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Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

Dragon Age: Origins is out there amidst consumers, garnering both critical and commercial recognition for its dark atmosphere, excellent story, and entertaining combat. However, there's more to the Dragon Age series besides Origins. EA2D, makers of the excellent Mirror's Edge 2D, decided to take the 2D browser approach to the Dragon Age franchise. The end result is Dragon Age: Journeys, a spin-off game that manages to be good on its own while still providing you with bonuses in the main game itself. Those that love strategy and role-playing games should definitely try it out.

UK-based Jagex, creators of the popular broswer-based fantasy MMO RuneScape, has decided to cancel their plans for MechScape, their next major browser-based MMO. According to Gamesindustry.biz the decision came in a late stage of the game's development with the company's CEO Mark Gerhard saying it will cost Jagex " . . . tens of millions of pounds. Maybe more." He admitted that the continued success of RuneScape helped make their move to cancel MechScape easier.

However the final product was not turning out as Jagex had hoped with Gerhard stating, "The previous game wasn't a game that we want to play." They are now working on a new secret game project that will use the game engine that was being developed for MechScape. It's current release date is sometime in 2010.

After a bit of a false start earlier today, the browser-based title Dragon Age Journeys has officially launched, letting folks play the first chapter, The Deep Roads, for free. The tactical RPG, developed by the new Electronic Arts division EA 2D, is naturally based on BioWare's upcoming fantasy RPG Dragon Age: Origins.

People who use their EA account to sign into Dragon Age Journeys and then use the same account for Dragon Age Origins will get three extra in-game items to use in the BioWare game. While the first chapter is free to play, an article on GamePro indicates that future chapters will include microtransactions.

Sid Meier has mostly been a PC game developer and creator but recently he and his team at Firaxis Games have been moving into different platforms such as the recent console game Civilization Revolution. Now Meier has announced plans to enter the social networking game business with a game called Civilization Network on Facebook.

The game has already launched a fan page with a message from Meier who states that the game will "allow you to join together with your friends to create the world's most powerful, richest, smartest, or just plain coolest civilization." The game will be free to play and will launch a closed beta test "soon". The full game will launch sometime in 2010.

While BioWare's fantasy RPG Dragon Age: Origins is due for release in two weeks, we are becoming more and more interested in the upcoming Flash-based Dragon Age Journeys that's being developed by EA 2D. The latest entry in BioWare's blog site has more info and more screenshots from the game.

As we previously reported the title is being designed as a tactical RPG game with the player controlling up to three heroes. Both their stat systems and their talent trees come from Dragon Age: Origins, as do many of the creatures the heroes have to face in the game. The game sounds like it will be a fairly deep gameplay experience for a browser-based title. Features like giving monsters two special attacks and putting obstacles randomly in the game keeps battles from being repetitious. The first chapter in Dragon Age Journeys should be available later this month.

We have only a couple of weeks until Dragon Age: Origins is finally released but publisher Electronic Arts is pulling out all the stops to promote and expand the BioWare fantasy RPG. Two prose novels have already been released, a pen-and-paper RPG is planned as is a regular monthly comic book. This week it was revealed that a Flash-based Dragon Age game is the works from the publisher's new EA 2D studio.

According to BioWare's blog site, the Dragon Age Journeys Flash game is being created by some of the leading creators of Flash-based game titles. The head man behind the Dragon Age game is Daniel Stradwick, who created the Monster's Den Flash RPG title. Dragon Age Journeys is being designed as a tactical RPG to be released in three chapters with the assistants and guidance of BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins team. There's no word yet on when the first chapter will be released.

Each week we find more and more free games that do not quite fit into the freeware mold. Games that do not require a subscription fee to play, but encourage player usage of money through microtransactions or special subscription services. This is Playing For Free, a column that showcases these games.

The week's column is a new thing for Playing for Free. Granted, the column is only a month old, so it's perfectly acceptable to introduce new things! In this case, it's not a stand-alone game, but one of those free browser MMOs that lots of bored office workers play on their idle time. It's called Ikariam, and it surprisingly good given the rather crowded and poorly-realized genre that is the browser MMO. So for those interested in a little game that keeps on chugging while you work or play, here's one of the better browser MMOs to peruse.

You might have heard about Popcap's successful tower defense-style game Plants Vs Zombies. While you can download a free demo of the game, Popcap is making things even easier by launching a free Flash based version on their official web site.

The Flash versions doesn't have all of the content and features of the downloadable PC game but it does have an extra Zombie unit that isn't in the full PC version of the game. There are three available gameplay modes, 14 levels, a total of six zombie types and a total of 12 plant units. All in all this should be a huge distraction for people at work as well as an effective way to sample the full downloadable PC game.

Digital Illusions got their start in Sweden where they released Battlefield 1942, the first in a long line of Battlefield games from the dev studio. Now one of the co-founders of DICE, Fredrik Liljegren, has helped to launch a new Canadian studio that recently launched a free-to-play browser based action game.

The company is called Antic Entertainment which Liljegren formed with the help of two former members of Digital Extremes. Their first game is called Junk: Battles, The post-apocalypse setting gives the game its theme as players create vehicles that they put in action-strategy battles online with other players. While free-to-play, you can also purchase upgradable parts and items for your vehicles (over 220 parts are available). While Antic Entertainment is currently working on web browser-based games they hope to expand to "all viable platforms."

The upcoming browser-based pro football game Quick Hit Football has already made announcements about its deals with five current NFL players and five former NFL coaches. Today the game's development team has announced yet another deal that will bring nearly 100 former NFL greats to their game.

Players will be able to draft at least two of the virtual versions of these players in their games based on their own play style. You can check out the entire player list at the game's official web site. Quick Hit Football is currently in beta and is scheduled to officially launch later this year.

If you still haven't tried out Spore yet and don't feel like downloading the free version of the Spore Creature Creator, Electronic Arts has something planned for you. They are supposed to launch a Flash-based version of the creator in a 2D format on the spore2d.com web site. We say "supposed to" because at the moment the site doesn't appear to be working yet.

Once the site is operational, EA said you can use it to make any kind of creature you want or import any creature to the web from the Sporepedia site and even play with them in the Spore Creature Trainer mini-game. You can show off your 2D creature via email or your favorite social networking site as well.

Update: The spore2d.com site appears to be working now.

Last week we reported on the upcoming launch of Monopoly City Streets, a browser-based version of the classic board game that used Google Maps as the basis for the streets (including possibly your street and address). Since then the game has launched . . . and in doing so has hit a small problem; it's just too popular.

According to the game's official blog site, traffic for Monopoly City Streets has been far above their expectations. Their own stats say the game has gotten 1.7 million visitors "but the figure is likely far higher". As a result the development team has been doing some improvements on the back end and they plan to reset the entire game sometime this week.

Hasbro's flagship board game Monopoly has been adapted to the PC many times but later today (around 1 pm ET) a very different online only version of the game is scheduled to launch. Monopoly City Streets will allow players to compete against online opponents and will allow everyone to use Google Maps to build their real estate empire.

Yep, that means that you could buy your own street and possibly the house you live in as part of the game. You get $3 million of those great Monopoly dollars to start out with and you earn rent from those properties you purchase. You can build up your properties with better houses, hotels and other building to increase your rent and trade properties with other players. This online game is apparently designed to promote a new Monopoly board game and will be online for a limited time.

We talked about it a while ago, but unfortunately, Captain Forever was not intended for release to the public. While it has yet to enter its freeware stage, Captain Forever is now in pre-release for those that support the developer Farbs. What does this mean? Shill out $15 now and you will be labeled as a supporter, which will give you access to the full game the minute you donate as well as a supporter-only version later this year. Considering that we loved the game when we originally reported on it, this is a great deal.

For those unwilling to pay right now, the current version of Captain Forever will be released as freeware around the time that the new supporter version is released. The price to become a supporter will also hike up to $20, meaning that pre-purchase will give you a nice $5 discount. All this money goes towards the release of the next edition of Captain Forever as well as the next, unannounced, game from Farbs.

While the original Starsiege: Tribes first person shooter is available as a free downloadable title, wouldn't it be cool to just play the game on a browser. GarageGames and InstantAction plan to do just that very soon with their web browser based version of Tribes. We got a chance to play a beta of the Tribes browser game at PAX 2009 this weekend.

Basically if you played Tribes when it first came out almost 11 years ago you will be familiar with the browser based version. It's basically the same game with a few extra bug fixes, according to InstantAction reps. The game is also purely multiplayer (no bots here) so you and your friends will have to join servers and play in the game's massive levels, defend bases, build and repair turrets and items and more. In short it's going to be pure nostalgia fun.

But will there be more to come? While InstantAction already has a kind of spiritual successor to Tribes running on their servers (Fallen Empire: Legions) they did say that if the browser version of Tribes turns out to be a hit they could add new content to the game (the company now owns the rights to the Tribes franchise). There's no release date set for the InstantAction version of Tribes but based on our playtime it shouldn't be too much of a wait.