages collecting golden hockey pucks and defeating enemies."

The plot is some sort of in-joke, but is perfectly adequate as plots go and you really do not need a plot at all. The game is pretty much self-explanatory and all you need to do is jump in and play. Here are more notes on this one:

• Production qualities: both the sound, the graphics, the concept, and the look and feel harken back to early console games or old -school blocky/chunky Commodore 64 graphics.
• Game elements: pucks to collect, buttons to push that open doors, end-level bosses to fight… i.e. what you would typically expect.
• The fighting: involves stringing together combo moves (just experiment). It is interesting that the makers of this game managed to implement combo moves for such a little sprite, but they did, and it works relatively well. A good repertoire of moves will help you dispense of some of the bad guys, which are frequently quite tough.
• The "bonesaw": is in fact a special ability to dispense awesome attacks that travel distances. To get this, you have to do a lot of fighting, which causes a gauge to build up and up,
• The difficulty level: is a good one. Meaning its not an easy game, but is certainly quite manageable. Once you reach a level you can go straight back to the beginning of it, rather than forced back to the very beginning.
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Description: Pteroglider is a vertical scrolling shoot em up featuring four levels of non-stop action, outstanding production qualities, and an innovative "mouse targeting" firing system.

I’ve been wanting to post an interesting mindless shoot em up for a while now, and a reader just emailed and tipped me off about this one (thanks Alexi). This game apparently was launched as a commercial game in 2004 and just launched as freeware.

Although it might look like many other polished vertical shoot em ups, what makes this game interesting is it’s unique combination of mouse and keyboard controls: while the keyboard arrow keys (or W/A/S/D) are used to maneuver your craft, shooting is done by moving a little targeting crosshair with the mouse, firing with the left mouse button and shooting rockets with the right. A very interesting and atypical element, although it does take some time to get used to.

Incidentally, it is precisely this unusual control scheme that’s been cited by one of the developers of this game in his blog as one of the reasons why it wasn’t commercially successful (the mouse targeting making the game "much too difficult for casual gamers"). Personally I think that’s a bit too harsh; I was able to play the game and control the ship fairly well very quickly after installing it, in fact getting to the end of the second level within an hour of installing. Moreover, once you finish a level your can always re-start from the beginning of that level, rather than from the very beginning.
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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: Passage is a side-scrolling casual game done in pixellated, retro-looking graphics. The game can be completed in 5 minutes and is meant to represent a lifetime from birth until death. Passage is an art project open to each player’s interpretation.

The description above pretty much says it all. As in life, the only guarantee in "Passage" is death, otherwise you are free to explore as you like. Make sure to use all of the arrow keys to scroll up and down as well as left and right. Whats interesting is that even though your character is made up of a handful of oversized blocks ("pixels") the process of ageing is nonetheless represented so convincingly. I’ll admit to experiencing a genuine, heartfelt sadness when my character lost his mate.

More notes on this:

• Controls: aside from the arrow keys, press F for fullscreen, B to adjust blow up factor.
• Hints: don’t just avoid things, there are objects you can "collect". Also note that you can re-play this game differently, making different choices.
• Installation: no installer, just unzip and run.

But is it art?: I think so. As in all artwork, the author makes sure to point out that the player’s own reaction/interpretation of this is the interesting part. He does volunteer his own interpretation on his site though, but requests that you please play the game first (which is why I’m not going to link to it from this review).
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Description: Binary Toys are animated windowless vector characters “made up of springs, muscles, and masses” that are designed to inhabit your computer, interacting with your desktop environment in accordance with the laws of physics.

Get the picture: animated wireframe creatures walking, crawling around your desktop, tumbling from the top of one open window to the another, falling on their backs, legs wriggling in the air, and hence unable to move without your intervention (which, in this case, could either be to grab hold of the edge of the creature and flick it around with the mouse, or press “U” to magically untangle it). Not sure if I should categorize this as a “game” or a “desktop enhancement . Here are more notes:

• Interaction: you can grab any of the “nodes” on the creature’s body and drag it around, drop it, etc. Keyboard controls as follows: T/toggle transparency, S/change size, large and small, M/show muscles (really just changes the look a little bit), U/untangle, get back on its feet, R/reverse direction, Space/pause and unpause.
• Creatures: ten in total (right click on a creature to change). You can have creatures change randomly or have multiple creatures running around the screen simultaneously. Creatures include: Amoeba , Bouncy Diamond, Breaking Wave, Caterpillar Pod, Cheeky Triangle, Dainty Walker, Dirk Jiggler, Hairy Caterpillar, Millipede, Wiggly Worm. There’s an option to load creatures from an XML file for future additions.
• Behavior: according to the Binary Toys site: “these toys exhibit complex behavior and are surprisingly life-like”. They really do.
• Memory consumption: around 5 megs in memory.
• Installation: no installing necessary; simply run the executable.
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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: Synaesthete is a free 3D isometric game that introduces some very interesting innovations to the shoot em up genre. It aims to synchronize visuals and audio in a unified whole, where both interact and are an part of the gaming experience.

The objective of this game is not new: make your way from room to room inside a 3D Isometric universe, dispensing of bad guys along the way, collecting health power-ups and the like that are scattered around the terrain, and using spells that have various effects (such as killing all baddies within a certain range). Its all woven together within the sub-text of your character, termed a "Zaikman", protecting the collective unconscious.

It all sounds all too familiar, you might say, except for the way your Zaikman’s firepower is deployed. This is done with the help of a device called the "tracker" which sits prominently in the middle of the screen. Both the intensity and accuracy of your firepower depends on how accurately you can mimic the patterns of colored blips that cascade down the screen (and into the tracker) using three keys on your keyboard, basically the same principle as that employed by games such as "Dance Dance Revolution" or "Guitar Hero".

The net effect of this is as follows: with your left hand you will be maneuvering your guy to dodge bad guys, while with your right hand you will be frantically tapping three keys and trying to match the falling patterns. Add to this the pulsating beats of music, and the patterns and colors that are exploding all over the screen, and it all makes for some very intense gameplay (see video below).
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Description: Phun, described as a "2D physics sandbox", is a free physics game where the user can construct the entire game environment using combinations of objects and then observe and tweak how the various creations/objects interact.

This is one of those programs that can be described as not being a game, but a toy. There is no goal beyond unleashing your imagination and building up a world of objects and then seeing how they interact together, then tweaking and re-building again when you get a sense of what actually goes on in the interaction. A lot of the fun in Phun comes from the many surprises that you will invariably encounter when the objects do things that you wouldn’t have expected. Here is more info on this program:

• How it works: draw and create your objects and environment, then press the "play button" and watch as your objects fall , collide with each other, bounce, and do whatever it is that they will do. The physics in this game are remarkably well done; things behave as you would expect them to,
• The user interface: what makes this game so easy to get into is that everything - everything - is done through clicking an object and right clicking to manipulate it. Aside from a toolbar on the left hand side that selects the various actions and objects you can use, all of the functions and options that you need to manipulate objects are a right click away in the context menu.
• Objects: include anything that you can draw with a brush such as a square or rectangle or any irregular object that you can imagine. Or you can select defined objects such as a plane, circle or box, or functional objects that do specific things such as chains, hinges, or springs you can attach to things.
• Object properties: everything from friction to bounciness and density can be defined for your objects. You can also set whether they collide with stuff or whether they liquefy on playback. Other things you can define: whether your world has gravity, and whether there is air friction.
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Description: Risk is an open source Java implementation of the famous board game with the same name. It offers 3 different game modes (domination, capital, and mission), customized downloadable maps, multiplayer play (over the internet or LAN), excellent computer AI, and generally high production qualities

If you’re a fan of Risk, as I am, you will really like this implementation of it. It combines some excellent game innovations with fantastic production qualities. Here are more notes on this game:

• Game modes: “Domination” (where the objective is to conquer all territories), “Capital” (where the object is to capture all of the capitals on the map), and “Mission” (where the computer gives you a specific objective, such as to hold 12 adjacent territories and arm them with 20 armies each, or to destroy a certain opponent).
• Custom maps: these can either be (a) completely new maps, such as the “Roman Empire” map or the map of the UK (there’s even a map of the London underground subway); or (b) the traditional world map, but with new ’access routes’ between continents, or (c) the traditional Risk world map in a new skin. Look here for a gallery of downloadable maps.
• The computer AI: there are 3 types of computer opponent (crap AI, easy AI, and hard AI). The hard AI is generally very good. The hard AI is excellent; if you are accustomed to rolling over computer Risk opponents try going against mostly hard AI’s (it will certainly be a challenge).
• Multiplayer: over the internet is on the way, but as of this writing (Feb 10th 2008) it was not yet implemented. Network play over LAN is also possible but I did not try it.
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