Abe's Free PC Game Dynasty (With Reviews!) - Vega Strike Reviewed!
 

Hello all and welcome to my newest project. Many people in my general age still like PC gaming, but the costs of new games begin to compete with marriage, mortgage, car, insurance, children, and such. One of the things I want to do is d/l and try out some free games, just to see if I like them or not.

I thought this would be a great idea for a dynasty. I can tell you what I am playing, give you links, give you overviews, and then give you an overall review at the end. I can also give you some other free games I've played, and what I thought of them. These are all normal PC games, and not things like browser games or whatnot. These are also generally not going to be casual games, like card games or anything. These are real games for real gamers, just free.

I just d/l'ed a game I've been wanting to try out for a while. I will install it and play it until I get bored or something else catches my fancy (which happens with great regularity). Here we go - The Battle for Wesnoth.

Looking forward to reading this. Always like a good free game.

Battle for Wesnoth

This looks like a fun strategy game in the vein of Fantasy General. What will I think? No clue!


For some of these games, unless they are complete, I generally want to know when the most recent edit was done, to see how current it is. Battle for Wesnoth? August 31, 2009 - just two days ago.

Wow, got my first comment really quickly! Read along!

I played through the tutorials. Looks pretty grokkable. I'll try to get some play in tomorrow.

cool idea for a dynasty. free games are great

I'm all over this thread. The reviews are really going to add a lot of value.

I've been looking for a cheap (or free) game to play -- preferably one that you can go away from without warning to tend to a crying baby. Thanks,for doing this, Abe, so I don't have to!

interesting idea, I'll be reading!

FM

+1

Keep us updated. Thanks Abe.

Really interested to hear you impressions on Battle for Wesnoth, I have looked at it from time to time.

Well geez, Abe, it's been a few hours already - don't leave us hanging! :)

Heh!

I am going to be loading up the first campaign in Battle for Wesnoth in a few minutes and playing it for a bit tonight.

I have decided to begin with the campaign, The South Guard. There look to be a ton of campaigns of different difficulties. This one has 7 or 8 scenarios.

Well, I have played the first three scenarios in this campaign. Let's talk about early impressions.

The game is simple enough. You can pick it up in ten minutes. No one will ever say that Battle for Wesnoth was complex. It's no Crusader Kings. Of course, it's not setting out to be.

You move figures, attack, etc. All in a turn based game system. We'll see for how long it holds my attention, but for now, I'm still playing, and just started scenario 4 of The South Guard campaign.

Oh, one thing I really do like is the Recall function. Any unit you have that survives a previous scenario can be recalled to the next scenario with all stats, XP, and skills. We all remember games where you could keep developing a few core characters, but I can't recall ever seeing one where every unit that survives can be recalled, at no cost, in the next scenario. I like it.

I've played it a bit, and have enjoyed it - closest comparison to a "big-name" game is the Heroes of Might and Magic series.

*cough*dwarffortress*cough*

I'm going to pick up my campaign again in a few moments.

I finished the campaign, so allow me to give you my official early review for Battle for Wesnoth. I'll keep playing it, and as I discover more late,r I'll update this.

Review of Battle for Westnoth





How do you review a game that is free? If you get just five hours of enjoyment out of it, isn't it still worth it, technically? I am going to give you what I think the replayability of the games are, so that you can get a handle on just how much you can get from it.

The Battle for Wesnoth was originally released in 2003, and it looks like it was released in 2001. The graphics are dated. Despite that, the game looks fine, because for the most part, PC graphics have not evolved in this past decade like they have in previous ones. Playing a 1987 game in 1996 would be hard. This is barely noticeable.




I thought the music was annoying, and I turned it off within an hour of play.

This is a turn-based strategy wargame. You move pieces across the board, then your opponent moves pieces, and so forth. When two pieces meet, combat begins based on a variety of rules in the game system. That's it. Simple enough.

In fact, if you check out the tutorial, you'll find yourself done in 10 or 15 minutes. The game is quite simple and easy to pick up.

You get gold every turn. The more villages you have flagged, the more gold you'll get. Units have a gold cost, and can only be recruited in forts and castles by your main unit's presence. They also have a gold upkeep. You can't find pots of gold on the map or gain it by defeating enemies, so you have to watch your resource intake.

Units have hit points, and some traits, and then a level and XP. As a unit levels up, they becom more powerful and gain new abilities. Some units can level into 2 o more things, and you can choose which you want. I leveled a spearman into a pikeman, and he still wasn't much. When I leveled him into a 3rd level Halbardier, however, he became a weapon of death. Dude had the first strike ability and dealt 20 damage a hit. Nasty.

Character have multiple attacks (usually). Some are close range, and some are range attacks. A character will deal a certain amount of damage, and have a certain amount of attacks. A Spearman might have a 5-3 attack with their spear. That means they attack three times, and deal 5 for each hit. Whichever way a unit it attacked, that is how it will defend itself. Some units have very weak close range attacks, or have no range attacks, so find the weakness and hit it.

Units also have traits when they are created, and skills that affect the game. There are only a few traits and units come with two. One is quick, and they move a bit farther, another has more hp, another hits more, etc. Then units have skills and abilities. There is one that heals and cure adjacent units each turn. When you level that one up o level 3, it gains the illuminate ability and makes adjacent squares day.

The game board moves through night and day. Two day, dusk, two night, dawn. Units are either lawful, chaotic or neutral. Chaotic units are at +25 at night and -25 at day to attack damage, lawful units are the opposite, and neutral units in the middle. If your scenario is underground, it is permanently night.

Units have various attack strengths and weaknesses. For example, a Knight has a lance with a piercing attack and a morning star with a smashing attack. The morning star does a lot more damage against skeletons. Find the right attack for an enemy's weakness and you can dole out some damage.




Here you can see Rhobryn's level, XP, HP, abilities (teleport), traits (strong,quick), movement left, and attacks with damage, # of attacks and type listed.


Units dodge more on certain terrain than on others. An elf in teh woods at night can dodge 70% of attacks that come its way. Exposed in a river or stream, you can usually hit a foe. Your horsemen are good on a plains, your pikemen good in towns, etc.

As a result, there are a number of factors you have to balance in order to attack. What is the dodge chance of your foe? How much damage and how many attacks do you get? What are your attacks range? What are your attacks characteristic vs their resistance? What time of day is it? What special abilities do you or your foe have? Attacking into a drain attack on defense means you might actually heal your foe instead of dealing damage. What ground are you on, for the counter attack?

Even though the game is simple enough, there is sufficient complexity here to make you think and play.

In the game, you can recall any troops that survive from one scenario in a campaign to the next. This costs 20 gold to do, but you usually begin the scenario with a large pot of gold, since gold can roll over from one scenario to the next with limitations. Troops that level up are going to be a lot better than new meat. Troops that you are given as part of a scenario have the loyal characteristic. That means they are gold free for upkeep, so treat them well and level them up, because they are worth it.

In the scenario I played, you have a couple of interesting things. At one point, I had to choose whether or not to ditch my elf allies and ally with bandits against the undead horde. I would lose my elf units, gain bandit ones, nad be able to recruit bandit-type units in the future. I stayed the course because my elves were awesome. Later, one of my captains ran back home to let everyone know what was happening and regaurd my town, because we were going to be gone longer. On his way, he has to fight some bad guys. If you recall units you have developed, then you do not get them back in the main scenario, because they have gone home, so I choose to use all fresh units. That was a nice difference. I also fought in a cave in one scenario, and found a bunch of trolls that I could ally with for some serious goldege. As a result, the campaign felt different, even though it had maybe 7 or 8 scenarios all in all. There were a ton of campaigns with radically different numbers of scenarios and difficulties, including the main campaign with 25 scenarios.

The game features hot seat and online multiplayer if you are interested.


In other news, I may not like BfW's math. I decided to reload an old save during a hard mission on this Isle of the Dead. My mermen had a 50% chance ot hit this bady guy and missed horribly they hit twice out of 12 attacks. That's odd, I think, so I reload to try again. This time, 4 out of 12., still low but close. I decide to try again, just to see - 7 out of 12. That's where I would expect to see it.

Throughout the rest of the scenario I save just before making attacks and then load and try again. The results were that I was regularly hitting lower than my %. I would hit 40% on a character with 70%, or 30% on one with 50%. The result was that I felt the actual hit percentages were much lower than the display percentages, but not on the counter attack. My opponent would hit their numbers on the counter. I would have a person with a7-% chance and four sims, three attacks each, only hit 4 times, despite math saying it should be more like 8-9. There were numerous examples of this.

This revelation greatly disturbs me. It means that the game may be cheating in favor of the foe, or that it has a problem with its basic mechanics

I'm not the biggest fan of the "been there, done that" fantasy that the game provides. Elves are sterotypical elves down to being good at archery, haughty, and tree huggers. Humans are every breed from bandits to nobles. Dwarves, orcs, undead, etc. All as you can imagine they would be, with no derivation. A bit more flavor would have been nice.

As a result, Battle for Wesnoth does have some dated graphics and some music that I really don't like that much. The gameplay is simple and easy to pick up, and there is some strategic depth here, but I doubt the simple mechanics can hold my interest for too much longer. I've played for about 6-7 total hours, and I want to play more, but how much more? 10 more hours? 5 more? 20 more? I can't say.

It's worth checking out, no question.


Overall: 3 stars outta 5

Battle for Wesnoth

Are you open to requests for free games to review? If so, UFO Alien Invasion is one that is intriguing to me and that I might pick up based on a good review. I've got other stuff that has me interested in my free time right now, but that one is sitting in my personal queue at the moment.

Obviously if you have no interest in playing this game then completely disregard this.

I do have that in my queue right now, but I'm playing through the 25 scenario campaign in BfW right now. Probably will get to UFO:AI soon.


In other news, I may not like BfW's math. I decided to reload an old save during a hard mission on this Isle of the Dead. My mermen had a 50% chance ot hit this bady guy and missed horribly they hit twice out of 12 attacks. That's odd, I think, so I reload to try again. This time, 4 out of 12., still low but close. I decide to try again, just to see - 7 out of 12. That's where I would expect to see it.

Throughout the rest of the scenario I save just before making attacks and then load and try again. The results were that I was regularly hitting lower than my %. I would hit 40% on a character with 70%, or 30% on one with 50%. The result was that I felt the actual hit percentages were much lower than the display percentages, but not on the counter attack. My opponent would hit their numbers on the counter.

This revelation greatly disturbs me. It means that the game may be cheating in favor of the foe, or that it has a problem with its basic mechanics.

I will add these paragraphs to my review.

I e-mailed my review to the main guy in charge of the project, and he said the rng is designed so that it can be streaky at times.

Review of The Ur-Quan Masters

I mentioned earlier that if I had already played a free d/l game, I would go ahead and give you a review. I have played this thing through like four or five times in the past three years.

The Ur-Quan Masters - Downloads

The UQM is done and complete. The Ur-Quan Masters is, for those not in the know, a virtually identical version of Star Control 2, one of the biggest classics from the 1990s PC era of dominance.

The game designers released the code from SC2, and a build was made quickly by fans. Today, UQM is complete, with only a few cosmetic changes (like music). You even have to use keyboard keys instead of a mouse as an input device.

How do I start to talk about SC2/UQM? If you;ve played it, then go d/l the new version and play it to death. Love it. If you haven;t where do I start?

I could start by stating that SC2 is awesome. It's not a game that is too much like anything else. It's really its own thing. I loves it! I could say is has the best and most fleshed out alien races of any sci-fi game ever, period.





Earth has been enslaved by the Ur-Quan.


So, what I decided to do was cut and paste from my review from my Top 100 games countdown.





Star Control 2 takes up where the original left off. The nasty Ur-Quan and their Heirarchy of Battle Thralls have destroyed the Alliance of Free Stars and imprisoned all of the races on their homeworlds unless they chose to be Battle Thralls as well.

You begin the game as the child of a deep space research team that was never found by the Ur-Quan. The research team discovered an old Precursor factory that built the framework of a spaceship, but there were not enough materials on the planet to build the whole vessel. You strike out for Earth with your only Earth Cruiser they had in tow.

You arrive to find Earth under a slave shield and the entire human race under it, except fora few hundred that man an Ur-Quan space station around the planet that the Ur-Quan and their Battle Thralls use as a refulling and resupply station.

After you convince the commander to join your quest to restablish the Alliance. You have to seek out your own allies and find what happened. You'll discover new allies. You'll find that some of your own enemies can be friends, some of yoru own friends can be enemies, and some races will switch from, one to the other.

In the meantime, you will also discover that an Ur-Quan splinter group called the Kohr-Ah are fighting with the main group, the Kzer-Za, and the winner will control the Ur-Quan destiny. The Kohr-Ah want to destroy all non-Ur-Quan life making them worse than your old enemies, the Kzer-Za Ur-Quand, who at least want you as fallow slaves or battle thralls.

If the game is allowed to go on too long, the Kohr-Ah will win the Doctrinal War and then begin annililating every race in existance. Therefore, you have a clock, but you don't know when the clock ends. There are few things you can do to extend the clock, but you will have a limited amount of time.

Meanwhile, you'll need to be collecting minerals. You'll be ssearching star systems for various mineral deposits and taking them back to the space station where you can swap them for fuel, crew, escort ships and modules. Your ship, as a framework, is modular and can be configured for different missions.

Here is the shipyard with a lot of escort vessels already for the ship:





If you lose your precursor vessel, you lose the game. If the Kohr-Ah exterminate life, you lose the game.

You can also shoot down monsters on some planets for biological data. There are a race of interstellar traders, the Melnorme, that will trade for your biological data and in return will give you fuel, tips, and upgrades for your precursor vessel.

StarCon2 is an amazing synergy of various games, all rolled into one. In addition to the resource gathering, and in addition to the political simulation, when ships get into combat you have to fight it out in a real time arcade style shooter.

Many people thought that this was a real attraction to the StarCon series. The developers took serious pride in balancing all of the ships. Every ship has two attacks, and each is different. All of the ships are balanced and useful in some situations.

Here, a Chenjesu ship and a Mycon ship are locked in combat. Sometimes there is a planet which acts realistically. You can whip around it for a speed increase or fall into its gravity well and hit the planet for serious damage.




The game has multiple paths to victory and multiple ways to screw up. Based on how and when you do things, various ending can occur. For example, a friendly people called the Pkunk will start heading towards their warlike and battle thrall distant cousins. Two times you can arrive and deadly their journey, but by the third time they head off to join their cousins, if you haven't started a civil war in their cousin's society, the Pkunk will be slaughtered and eradicated. Of course, you can win the game with or without the Pkunk, but that;s the beauty of the game.

The game has a serious sense of humor to it. The Spathi, who are a cowardly race, have created one of the fast ships in the galaxy. It fires B.ackwards U.tilizing T.racking T.orpedoes behind it. Yes, that's right, it fires BUTT missiles at enemies as it runs away.

There are several other reasons why I love StarCon2 so much. Let me list some of them:

StarCon has the most beleivable, realistic, fully fleshed out space faring races I have ever enountered in any game, period. Every race is fully fleshed out, from the evil and loving it Ilwrath to my favorite, the Spathi, to the f'ed up Orz and the tri-race, the ZotFoqPik.

The VUX are these disgusting slimey tentacled race-things, but talk to them about why they hate humans and listen to them go on and on about how humans are so ugly. It's amazing. The way they describe our physical appearance actually makes me understand why they would find us so repulsive.

The simple fact is that each race is balanced in its ships and its personalities (or not balanced , in the case of the Orz).

StarCon2 blends humor, politics, amazingly fleshed out races, resource gathering and real time combat and combines all of that on a "do-it-yourself" go out there and figure it all out game. It's truly a marvelous game.



Overall: 3.5 stars outta 5 for today, because the graphics are dated a bit, but it's still a great game.

I played Battle for Westnoth pretty much straight through today and I'm starting to tire of it. Perhaps the next game will begin soon. Of course, I decided to do the mega 25 scenario campaign, and that may be part of it.



So if I don;t do any more ,that will be about 20-25 hours of gaming for $0 and it stays on my puter if I want to load it up and play again laters.

The next game in my queue, is LinCity-NG.


LincityWiki

I just spent a few hours tinkering around with LinCity-NG:


Review for LinCity-NG


I had a lot of high hopes for this SimCity clone. It's been a while since the last SimCity of any quality, and there have been a lot of areas targetable for improvement. Even if the game doesn;t have all of the bells and whistles of SC4, a good city builder would be a lot of fun to play.

Unfortunately, LinCity is neither good, nor fun to play.







LinCity-NG is actually a fork from the original LinCity which had been developed for four years, and the developers decided to take the code and try again. Well, they need a LinCity-NNG.


After playing around with it for a couple of hours, I am done with this game. Let's move on to the next one!


Like many city builders, you have to build infrastructure like trash collecting, roads, water and power. Water is easy, and consists of only building a well every so many residents, and you'll have water. There are roads labeled "track" and then higher quality roads. Trains. Power. Trash goes to something called a "tip."

No police stations, but you can build Fire coverage. You get two type of schools to choose from. You build residential areas in a 3x3 grid already set up for you. You can build farms. You cannot build any industrial or commerical areas. Instead, you can build your own buildings.

The game is very production heavy. There are some coal seams and you can build Coal mines. You can build Ore Mines, Communes - which make charcoal, and a few other things like Potteries and Blacksmiths and Mills.

The result is a weird looking town. You have modern late 20th century things like a Recycling Center and modern power options next to a blacksmith, communes, and wells. And nothing commercial at all. No gas stations, no stores, nothing.




Where are they shopping?



I built my first city, and no one moved in. I couldn't even figure out what was wrong, so I just loaded a pre-saved city already in progress and built from it.

The game's sounds are virtually midi level with very poor sounds. In the music, an ambulance goes by, and I swear, it's the worst ambulance sound I've heard. It sounds like it was played on a child's instrument instead of a real one. Yuck.

The graphics are acceptable but dated. Totally looks 7-9 years old.


As a result, LinCity-NG is not worth your time. Even though it was updated in January with release 2.0, this is not done, as far as I am concerned. The dynamics are off, the documentation is poor or missing, the graphics are older, the music is awful, the gameplay is mismatched at best and downright befuddling at worst. Ick.

I didn't even get to the winning conditions, and one is supposedly evacuating all of your people in spaceships.


Overall - 1 outta 5 for effort.

What game is next in the queue?


hxxp://www.rtsoft.com/dink/download.htm

Let's just grab something random off the list.

I'm over two hours in and I'm more pleased with this than with LinCity-NG

5 hours in with Dink Smallwood is about 2/3s of the way through the game.

Played the heck out of Dink in the day. Absolutely had fun with the game, dated graphics, but, the storyline is enjoyable, all in all not always fun for everyone, but I had fun with it.

I just acquired the Light Sword in the Edge of the World, in case you remember it well enough to know where I am.

Just finished the game. Offical Time - 6:35, but that doesn;t include reloading after dying.

Review of Dink Smallwood

Dink Smallwood was released commercially by some independent developers back in 1997. After the initial press sold, the developer was not going to make more copies for sale, so it was released as freeware in 1999, and later the code was released.

Dink is an...odd...game to say the least. The game is basically an action RPG in the style of NES RPGs like Zelda. In fact, imagine Zelda with a few more RPG elements like XP, levels, and three stats, and you have Dink Smallwood, sorta. The first time I burned down a tree with a Fireball spell to reveal a hidden passage that held a heart Container, I felt the Zelda.





In this game, you play a Pig Farmer with delusions of grandeur who is forced by circumstance to be more than he is. You help out a variety of towns, and each time, more of the map opens to you. Eventually, you piece the Edge of the Word at the behest of the king, and eventually find the Big Bad and kill him in the Darklands.

The game looks bad, and I'm not going to cherry coat it. Even in 1997 it had old graphics. I'm warning you now, so if you d/l, you won;t say, wow, I never expected it to be this hideous.

The game's pseudo-midi music is barely noticeable, but one tune I liked, and I would turn it up for that one, and then back down again.

This game has a weird and wicked sense of humor. I laughed a few times. Dink Smallwood is trying to get his bone on, and there are many chances to flirt and ask out the ladies of the kingdom, all to no avail. At the same time, there are some serious events that happen too, and between the laughter and the severe nature of some events, the game feels weird.





The gameplay is okay, but not great. The reach of the character is poor in relation to his weapon, so the actual fighting mechanic is no great shakes. There are bows, swords, and boots that are weapons, and I would have loved a hotkey that allows you to switch between a bow and a sword while fighting, so you would not have to got into your inventory to switch things.

The game is short. I started it and finished it in one day. Granted, that day was a holiday, but still, just one day of play. There is also virtually no replayability to the main game, but there are add-on games that have been added by the modding community, including one Monkey Island...

I don;t want to spoil the game for any who want to play it, so I am steering clear of major spoilers.

One problem with the game was severe backtracking. if you get stuck in the early part of the game, just go to places you've already been to, and then you will find a screen where a character is now doing something, and you unlock the next thing to do.

Note that there are a lot of character development pieces for random characters that have nothing to do with the game whatsoever.

Kudos for having unique monsters (except for dragons) instead of your normal run of the mill monster. Battle for Wesnoth could learn from that.

Anyway, d/l it and enjoy it for what it is worth, a short, action-RPG with a Zelda feel and a weird humor style.


Summary: 2 stars outta 5.

What game is next at bat?

Yo, Frankie!

I haven;t played a platformer in a while. Will I still like it?

Yo Frankie! - Apricot Open Game Project - Yo Frankie! - Apricot Open Game Blog

One of the reasons why I chose it because it looks like it has great graphics. We'll see, but that's a great start after some of these more recent games like LinCity-NG and Dink.

Review of Yo Frankie!


This game is a pretty platformer that was created by a university last year in Amsterdam as a project, and then released for free. It seemed like something interesting, so I went to take a look.

You are playing the part of a squirrel called Frank. You are to explore the world, you can attack, jump, pick up and throw items. The graphics are really strong and the world features enemies like rats and sheep for you to attack and kill, and then you can pick up the bones left behind.





See how pretty? You are the dead squirrel in the middle.




Sound great? Yep. here;s the problem with Yo Frankie. Because it was a project to push the envelope for a pair of engines, and for a school, it isn;t really a game. I can explore levels, fights sheep, collects bones and nuts, and jump around. I found no objective, no plot, and a severe lack of anything resembling documentation.

The result, this is is a mess, and hardly a game in any real sense of the word. Avoid.


Summary: 1 outta 5 stars for being pretty.

My next game is just going to be a quick little diversionary arcade game called Chromium B.S.U. I expect a review tonight after playing it a bit.

Review of Chromium B.S.U.


This is just a quick little free arcade game. It plays like arcade games from the 80s, but has better graphics and sound.

There's not too much I can say about it. It's not designed to take hours of your time, and it is designed to be hard. This is straight from the FAQ:

Q: I keep getting killed. Why is is so difficult?
A: Quitcher whinin', you ninny! It's supposed to be hard! Seriously, Chromium B.S.U. is intended to be a 15 minute adrenaline rush/mental cleanser. Frequent doses of explosions (even your own) can be very therapeutic.





You move your ship and fire, and pick up upgrades. As enemy ships pass you, you lose lives...er...I mean spare ships. That's it.

Simple enough, eh?

I enjoyed it enough to not unisntall it, and added it to my casual games directory, for when I want a few minutes of gaming and not more. As such, it will stay installed.


Summary: 2 stars outta 5. It does what it sets out to do, but that goal ain;t high.

Of the games I have tried, only Battle for Wesnoth and Chromium BSU are still installed.

I also still have Ur-Quan Masters installed, but I've had that baby on every computer I have for a couple of years now.

Next up in the queue:

FreeCol

This is a clone of Colonization by MicroProse, and it was released waaay back in 2003.

Find out more here:

FreeCol - Home

The most recent version was released in Aug 2, 2009.

From the FreeCol rulebook:



This will be my favorite part about the game, I think.

Other European Countries with colonies in the Americas include:

Duchy of Courland
Germany
Scotland

I like the Building, Trade and Agriculture advantages. I will be playing as Denmark. Let's go with the classic Trade one, because I'm familiar with it, and can see if this game is similar to the Colonization we all know and love and know. And love.

Well, i think I just won the game. First turn, found land and Lost City, landed, Fountain of Youth, which means 8 free colonists in Copenhagen immediately. That's waaay too much of an early advantage, so I'm restarting.

Having lots of fun so far, very very similar to Colonization, with a few changes, like a founding father taken by one country prevents it being to others.