This week it’s a free-stuff-for-download feeding frenzy. If you’ve seen the outrageous prices for computer and Playstation games currently, its rip-off city everywhere – and being either a gamer, or a parent of a gamer, can cripple you financially. Also if you’re looking for a little something to mess around with on your PC, one or two steps beyond Solitaire – and the mindless eyecandy shoot-em-ups are too complex and pricey to bother with – then read on.
There are thousands of free and more or less legal games for you to download and play, (or to help wean your kids off the expensive crappy games and onto the older ones requiring a little IQ. I say ‘more or less legal’, because with most of the games – often the original manufacturers and makers themselves are out of business and long gone. And a lot of these games are sometimes just too damn good to gather dust in a vault and be forgotten.
So its not ‘piracy’ in the strictest sense of the word – as few, if any starving programmers, artists or companies are being deprived of any money.
Remember those corner cafe machine games you used to spend hours playing? They’re called ‘arcade games’ – and there’s a gizmo which lets you play them on your PC now. Over 3000 titles are yours for the grabbing. The gizmo is called MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) – don’t be scared off by the geekspeak, its just a program that allows you to run the little files (called ‘roms’) that make up those games you once spent fortunes on – from Donkey Kong onwards. Pick a version.
Don’t be worried about filesizes and your modem coping, because most of the actual games themselves are tiny – an indication of just how far we’ve come in a few short years. You can build up a swanky collection of thousands of titles to play at home or work, without much effort. If you or your kids are looking for time killers, Mame and the huge supply of old arcade games available online, is the perfect free solution.
Start your collection of games to run on your MAME, as well as more overview and help – at Arcade PC. Or try Massive Mame.
And for info and downloads, try The Vintage Gaming Networks Mame Page. Then to see just how many games are available for freebie playing, check out the lists at Rom Lists . Mame isn’t the only ’emulator’ in this genre, as can be seen here. Try them all and be collect up some history.
Next we move up the scale, away from the simple arcade games, towards the larger games which simply require your PC to run them, no extra’s needed. A good starting point is the oddly named The Bosnian Classic Games Archive . Pick your genre and go browsing to start building up a very respectable collection of free full length games.
Some of the goodies, as an intro into ‘real’ games where the story was more important than anything – the creator of the ‘Alien’ creature, artist HR Giger, was behind a very creepy little game called Darkseed – read about it and download it here. (In a zipfile it’s a mere 5megs). And here’s an alternative info and download option — Classic Trash. The sequel is also available, bear in mind size-wise it’s larger – 27megs (you should be able to get this in a few hours or overnight) Darkseed 2. For more game options, browse through what’s available at Classic Trash.
Then for larger games, The Underdogs is one very useful site, although the original makers of some of the great games have cottoned onto the fact that their old products are getting fans again, and have been clamping down on sites which provide free downloads – so not everything that catches your eye, is as available as it once was. But The Underdogs has a load of unique full games, not available anywhere else. For example – take a look at the nightmarish game Bad Mojo.(178megs).
Given that there’s a major dumbing down of computer games lately, and there’s a whole generation of players who think ‘games’ are just about shooting and fast reflexes, Bad Mojo is one of many ‘adventure’ games that are sitting online, games which are story and puzzle based. If this is a new concept to you, read A Beginners Guide To Graphic Adventure Games.
Another leaping off point, with the same ‘oops’ by manufacturers who’re waking up to the retro-trends being profitable, is Abandon Games.
Then for more games – ranging from tiny, to quite large – go browse through Disk World. (One of the goodies they have that you should try out, if you want to exercise the brain a little and weighing in at just 7meg, is the classic sci-fi Beneath A Steel Sky.
Another spot with large numbers of titles – some of which have been blocked for download as the makers woke up – is The Good Old Days.
Another site with as many though often smaller games – is XTC. And at The Thing you can get more abandonwares games, like the (for its time) headscratcher classic The Incredible Machine.
Be ready to fill your hard drive at Free Oldies.
Another site with a lot of decent (and some indecent) games – although you’ll have to swat aside the pop-up pages to get to the meat, is Old Games. (This has everything from original Duke Nukem, the Leisure Suit Larry series and Blood, through to the sleazy adults only delights of Virtual Valerie and beyond). Some classics include Terry Pratchett’s DiscWorld (20megs). Then there’s Gabriel Knight – Sins of the Fathers 1.
For another load of games, starting from the original Mortal Kombat (just 3 megs for those chop suey fans) onwards, go do some free shopping at Flashback!
And to show that this isn’t just a ‘guy’ thing, here’s another site with oldies for download, run by a woman – Bunny Abandonware.
For some lemmings game series and a handful of others, try Abandon Creations. And for early Monkey Island and Indiana Jones games, as well as the first Civilization game at Abandonia.
And the freebies just keep on coming at OK Games as well as at Classic Games.
For info on how to use that shiny new PC of yours to play the older games which generally don’t look as good as the newer ones – but which often have much more content, spend some time at The Old School. And if you recall the killing frenzies and multiplayer gaming fun from Apogee Games (Duke Nukem, Terminal Velocity, Rise of the Triads etc) – there’s a great help page on how to run the games on your current PC at Lon’s Apogee Page.
If there’re games that you remember playing way back when, and have always had a secret soft spot for, but never found them since – go find info and pix at the searchable Games Museum.
So the next time you’ve got some free time, or the spawn in your household are whining at you to fork out hundreds of rands for some nice-looking but essentially dumb game, the above info is a simple route to get staggeringly large quantities of extremely fun and sometimes highly intelligent games, of a content caliber way beyond what’s commercially available. Go start collecting.
Until the next time, if people who want you to pay for games don’t get me.
Ian Fraser is a playwright, author, comedian, conspiracy nut, old-time radio collector and self-confessed data-junkie. Winner of numerous Vita and Amstel Awards, he’s been an Internet addict and games-fanatic since around 1995, when the Internet began to make much more sense than theatre.