Looking back at my recent posts I have decided that this blog is becoming too political, so I have decided to ignore the news for now and look for fun stuff. I haven't actually played any games on my pc for months, not that I dont like games, just its hard finding modern games that I like. Im one who can play UFO Enemy unknown and Doom to death, the only recent games that I own and have installed are Unreal, UT2k3, Doom III and Age of Empires II.
Because I use xp64 on my pc a lot of the good old dos games I used to play wont run, even under dosbox – which is a problem from windows 2k onwards im afraid. One of my favourite games of all time UFO Enemy unknown will install from cd but the actuall game wont run on my pc. Now if i were to admit to being a hard core computer user, I could boot up from dos on a floppy disk (yes ancient technology I know but it works!) mount the cd rom and play the game – but thats a lot of hard work just for one game. I decided to google it, see if anyone had fixed the problems I had come accross, since I used to play it loads under windows 98 and when we upgraded to XP none of my old dos games would run, let alone on my even newer xp64 box. This is where I stumbled into the world of abandonware. After a few hours of searching I had found UFO Enemy Unknown and decided to download it as the website said it supported windows xp. Im not sure of the legality of downloading it but as its abandonware and as I already bought the cd years ago – and still have that cd in my posesion – I dont see it being a problem.
The file downloaded was pretty much the game files so all I had to do was copy them accross to where I wanted to run the game from… D:\My Applications\Dos Games\UFO\ and it worked. It just worked, sound and everything (because im doing this from memory i cant remember if it just worked natively under x64's 32bit emulation, or if I had to use dos box. But thats not important, the important thing is it worked).
Well seeing as todays modern PC games – with a few exceptions: doom III, UT2k4 – are focused totally on graphics and less on game-play I decided to go on the hunt for some free ones online (not the abandon-ware ones mind you, the open-source free ones). My first port of call is sourceforge and I have found a huge list of games that look to promise some good game play. As I am not at home atm I am unable to provide a first person review of each game, so for now this shall have to provide as a preview and when I get home tonight I shall download the ones listed here and play them so as to write a comprehensive review on them.
From the description this sounds like it could be a fun game to play. I used to spend countless hours playing twisted metal in turns with friends and my sisters – so it could be classed as a good favorite of mine. It is written in C++ and python and although as far as I can tell they have only ported it to Linux because of the languages used to write it, it shouldn't be too difficult to port to other frameworks – if they don't have an x86 windows port I might try to compile it with native x64 support. The graphics aren't all that good it seems, but then again it was always the game play in twisted metal that kept me playing for hours on end.
Not a game on its own but the Irrlicht Engine really does look like something good. If you go to the engines website you can find a varied list of games that have been built using the engines base. I have included this here in the list because I shall be checking out some of the games that have been made using it and writing an article on that. Also I am bored of the useless collection of windows screen savers that come with xp, so I may use this engine to create some pretty ones all depends on how quick it is 
This one goes back to the beginning of this article my love of UFO Enemy Unknown and looks to be one of the first I shall download and try tonight. Im not too sure how well developed this is as it is still in beta. But from the screenshots it does look to be a pretty good representation of the UFO games, and the developers say that it is able to import the image maps from the actual game to provide an even better representation. Even though I am likely to play UFO Enemy Unknown over this, it does look to be an interesting game and so I shall give it a go and let you know what I think.
Next to UFO Enemy Unknown on my list of games I loved would be Duke Nukem 3D. I haven't been able to find this in recent years, although ages ago I managed to find a demo download which was basically the full first level. The last time I properly played this was on an N64 and since then I have only been able to find and play demo versions for the pc. Alas since getting an x64 pc I haven't been able to find a version of Duke Nukem that will run – however if this one doesn't run the source is available and so I may be able to port it to native x64 architecture – although I don't know too much about such things. In the past I have simply pressed compile and ran the executable it produced. The developers describe this as A cross-platform, OpenGL-rendered Duke Nukem 3D port which provides many new features for mod authors. So if it wont run under native 32-bit emulation I should be able to compile it for native x64. If this works I will be one happy bunny as I have tried numerous times this year to get a version of Duke Nukem working.
Summarized Scorched3D is a 3D remake of the popular 2D artillery game Scorched Earth. Scorched3D can be played against the computer, other players and remotely across the internet or LAN. I never played Scorched Earth, never even heard of the game to be honest, what attracted me to this one is the multiplayer function. Many a late night has been burnt up with me and Andrew playing Worms Armageddon and AOE II over the network, and if this provides some good game play then it may be added to our list of multi-player games. The problem with many PC games nowadays, is the fact that you need a fkn cd to play the game, so what if you want to play the game multiplayer on your computers on your network? You can't, unless you crack the cd! I don't know about you but this sounds like the game companies are fueling piracy… all the way though the UT series up-to UT2k3 you could install the game on any PC you owned and not need the cd when I found that UT2k3 wouldn't run without the cd the first thing I did was hunt for a crack! Fortunately the game makers discovered the dismay this caused the UT community and almost immediately released a no-cd patch for the game. Fortunately you don't get this problem with open-source 
Secret Maryo Chronicles
Described as a Classic Mario game like Super Mario World or Super Mario Brothers with an advanced Leveleditor and new Graphics based on SDL, written in C++. Im really interested in the level editor as I always liked the concept of being able to make your own maps for a game. I really liked the Mario Games on the NES and Super NES so being able to play similar on the PC and to be able to edit my own maps for playing is a really cool idea. The graphics look rather good, albeit in a cartoon style. But I'm all about the game play and if they have managed to make that even half of what the original was like then this should turn out to be a new favorite. Says it runs under linux and windows so we shall see if it runs on my x64 box if it does this looks from the screenshots to be a game I may play often.
From the description it sounds like this is a port of an old doom clone for Amiga. They say that it is OS portable, so I hope they have a x86 version for me to run under emulation. I don't know too much about this as the description was rather brief so all I can comment on is the screenshot that I have got hold of. From the screenshot this looks like a good old 3D FPS and if its based on doom then I'm interested to see what the game-play is like – seeing as I really liked the doom series right up to doom III (which I am having problems getting to run on x64). I shall be able to shed some light on this one and let you know wether its good or not, once I download and play it at home.
As you can see from the tiny selection I have posted above, the world of free open source games is pretty varied and of reasonable quality. Some of these projects have as many active developers as closed-source games and the quality of some can match if not surpass that of retail versions. I chose to ignore any games listed on sourceforge that didn't have screenshots in the main listing when I was browsing. However I am sure I must have missed a few good ones, mainly because Azerius didn't have a screenshot in the browse list either and although I really don't like that torrent program (Im a utorrent guy) it is of good quality.
I shall attempt to get some of the aforementioned games working tonight and get back here with an article explaining a) how i got them to work and b) reviewing how they play.
Free Open Source Games. Here is some more to “test drive”.
http://fossgamer.110mb.com/index.html