Free games thread

Need for Speed World
In September 2010, they made the game free2play since they hit 1 million members. Quite fun.

http://world.needforspeed.com

Who likes getting games for free (and legally)? Let's share some good free games, no matter how large or small, new or old, or whether they were originally free or only became free later. The point is let's all enjoy some games without paying any money.

First up there's a programme called Tiggit that wants to be the Steam of free games. It's a very simple open-source programme for installing free games (and some demos) without having to trawl through the internet for them. Currently has 349 games including Bungie's (of Halo fame) Marathon, Ben Croshaw's (of Zero Punctuation fame) point 'n' games, Cave Story, Knytt and other well known and not so well known free games.


I haven't played it in ages but assuming they haven't changed it much TrackMania Nations Forever is a really fun online racer. What's great is the custom track support. There are so many user-made tracks you'll never be finished playing for them and there is a massive variety in there. It's not a typical racing game. One crash will not make you lose the entire race. You are competing for the best time and can reset back to the start as many times as you want to keep trying to push your way up the rankings before the round ends. Sometimes just being able to figure out how to finish a track is hard enough.


Psi-Ops was a decent shooters that has been released as ad-supported freeware. If you can't stand the idea of ads in your loading screens you can steer clear but otherwise it's a commercial-grade shooter you can now get free.
Edit: I had Far Cry here but the promotion is actually closed. Sorry about that.


Some real classics here: the original Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn, Red Alert and Tiberian Sun have all been released for free by EA. To make the games as good as possible I'd recommend also installing Nyergud's patches. Command & Conquer v1.06 and Red Alert v3.03 are not official patches but they represent years of fan effort to bring the games up to spec. On the same site you can also find mods to enable windowed mode and online play for these old games, but you probably should mess with those unless you know what you're doing.


Similarly you can download GTA 1 and 2 straight off of Rockstar's website. Anyone else remember playing these and swapping out the GTA disc with a CD to get whatever tunes you wanted to play over the car radio in the game?



One last thing. I made this for some friends but I don't expect the traffic from here to overload my Dropbox. It's a little pack of free horror games. The first three are 3D, small, to varying degrees randomly generated and already fairly well known. Slender, SCP - Containment Breach and SCP-087-B.

Containment Breach has you trying to escape an underground facility where powerful creatures/artefacts are stored and of course everything is trying to kill you. If there are any Doctor Who fans here the main creature you're trying to avoid is basically a Weeping Angel; it only moves when you're not looking at it or when you blink (the game has a blink meter) and moves incredibly fast as soon as you look away so you have to keep looking at it while trying to reach the nearest door to get it between yourself and the creature.

Slender is similar but in some ways the opposite. You are dumped in a forest and trying to avoid the Slenderman who also doesn't move when you are looking at him but you must avoid looking at him because if you stare at him too long you die.

SCP-087-B deals with a particular creature and lots of stairs.

The other two games in the pack were made by Japanese devs using RPG Maker. They're both 2D horror adventure games and much more story-based than the 3D ones and feature actual characters and dialogue and such. Ib is especially good though it's the least scary game in this pack. It's about a girl who goes to an art gallery with her parents and then things go a bit Silent Hill.

The other one is called Ao Oni (roughly that means blue troll). It's about a group of students who go to explore an abandoned mansion and get chased by a large violet-coloured monster.

Download link for the pack.