Free & Open Source Game Guide

[MrFlibble]

Well, seeing as how the game turned out to be a not very successful project commercially, and the company focused on developing completely different products and services altogether, I guess it's possible that they just didn't care enough to maintain a stable download.

On the other hand, it is mentioned on the site that they released the game for free because they thought it outdated for being a DOS programme. Now with DOSBox and other methods of running old software on new PCs, this is not a problem at all, and there has been a recent increase in interest in old games, including DOS ones, because of this. So maybe their link to an online store that still sells the game is a kind of an indirect way to get at least some small profit back after they decided to make the game freely available.

[MrFlibble]

I've just stumbled upon a rather obscure FPS game by a Brazilian studio, called Hades 2. It was released somewhere around 1999, and 10 years after, the developers, Espaço Informática, released the game as freeware.

Essentially, it's a 2.5D FPS that looks like Eradicator or, even more, Marathon and its sequels, with high-res sprites and a sci-fi/horror theme. It was obviously quite dated in terms of graphics when it was released, but it appears quite playable none the less.

Hades 2 Official Site

Hades 2 Screenshots

Hades 2 Official Full Download

[MrFlibble]

Advanced Strategic Command - a game modelled closely after Battle Isle 2200, with similar graphics (but in high-res) and a lot of improvements. It offers both a single-player campaign and mutliplayer mode.

Crimson Fields - another game inspired by the Battle Isle series with some differences (e.g. there is no base construction). There's a single-player campaign with a rather detailed, albeit pretty standard, story, skirmish mode and multiplayer battles.

Fire & Dragons - an Action/RPG game by an independednt Austrian developer, Nikolaus Gebhardt. There's also a sequel, Gates of Destiny.

[MrFlibble]

Leylines is a turn-based medieval fantasy strategy game influenced by Master of Magic.

[MrFlibble]

A new 0 A.D. Alpha release, codename Geronium, had been made available for download recently. New additions include:

• All-new dynamic territory design. Territories change throughout the game based upon the structures built by the players. Each structure has a "weight" given to it and a radius within which this weight has an effect based on the importance of that building, and these values affect borders proportionally. If one of a player's buildings falls into enemy territory due to shifting borders, then that building is planned to slowly lose loyalty until finally converting over to the enemy's side. (In the meantime, in 0 A.D. Alpha 7 it loses health instead, until it is destroyed.) This can be stopped and slowly reversed if the border shifts and the building comes back to the player's side.
  
• An all-new and unique Carthaginian civilization, including:
  
  • Revamped and rebalanced units.
    
  • A completely remodeled navy from the ground up.
    
  • New docks, Iberian, Celt, and Italian embassies, walls, and civic center.
    
  • Dozens of new shields, helmets, and props.
    
  • New Easter Egg objects, including a Tophet structure, Samnite warriors, and the Sacred Band of Ba'al.

  [*]A brand new main menu design with new dynamic background, depicting the Spartan tradition of mothers sending off their sons to battle, telling them to come back either with their shield or on it. (Thanks, dashinvaine!). The menu and UI graphics have all been converted to the new style.

  [*]Music and Sound:

  • Several new tracks, all composed and directed by Omri Lahav, most featuring live percussion and flute segments (Thanks, percussionist Dror Parker and flutist Marta Mc'cave!):
    
    • Brand new 0 A.D. main theme, "Honor Bound", to go with our new menu.
      
    • Carthaginian peace tracks "Peaks of Atlas" and "Mediterranean Waves", featuring live percussion with a North African feel.
      
    • "Dried Tears" defeat music track.
      
    • Re-done Hellenic peace track, "Forging a City-State", with awesome flute improvisation segment.

    [*]100+ new sound effects from the DynamiteSoundBytes team, dozens of them audible in-game.

  [*]New maps: Carthaginians Sandbox (Demo Map); Siwa Oasis; Cycladic Archipelago IV; Gallic Fields; Migration (Thanks, SMST, NOXAS1, and Yodaspirine!)

  [*]Miscellaneous: New Palisade objects, including wall segments, gates, towers, and spikes; Lion, Lioness, Infant Giraffe, and Giraffe death animations (Thanks, Athos!); A new "Islands" Random Map Script (Thanks, howlingflute!); An all-new Roman Triumphal Arch Easter Egg object (Thank you, Brightgalrs!); A LOTR-like Elven ship Easter Egg object (Thanks, Shield Bearer!).

[MrFlibble]

Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries is a rather unusual strategy game by Trevor Chan, which successfully combines intense real-time action with sophisticated economy, politics and espionage characteristic of turn-based 4X strategy games. You can not only fight your enemies, but also trade with other nations, infiltrate spies, sabotage, expand your borders by founding new cities, hire mercenaries, conduct research, and even fight mythical monsters and gain support of supernatural powers.

Originally released in 1997 (under the title Seven Kingdoms), the game's source code and all data except music had been released under the GPL license, effectively making the game freeware. The community immediately started working on an updated version, and the current build, 2.14.3, is available from Windows and Linux.

Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries Project Homepage

Seven Kingdoms Wiki

Seven Kingdoms copyright information

Download Seven Kingdoms 2.13.0 and subsequent patches at SourceForge

Seven Kingdoms Encyclopedia

Seven Kingdoms FAQ

Seven Kingdoms Wikipedia article

Download Seven Kingdoms Demo at FilePlanet

Download Seven Kingdoms: Ancient Adversaries Demo at FilePlanet

[MrFlibble]

Just found a nice page: List Of Open Source Programs. It's not only games though, but also other open-source software as well.

[Edit] A few more links:

http://planet.freegamedev.net/

http://libregamewiki.org/Main_Page

[Edit 2] Here's another nice resource: Open Source Game Clones. It lists both engine recreation projects (original game data files required) and "games inspired by classics" to :)

[MrFlibble]

Just found there's a more than decent page dedicated to free games at TVTropes ^_^

[MrFlibble]

Recently an interesting game was brought to my attention called Conquest of Elysium II. It's a medieval fantasy turn-based strategy game not unlike Master of Magic or Warlords, with rather simple graphics but rich and diverse gameplay. It was released in 1997 by a Swedish studio who would later create the Dominions game series, and had been updated numerous times since. Eventually Conquest of Elysium II (the "II" in the title denotes that this is the Windows-compatible version 2.x) was released for free and is available for Windows, Linux and MacOS.

In the game, the player can choose from about twenty character (leader) classes, each with unique attributes and playing style, and sets on a quest to conquer and subjugate all opponents. The game can be played either against the AI or other players in hot-seat mode. The game world is randomly generated each time, and additional parameters can be set like society types which define what the environment will be like and what objects and neutral monsters will be present on the map.

Conquest of Elysium II Official Home Page

Conquest of Elysium II Review & Download at Shrapnel Games

Conquest of Elysium II Wikipedia article

Conquest of Elysium II TVTropes article

[MrFlibble]

Here's yet another nice website which maintains quite an impressive database of free games:

http://www.curlysworldoffreeware.com/

[MrFlibble]

Continents is a turn-based strategy game written in Java that was heavily inspired by Master of Magic.

The project was abandoned back in 2003, being very close to completion. The most recent version is beta v0.98, downloadable from the links below:

Archived copy of the Continents project page at Oocities.org

Archived copy of the Continents project page at ReoCities.com

Download Continents at FilePlanet

[MrFlibble]

Recently I've read a post at Abandonia Forums about an old-style top-down RPG called Realmz, which was originally developed for Mac computers in mid-nineties, then ported to PC in 1999. In 2008, the developer has released the game fro free.

Realmz: "Abandoned Freeware" RPG

Well this is most peculiar case.

Realmz is indie Mac/Windows RPG from 1994' date=' with official scenarios/expansions being released up to 2002.

It was developed by a guy called Tim Phillips and published through his company Fantasoft.

(He also published some games for other Mac Indie Developers, including the original Exile Trilogy by Jeff Vogel.)

In November 2008, Tim Phillips released the full version of Realmz (Mac & Windows) as a free download. Plus the registration numbers for the commercial scenarios/expansions made available to everyone on the Realmz Yahoo Group.

However, Fantasoft's website has since expired.

Links:

Realmz Wiki Page

Fantasoft Website (Expired)

Archive of the Site

The official website is down but has a functional mirror, which can be found here. The links at the downloads page there are broken though because they still point to the old website, but the files are present on the site. The correct links are as follows:

Realmz v7.1.2 Demo for Windows

Realmz v7.1.2 Demo for MacOS

Windows version registration codes

MacOS version registration codes

Realmz Version 7.x.x to 7.1.2 Update for Windows

Realmz Version 7.x.x to 7.1.2 Update for MacOS

Realmz Version 7.1.2 to 8.0.7 Update for MacOS

[MrFlibble]

Regarding Seven Kingdoms, I've just noticed the (more-or-less recent) news at the 7kfans website that the team has been able to negotiate the issue around the soundtrack for the game which, until recently, was not available for free distribution:

7KAA Music Now Available

December 4th, 2011 the3dfxdude Posted in Seven Kingdoms | 1 Comment »

Thanks to Bjorn Lynne’s generous offer, we worked out the details, and now have the music freely available for use with the game again. I hope all of you can support him in his latest work where possible.

And those who have asked in the past, and got turned down, thank you for your patience. We really wanted to work this out properly, that is why we always had tough responses.

Please note that the music is NOT GPL or public domain. The music may not be modified or re-recorded. It can only be used as intended with the game.

Here you may download the music, that can then be applied to your GPL version of the game. In the future, we will offer complete downloadable packages. Note that some linux distributions might choose not to include the music, so you may still get the music here if that is the case.

Download 7KAA Music (.zip) (.bz2)

[MrFlibble]

I of the Enemy: Ril'Cerat is a free stand-alone prequel campaign to I of the Enemy, an oldschool science-fiction real-time strategy game.

Download I of the Enemy: Ril'Cerat from Brothersoft Games

Download I of the Enemy: Ril'Cerat from FileForum

The manual for the game in Microsoft Word format can be downloaded from the official downloads page (Wayback Machine archived copy).

[MrFlibble]

Special Agent - a classic platform game inspired by Apogee's Secret Agent. Thanks to Scpm of 3D Realms Forums for mentioning this one! ^_^

[MrFlibble]

Knights of War - a trun-based strategy in a medieval setting that follows the footsteps of Heroes of Might and Magic series. There are no fantasy elements in this game though.

Pyrrhic Tales: Prelude to Darkness - a party-based 3D CRPG that was originally released in 2001 and had been made free to play for the general public since by the developers.

ShadowFlare: Episode One - a 2002 Western-type Action/RPG in the vein of Diablo series, however it had been developed by a Japanese company. Initially, all four episodes were sold, with only a demo of the game being available for free, but in 2003 the first episode was made free to download for the official website as a shareware episode.

[MrFlibble]

Just stumbled upon this really huge (and frequently updated) database of free games of all flavours:

Megazell's Free And Legal PC Games List

[MrFlibble]

Here's a few more nice gaming websites (mostly indie but not exclusively) with reviews, links and freeware, shareware & demo downloads:

ManifestoGames

Play This Thing!

Rampant Games

[MrFlibble]

After some confusion with a promotional Facebook/Steam giveaway, 3D Realms' Shadow Warrior has become permanently free on Steam.

[MrFlibble]

Not long ago I found an excellent blog dedicated to free and liberated games:

http://juegosliberados.blogspot.com/

It's in Spanish but it shouldn't be a problem really :)

In other news, Blizzard recently made its classic platform game, Blackthorne, free to download and play. You can get it here:

https://us.battle.net/account/download/?show=classic

Spiderweb Software decided to make their old Win16/Mac games free. This includes Exile: Escape from the Pit, Exile II: Crystal Souls, Exile III: Ruined World, and Blades of Exile. Take note though that they might be problematic to run on modern Windows versions, except the open source version of Blades of Exile (which was available before anyway) that is ported to modern operating systems.

Also here's a few free FPS titles that are probably worth checking out:

Beyond Life

Digmaan

Digmaan: The Aftermath

[X3M]

Congratulations on having the 6th tab completely for yourself. (If people have the 20 per page settings)

But you did an impressive job.

 

Now it's my turn to add something:

http://wz2100.net/

 

There we go. I was missing it all the time. And it is a classic, since it is from the last century no doubt.

[MrFlibble]

CodeRED: Battle for Earth and its sequel, CodeRED: The Martian Chronicles, are single-player precursors to Alien Arena.

• CodeRED: Battle for Earth: CodeREDBFE.exe
• CodeRED: The Martian Chronicles: CodeREDMC.exe

As far as I can tell, these are the final versions of both games (v4.0).

[Nyerguds]

Ah, I guess my link to Remar Games would've been more valid in this thread :P

A load of interesting shooters an puzzle games, all created with Game Maker, but nonetheless of exceptional quality.

I absolutely love the game Iji. It is amazingly deep for a platformer shooter game. Interestingly, its default ending is pretty bad, and there's a better ending unlockable by making a certain different choice ingame. Both endings are equally powerful, however. Brilliant game.

[Matthias M.]

I recently found some that really look like AAA I want to try out soon

• http://www.zeroballistics.com/
• http://www.thedarkmod.com/
• http://www.warsow.net/

and some more retro like, but with a twist, written in Lua

• http://tangramgames.dk/games/mrrescue/
• http://stabyourself.net/mari0/

[MrFlibble]

If you're into modern games in retro style, you should definitely visit Locomalito games.

The Dark Mod is a stand-alone total converison that recreates Thief on the Doom 3 engine.

Warsow is an arena shooter game on the modified Quake 2 (IIRC) engine. It's been around for quite a while, with the development going on since early 2000s. Personally I don't like the artistic style of it very much but taking the engine into account it should be quite playable. The art quality is also good without doubt.

[Edit] I just checked a recent gameplay video of [Warsow, and it looks quite amazing. Last time I played it was v0.2-something, and it was already quite good-looking back then.