More freeware goodness

You forgot Cave Story! 😃

http://www.miraigamer.net/cavestory/

Awesome. I'm going to try a couple of these tonight. I didn't know there were so many freeware indie games out there.

Dark Nation wrote:You forgot Cave Story!

Cave Story is well-known enough that I decided not to add it. Still, I suppose it doesn't hurt.

Also, a couple shmups I forgot to add the first time:

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eXceed 2nd Vampire REX- Pretty fun Ikaruga-style vertical shump. It has only 4 stages, but a lot of fun nonetheless. Aim for an eXceed ranking!

Download: http://www.tennen-sozai.com/eXceed2nd-rex/eXceed2nd_REX_tri001.zip

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Blue Wish Ressurection- Vertical shmup with manic tendencies, though not quite a curtain-fire game. Has an interesting system where getting hit will remove a bomb from your stock instead of killing you outright.

Download: http://www004.upp.so-net.ne.jp/x_xgameroom/Works/works.html
(Contains the main games page with links to the creator's older shumps, which are worth playing as well!)

http://www.armageddongames.net/forums//thread/96306/

DarkDragoonX wrote:
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Missing - A first-person adventure game (think Deja-Vu) that has you exploring an old hotel, trying to find out what happened to your missing family. An amazing game, definitely a must-play.

Download: http://www.studioeres.com/ccount/click.php?id=2

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This game delivers. Thanks for posting this.

Man, that Jabberwock game is a blast. You know how to tell that it's a really fun game? My hand is killing me. Is there a translation patch for the game and/or manual anywhere? It'd be nice if I knew what all these books and orbs and whatnot did.

Also, I'm surprised that you could mention Noitu without mentioning another fantastic Konjack game: Chalk. It's a weird sort of drawing shmup. Maybe? It's a lot of fun. Found it on Something Awful just the other day.

http://www.konjak.org/chalk.zip

EDIT: Is anyone else having an issue with Jabberwock, where upon resuming a saved game after closing the program, none of the controls, except for movement, work?

{DSG}DarkRaven wrote:Man, that Jabberwock game is a blast. You know how to tell that it's a really fun game? My hand is killing me. Is there a translation patch for the game and/or manual anywhere? It'd be nice if I knew what all these books and orbs and whatnot did.

Also, I'm surprised that you could mention Noitu without mentioning another fantastic Konjack game: Chalk. It's a weird sort of drawing shmup. Maybe? It's a lot of fun. Found it on Something Awful just the other day.

http://www.konjak.org/chalk.zip

EDIT: Is anyone else having an issue with Jabberwock, where upon resuming a saved game after closing the program, none of the controls, except for movement, work?

I haven't gotten around to playing Chalk yet, to be honest. I should stop putting it off, but I just haven't been able to work up the will to actually play the damn thing.

As for Jabberwock, I don't know what's going on with the control bug you're experiencing... I haven't encountered it, myself.

As for a translation, there is none, but I can give you the quick and dirty instructions:

Esc: View the map and collected items(once you get it).
z:[b] FIre bullets. Hold down z to strafe.
[b]x: Deploy a shield that blocks standard bullets. Requires an item you get by clearing the either the first screen, or the screen directly south of the first screen (can't remember exactly). uses mana, and mana does not regenerate while the shield is active.
c: Allows you to dash once you have obtained the boots. Drains mana.
Shift: Hold to slow down time and dodge tough bullet formations. Drains mana while active.
Left Ctrl: use a yellow magic book, functions as a smart bomb. Limited supply.
Space bar: Hold space bar to draw a magic circle in front of your character. Once the circle is drawn, continue to hold space and you can move around the room while your circle remains stationary. Pressing z while holding space will fire a large red beam attack towards the circle. Bosses have a similar attack, with a blue beam. By attacking their beam with yours, you can push the bosses' beam back until your beam begins to hit them, causing a counterattack and doing massive damage.

Boss rooms are the rooms with an nothing but an orb with a symbol on it. Find the book with the matching symbol and return to the room, and you can fight the boss. Defeat enough bosses and the teleporter to the final boss will become active in a certain room.

No betrayal at Krondor? I havn't played much so far, but I don't think I could name a better rpg for the pc. Did I mention it's free?
http://www.alt-tab.net/games/betrayal-at-krondor/download/

If you haven't played Cave Story by now, something is wrong with you.

I haven't played cave story. And yes, something is wrong with me...:googly:

I'm slowly working on a long list of games and sadly, cave story is not one of them atm.

I'm not alone! Not played Cave Story myself, Probably will at some point though.

I'm more into third-person adventure games myself. Can't stand first-person, for some reason. As such, the Reality-on-the-Norm, Chzo Mythos and Ben Jordon series all appeal to me. Not all of them are of the highest quality (especially some of the RoN ones) but most of them are pretty enjoyable.

anyone say Alien Carnage? =D its freeware.

Darth Marsden wrote:Chzo Mythos

Aye, the XDaS series is top-notch. Trilby's Notes in particular I found to be a great game. And for those of you who are far too lazy to just click Darth Mardsen's link, the XDaS series is a series of third-person horror adventure games centering around a strange artifact and an otherworldy being named Chzo. It starts with 5 Days a Stranger and continues through 7 Days a Skeptic, Trilby's Notes, and 6 Days a Sacrifice.

For more third-person adventuring goodness, check out:

Duty and Beyond - Piet will let nothing stop him as he travels across the world on his mission. What is it, you ask? To deliver... a PIZZA!

Download: http://new.bigbluecup.com/games.php?action=download&game=747

Wizardry fans praise be to ala moo moo! I stumbled upon this monstrosity completely by accident and was blown away. Any description I could give would not do it justice. You just have to see it for yourself.

http://www.angelfire.com/magic2/madgod/CosmicForge.html

Contra-dextra avenue:This will only work if you own the complete archives. I know, it sucks for me too.

This topic wins for mentioning La-Mulana.

Okay, so, Jabberwock is working now. But I still have no idea what certain items do. All the ones with controls that can be mapped are okay. I get that. But some of the ones on the right, by the boots and the shield, I don't know how to, or if I can use them.

Here's a cut and paste of a write-up i did on a freeware game called Warsow for Something Awful. It's a great game, and I highly suggest trying it out.

- - - - - -

It only seemed like a few years ago that games like Quake and Unreal Tournament were where people got their kicks fragging online. Fun, wasn't it? Unfortuniatly, it seems like good deathmatch games are getting harder and harder to find, since everyone and their sister would rather pretend they're hunting terrorists with an AK47 or pretending like they're saving private ryan on the beaches of normandy.

Well, boys and girls, dust off your rocket launchers. The deathmatch game is back with a vengance. It's called Warsow, it's the best deathmatch game that's been released in the last couple of years, and it's 100% free. The 0.3 beta has just been released, and it's the single biggest content update to the game yet, with over 20 awesome maps, over a half dozen game modes, and more :awesome: than you can shake a stick at.

As you can tell from the screenshots, it's a pretty different looking game compared to other deathmatch games. The development team describes the game as a cross between Quake, Unreal Tournament and Jet Set Radio, and it's pretty easy to see why. It has the fast movement and gameplay of Quake, the dodging and weird weapons of Unreal Tournament and the grinding and looks of Jet Set Radio.

Warsow, at it's core, has a few unique things that seperate it from ordinary deathmatch. First of all, it has a unique movement system. It borrows heavily from Quake 3 CPMA in that it features strafejumping, bunnyhopping and circlejumping, but in addition it features a brand new "trick" button that allows you to dash forward, grind up inclines and jump off walls retaining all of your speed. Second of all, it has a neat two-tiered ammo system. Your gun starts with weak ammo when you pick it up, and requires you to pick up ammo boxes for maximum power. This might seem annoying at first, but you soon realize how it gives you an extra way of clamping down on yuor opponent. Your opponent love to electrobolt you from halfway across the map? Take his EB ammo and his ammo will be slower and less effective. Maybe he loves to get in your face and zap you with his lightning gun? Steal the lightning ammo, and watch as his formally straight beam flops around like a noodle. It doesn't make your weapons ineffective, but it might mean the difference between fragging and being fragged in an intense battle.

Also, some of the game modes have gotten a neat little twist. CTF now features a timer, which counts down every second you have the flag. If time runs out, you drop the flag, and to add more time to the flag, you must have a teammate stand on a button that adds time to your flag. Clan Arena* also has a neat class based twist to it, in which depending on which class you pick, you only get strong ammo for two particular guns. In addition to those two, Warsow features normal FFA, 1on1 duel, team deathmatch and race to the finish gametypes, with instagib variations if you go for that sort of thing.

*If you don't know, Clan Arena is a wickedly fun round based gametype, similar to Counterstrike, where two teams spawn with all the weapons, health and ammo they will ever get for the rest of the round. If you die, you sit out for the rest of the round until one team has no more players left.

Warsow has something for all skill levels. Want to learn the movement? Race, FFA and Clan Arena it up until you learn some movement skill (if you have no idea how to do the movement, you can watch what keys people are pressing by cg_showpressedkeys 1 and learn by example). Want to prove your mettle and show you're the best of the best? Join the very active duel scene and get stomped by gxr and woodyfly 25 to -2 and have a blast while doing so. Or maybe play some pickup TDM or CTF and dominate the other team because you stole the quad out from under their noses. Add a great community, and you have one wickedly addictive and fun game. Oh, and for you Linux neckbeards, it runs on GNU too, and a Mac port is in the works for you folks that think differently.

It's been far too long, soldier. Time to reenter that arena and show those 'tacticool' pansies where the REAL action is.

Warsow 0.3 mirrors (This is probably what you want to click on)
Warsow.net homepage
Warsow Movement Tutorial
#warsow, Global Warsow IRC
#warsow.na, North American Warsow IRC

Need some introductary tips? Here are a couple of videos that you might appriciate:
Warsow Movement School Lesson 0 (Dashing and Walljumping)
Warsow Movement School Lesson 1 (Bunny Jumping)

And some demos I made shortly after 0.3 came out:
Some basic tricks on WDM1
A practical trick on WDM3
Being a speed freak for dummies on WCA1

Darth Marsden wrote:IChzo Mythos

Thank you for this. I just finished the second game.. Holy fucking hell, I'm still trembling slightly.

You're welcome. There's also some text adventures that he released in the run-up to 6 Days, which you can grab from his site, and he's also done some other awesome games - try out his Duke Nukem 3D mod, if you're into that sort of thing, or his Flashback-style 1213 series. All located here.

Other free adventure games that I think are awesome: Da New Guys, Maniac Mansion Deluxe, the King's Quest VGA series and Robert Redford Saves the Day. 😉

AlexMax wrote: A whole bunch of stuff about Warsow.[/url]

Thanks for the heads up on that game, as it seems really awesome... I'm definitely going to give it a look!

I think the climax of my pre-gaming joy is when I'm browsing the internet on a day like today only to find a thread dedicated to sharing the best freeware games, especially RPGs. I have this surge or excitement flowing through me right now, and I can't wait to start playing these games. Thank you all.

BTW, I miss making my own RPG Maker XP game. If only I had kept it up (and didn't lose my old HD) I wonder how far along it would've been by now.

These are browser-based but still free so I'm discussing them and YOU CAN'T STOP ME 😡

Both games have anti-poopsocking mechanics built in so you only need a limited amount of time per day to play.
Urban Dead
http://www.urbandead.com

This game is zombies vs. survivors. You get one "action point" every half-hour, with a cap of 50 action points (also individual IPs can only access the game a limited number of times per day so having multiple characters won't help you circumvent it). Therefore, you reach your maximum potential every 25 hours. I can't say much personally about the human side of the game because I rolled zombie from the start. It really doesn't matter because you can get revived as a zombie and survivors become zombies when they die, so if you change your mind it's relatively easy to swap sides.

I like the game because I only have to spend about 10 minutes on it each day and it's kind of fun to imagine I upset someone by killing them in their safehouse.

Hints if you play:
The game is EXTREMELY frustrating at the start because of the point cap. The first two character levels are pretty much the cruddiest to get because you have no bonuses to your movement or weapon usage. I think survivors have a bit of an advantage since they have more to do but I don't know.

If you start zombie I would recommend ignoring the guides on the wiki that tell you to increase your to hit and just go ahead and get Lurching Gait when you finally manage to claw your way up to 100xp. This makes movement consume 1 point instead of 2 and pretty much doubles the amount of turns you have in a day.

There's a bunch of information about the game on its wiki that is linked from the main page and I've said about all I want to because I saved the best for last.

The Kingdom of Loathing
http://www.kingdomofloathing.com

This is an RPG with a VERY tongue-in-cheek sense of humor. As far as I know every item has some kind of pop-culture (usually nerd gaming culture) reference. With the help of the wiki that is linked from the main page, you should be able to beat it easily within a month (new content is being rolled out in about 22 days so you might not get it squeezed in before then and after that I imagine the wiki won't be as much help for a few weeks). The fun part is the game has a pretty good New Game+ mechanic.

Whenever you beat the game, your stuff gets dumped in storage and you get to keep a skill that you learned. You have limited access to the stuff for a while, but the truly hardcore can bank stuff in such a way that it is possible to beat the game in a single day.

Basically the entire point of the game is like any other online RPG: stat building and dick waving. There are several trophies that can be obtained for achieving certain feats; from time to time the game is changed such that a trophy can't be obtained anymore and suddenly you possess a badge of honor that shows you were there back then. Furthermore, there exists hardcore and pathed ascensions, which allow you to greatly increase the challenge with much better rewards when you beat the game and more bragging rights.

The anti-poopsocking measure is defeatable through effort. Your unit of turns is called "adventures". You get 80 on your first day (this is changing in the new content) and every night at rollover (approximately 10:30 - 11:00PM Central) you are allotted 40 more adventures, up to a maximum of 200. Clan equipment can bestow about 12 extra adventures per day. Food and booze items can also bestow more adventures but you can only consume so much per day. With careful planning and about 10-15 ascensions under your belt you can have enough junk banked to beat the game in 1 or two days, that's about 900-1000 adventures for a really casual speed ascender I think. Multiple accounts are perfectly acceptable in this game, so if you just can't get enough knock yourself out.

This is currently my favorite game and I highly recommend it.

Hints if you play
If you don't mind spoiling the puzzles (some are kind of wacky and don't really have clues) read the wiki for an hour or two before you play. Get familiar with the classes, their skills, and the mechanics of the game. Each class has a main stat, but Moxie is important for EVERY class since it determines whether monsters can hit you or not. Because of this and how important booze/food is to getting done in a reasonable amount of time, I strongly recommend starting your character as a Disco Bandit and ignoring all of the skills until Level 5, when you can buy Advanced Cocktailcrafting. Every day you should have enough booze to get yourself falling-down drunk and 20-40 extra adventures easily. Make the booze at the beginning, then when you run out of adventures drink it all since you can't adventure while drunk. By the end of my first run I generally had 100+ adventures to spend every day.

You want to start doing hardcore ascensions as fast as possible in my opinion. Skills you make permanent on a non-hardcore ascension can't be used on hardcore ones, but skills you hardcore permanent are available on softcore runs. There's about 8 skills you really need to make ascensions take a reasonable amount of time, and doing softcore runs will just increase the amount of time before you can try to challenge yourself with hardcore pathed runs.

Voice of experience: Sauceror foodmaking skills are worthless without Pastamancer foodmaking skills. It is not wise to make your second attempt a hardcore teetotaler Sauceror, since you will have to farm for all of your ingredients and that usually leaves you either breaking even on adventures or at a slight loss; the teetotaler path further complicates things by restricting your access to booze which fairly early in the game you can daily get 4 boozes for 4 adventures to gain 10-25 adventures. I am in the middle of my second ascension and I'm about to drop my teetotaler path because I am not certain I can finish the game on time without the help of booze.

I'm early in my run so money is scarce but you can always message my character Sitten Spynne for advice. If I happen to have an item on hand that I know will be useful to you I will send it to you. Don't bother trying to pay me back I am on a hardcore run and I won't be able to get your payment for the next few ascensions because I have about 3 more left after this one before I chill out.

AtmaWeapon wrote:
The Kingdom of Loathing
http://www.kingdomofloathing.com

This game is awesome.

There is a translation to Engage to Jabberwock out:

http://www.romhacking.net/trans/1129/

Check it out 😊

Ah, a translation, eh? Very nice.

Also, those of you who enjoyed Missing (Daarksied) will also enjoy another first-person adventure game recently released by the same group:

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Fedora Spade - A detective-themed first-person adventure stylized after old 8-bit adventure games. To be released episodically, with episodes 1 & 2 already out! Great writing and a perfect gumshoe vibe make this game one you shouldn't miss. The first episode is rather short, quite easy, and is essentially there just to get you used to the game engine. Episode 2 is much larger and more difficult. But stop reading this and go download it! Go, go, go!

Download page: http://studioeres.com/games/fedora

www.binaryzoo.com has 4 or 5 great freeware games that are extremely addictive.

http://www.binaryzoo.com/games/index.htm

I just spent the evening playing the Chzo series, and damn, it did not disappoint. The third game in particular has great atmosphere - it started storming here as soon as I'd started playing, and I found myself looking over my shoulders more than once.

Missing was fun as well, though short, and the plot has the occasional hole. The ending is solid, which I can't say for the Chzo series.

My favorite adventure game of all time is Spider and Web, by Andrew Plotkin. Definitely worth a play, if you don't mind Interactive Fiction.

DarkDragon wrote:Missing was fun as well, though short, and the plot has the occasional hole. The ending is solid, which I can't say for the Chzo series.

I was disappointed with 7 Days A Skeptic until I played 6 Days A Sacrifice, but then I was very confused about what actually happened there. It tied up a lot of loose ends from the other games, but left me reasonably confused at the final scene. It almost deserves a thread of it's own to discuss.

Desktop Tower Defense is an excellent Flash based tower defense game, much like those commonly found whilst playing Warcraft 3. It has several levels of difficulty, as well as some fun and challenge modes as well.

The ending to 7 Days a Skeptic is just plain silly, and is the kind of humor that the author, Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw, has strewn throughout the rest of his site. The Chzo Mythos series was supposed to be serious, but I guess he couldn't resist slipping back into old ways for that last scene.

Other free adventures located here, here and here.