Favorite free PC games

ryaneberly

There are a lot of free games on the net. However, many of them either lack quality or completeness — often both. I’ve experimented with quite a few over the last few years, and here are a few of my favorites.

Nethack – www.nethack.org. The mother of all modern RPGs. This game was released in 1987 and has been updated many times since. The Xbox, Wii generation will be tempted to leave it after seeing the Ascii (yes text) based graphics. The standard windows client supports tilesets which replace the ascii characters with more meaningful pictures. I prefer GeoDuck’s WinHack tile set. Don’t knock it until you’ve named your elvish dagger ‘Sting’, rubbed a bottle and wished for a blessed +3 grayscale dragon armor, polymorphed your pet dog into a storm giant, or desperately scrawled ‘Elbereth’ in the dust. The depth of this game is way beyond anything you’ve seen before (unless you’ve played Dwarf Fortress… and no, that one did not make my list.)
Freeciv – http://www.freeciv.net. A free version of Sid Meier’s Civilization 2. Build an empire from the bronze age to the modern era.
Transcendence- this is a space action game, the controls behave like ‘asteroids’, but it has a story and game depth that approaches that of Nethack.
Pingus – http://pingus.seul.org. A free version of Lemmings.
De Blob – http://binnenstad.hku.nl/. A game made by a couple of Dutch students. You control a blob rolling around the city, your color is influenced by the color of the little ‘people’ you absorb, and you ‘paint the town’. It’s fun and my kids love it!
Hidden and Dangerous Deluxe. Commercial game, now free from the publisher. Control a squad (1 person at a time) in WWII era scenarios engaging the German army. There have been quite a few top down iso-metric view games in this genre, and this one is in a reasonable 3d engine.
Desktop Tower Defense – an addicting flash game based on the ‘tower defense’ scenarios developed in the Starcraft and Warcraft III map editors.
Portal: the flash version. A 2d version of the popular Portal game from Valve (Half-Life 2). I played through this shortly after completing the 3d version and enjoyed it.

What gems have you discovered?

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