Saturday, October 20, 2007

Freeware Gaming Weekend

So, this weekend the wife is out of town. I decided to take this opportunity to waste some time fragging some poor 14 year old kids without jobs. I didn't do so well. I think that I finally realized that I'm not at the top of my game anymore!

Of course, like the name of the blog explains, I don't have the money to go out and throw $50 at a new cool game. (let alone even own a computer that is able to play them at acceptable frame rates!) I was tired of hearing about Halo 3 and how cool it was and seeing the three at once kills on youtube so I decided to see what I could find for free. Open source has got to be the greatest thing since sliced bread! Right next to it in the online community of web 2.0ers is wikipedia. I did a quick search on Google for free fps games and I came across this wikipedia entry I'm not sure how complete the list is but there is something there for every FPS lover. Now of course it isn't going to be as awesome as some of the new Direct X 10 games that are coming out but for free they are very addictive and sometimes have much more original game play. One of the best things is that most of these games will play on lower end machines. My home PC is a lightning fast AMD Athlon 1.3 ghz, 768 mb pc133 ram, a PCI (not express) 128mb Radon 7250, and a 80 gb hd all thrown together in a hp tower that has the worst over heating problem I have ever seen! But, most of these games will play on it with no problems running at higher resolutions.

A few that I tried this week end are the classic Cube series, Tremulos, Openarena, and a copy of Call of Duty that I picked up for $10 at Walmart.

The game I enjoyed the most was Tremulos. It has nice graphics, and the game play is very enjoyable. You can choose to play as an alien or a human. Upgrades for your character have to be earned through fragging people on the other team. Humans can buy upgrades (i.e. better guns more armor etc...) from the armory and aliens can evolve after fighting well. This is a challenging yet fun game to kill a few hours on. The Cube series was the first open source fps game I had ever played. The single player has much to be desired still. The AI is... well.. not very intellegent. They have no self preservation abilities and sometimes they will fight and kill each other. The mulitplayer version is much better. It is a classic grab a gun and kill anything that moves as well as some capture the flag and team deathmatch. Openarena was built on the Quake 3 game engine. It has a kind of cartoonie feel but is fun to play still. Its capture the flag mode is very fun and runs well on even my computer.

For a list of all free games (not just fps) you can CLICK HERE

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