Freeware-Friday posts

Sometimes, the best game is the one that is so incredibly simple that you wish you had thought of it yourself. Rocky Memphis is such a game. It has plenty in common with gravity-defying platform VVVVVV, but not because it follows the same mechanics. Rather, Rocky Memphis follows strict platforming rules almost to the letter. What makes it great is the plethora of areas to explore, the excellently-done retro sprites, and the perfectly tuned difficulty that keeps you playing for just one more room. It's not exactly the most replayable game, but it doesn't have to be, and it knows it.

You're living at home with your loving wife and two children: a little boy and a little girl. The wife does groceries and cooks you dinner, the little boy loves sports and being mischevious, and the little girl loves her plushies and bedtime stories. It's like a sitcom from the 50s. However, you are being stalked by a Japanese chef who wishes to turn you into sushi. In most cases, this would be the plot to a horror flick (Sushi Slashers 2: Return of Sushi Chef). Here it is different, though: you are actually an octopus pretending to be a human. Thus the plot of Octodad is revealed, and both the story and gameplay lead to it being an incredibly hilarious, albeit short, freeware game.

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

Freeware games tend to follow a specific pattern. While they can be anything from proof-of-concept games (Dyson) to full-on, highly polished works (Iji, Cave Story), most have a distinctly retro air about them. And, of course, what is more retro than going to an arcade, laying down a few quarters, and blasting away at pixelated enemies while munching on a pretzel? Not much. Super Crate Box is a game in this tradition, and it has both an amazingly balanced core gameplay mechanic and a great sense of style. It's the first full game from Nijman and Rami's Vlambeer company, and it's a stellar freshman effort for the new company. In fact, thanks to its laser focus and balanced gameplay, it might just eat up more of your time than the latest AAA release.

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

Grand Theft Auto 2 is one of our favorite games. We've covered it here before on Freeware Friday (thanks to those generous folk at Rockstar) but we really can't emphasize enough just how fun it is. It seems we're not the only ones who seriously adore it, however, as an excellent multiplayer game bearing a striking resemblance to GTA2 was released recently. Subvein takes the top-down gameplay of the early Grand Theft Auto games, sticks it in a purely multiplayer environment, and sets it free. The result is a thoroughly enjoyable multiplayer experience that should be overlooked by absolutely nobody. If you enjoy multiplayer games whatsoever, you owe it to yourself to download and play Subvein.

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

One of the first games we ever covered on Freeware Friday was the incredibly detailed Dwarf Fortress. Despite having been absent for a while, we've still been keeping track of the best freeware games around, and one of them is a game which acts almost as a tribute to Dwarf Fortress' incredible complexity. Goblin Camp may appear to be a clone, but it's much more simple. It takes the incredible simulation of Dwarf Fortress and distills it to its core essence, removing a lot of the barriers to entry that have built up in eight years of development. Plus, and this is a big plus, the interface is much better!

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

We always love it when a mod team is brought into the game industry to make a retail-quality game. It's even better when said retail game is free. Continuing its extension of good will to all us PC folk, Valve has released a Source engine remake of the classic Unreal Tournament 2004 mod Alien Swarm. Developed by the original mod team, it's fascinating in that the entire game and code base are completely free. All you need to play is a copy of Steam and a Steam account. While some may dislike opening their computer to a DRM platform like Steam, Alien Swarm is such a fantastic game that it's hard to resist its siren call.

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

We've covered a few remakes here on Freeware Friday, and without a doubt all of them have been fantastic. However, we can't say that we've ever covered a remake of an Atari game. Thankfully, we can cross that checkmark off our to-do list with RobotzDX. A fantastic remake of a relatively (by today's standards, anyway) obscure Atari ST game called Robotz, it is a stressful and intelligent experience that easily inspires addiction. It also has procedural generation, which is always the way straight to our heart!

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

Old-school 2D shooters are, plainly put, amazing. There's tons of fun to be had from a simple, yet extremely challenging, shooter. From Raiden to Gradius to R-Type, there's plenty of room in the genre for newcomers, and that is exactly what indie title Hydorah is. There are very few indie games we could call classic, and even less in the realm of freeware. However, Hydorah, is one of those esteemed titles. While it is only the developer's second release, it is so polished and entertaining that it has set aside a place for itself among such incredible titles as Warning Forever or Cave Story. This is a game that deserves to be on everybody's hard drive.

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

We don't cover free-to-play games often on Freeware Friday, generally because they are bad. This column is, after all, for good freeware games. However, every once in a while, a game comes out of the blue and clocks us across the face with its quality, regardless of transaction status. League of Legends is such a game, and while it is not completely free (it sports microtransactions), it's excellent and offers free players enough variety to sidestep the problem of most free-to-play games. It is also, arugably, the best of the Defense of the Ancients (DotA) clones.

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

Games with a modular style to them always seem to draw players in like nothing else. Games like Super Metroid, Castlevania, or Shadow Complex. There's even a name for the genre: Metroidvania. Daniel Remar has made one of the best ones with Iji, but he's not leaving the genre quite yet. His first game was Hero, and he's made a new game that improves on it in every way. That game is Hero Core, and if you can stomach the retro-styled graphics, it's one incredibly good game. Hard, for sure, but great. It's also playable on just about any computer, and takes up almost no space at all, which makes it great for playing on the go. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.