Seeing as its New Year I thought I'd get a little light hearted and share a couple of my favourite free and very cheap games. They all have a small enough footprint to run on my four year old laptop and are all Windows based....try as I might I've never been more than underwhelmed by the available Linux games :-( (Mind you, I was bored by the Orange Box after four days, so maybe its just me...)
Q-Lat2
 | "Q-Lat2 is an arcade type game mixing features from pentaque, billiards, and flippers.
The game objective in Q-Lat2 is to make all the balls explode, by turning them all to the same color.
Q-Lat2 requires good aiming, fast reflexes, quick thinking,
and a lot of plain good luck :)
No blood and guns this time, just hectic hiscore hunting alone or with a friend." |
Its not quite that simple though. You control a ball which moves in a way reminicent of the ship in Asteroids. Hitting another ball will cause your ball to take on its colour, and hitting a normal ball with another normal ball will cause the hitee to take the colour of the hitter. So to turn all the balls one colour you have to use your ball as a cue ball to knock balls of the colour you want to work with into incorrectly coloured balls. Add a great sound track and you have a frustrating, addictive feast.
Mono
| "The aim of the game is to change the colour of the entire screen from black to white or white to black. This is achieved by shooting the alien blobs that colour the background when destroyed. There are 3 colours of blobs to shoot (red, green and blue) and the colour they leave behind changes the behaviour of any enemies that travel over it. A sort of "player controlled difficulty curve" where the more of the screen you colour, the more the enemies behaviour changes" |  |
Mono is nothing less than a very good Asteroids clone, with a few twists. As with Q-Lat2 its a very simple game, with great graphics, nice background music and fantastic gameplay.
Bridge Construction Set
 | "Bridge Construction Set is about building a bridge that doesn't break, although watching your bridge creation break and plunge a train into the watery depths below can be half the fun. In Bridge Construction Set you design and build bridges and then stress test them to see how your creations hold up under pressure. When test vehicles pass over your bridge and make it safely across you know you've succeeded. If they plummet into the river you know you need to go back to the drawing board." |
This is my favourite game, and has been for quite some time. BCS employs realistic physics, a range of materials and hydraulics and a powerful landscape editor so you can design your own bridge challenges. This one is a bit of a cheat - its not freeware, but there is a free demo. It only costs $19.99 (about a tenner in proper money) and comes in Windows, Linux and Mac flavours.
Head Over Heels
| "Head Over Heels was released, um, a while ago. Around about 1987 if I recall correctly and it was immediately praised in the press as being quite the bestest thing ever. Not only was it a huge game for it's time, it also had great graphics and was very addictive - if somewhat punishing in its difficulty level. Even today it still stands as a brilliantly designed title and has never really been bettered in the isometric adventure genre." |  |
One of the best games every created for the Spectrum, re-created and improved for the PC. And its free...what more could you want. The nice people at Retrospec have also re-done some other speccy classics. Some are fabulous, and improvements on the original (like Jetset Willy)..some are, well, less successful (Harrier Attack for one). I'm gradually working my way through them, and there are some real winners...
Thats me for 2007 - Happy New Year to all my readers and I'll be back in 2008!
