Free Games & Demos

[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]

Found a nice page: List Of Open Source Programs. It's not only games though, but also other open-source software as well. Following links from that site got a couple more places to check out:
http://planet.freegamedev.net/
http://libregamewiki.org/Main_Page

[MrFlibble]

Just found there's a more than decent page dedicated to freeware 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

[MusicallyInspired]

Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar is also free on GOG.

[MrFlibble]

Here's yet another nice website which maintains quite an impressive database of free games:
http://www.curlysworldoffreeware.com/

[MusicallyInspired]

The long-awaited Space Quest fangame Vohaul Strikes Back has at last been released.

http://www.sqvsb.com/

[MrFlibble]

The long-awaited Space Quest fangame Vohaul Strikes Back has at last been released.

http://www.sqvsb.com/

I've never been a particular Space Quest fan, but it looks nice

In other news, Stefan Hendriks' Arrakis had been known to be incompatible with DOSBox for a long time, but recently I found out that it runs just fine under DOSBox v0.74 The only thing to remember is that by default (at least, in v1.12) Arrakis is set to low speed to match the high-end computer configuration of the day (which was Pentium II). This might turn out somewhat slow in DOSBox, so it is recommendable to switch to 486 or Pentium I in the game settings (accessible from the main menu).

Also, I did not realize until now that there's a Star Wars Total Conversion for C-evo.

[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

[DeadPoolX]

If you have Half-Life 2, you should try these two free horror-themed mods: Nightmare House 2 and Underhell.

NOTE: Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is apparently required to run Nightmare House 2.

[MrFlibble]

Rather recently the Shareware CD Archive at archive.org got shareware CD editions of several well-known games, including Duke Nukem 3D, Blood, Quake and Starcraft:
Duke Nukem 3D Shareware Episode v1.1 (1996)
Blood Shareware (Monolith Productions) (1997)
Quake Shareware CD (1996)
StarCraft Shareware (1998)

The CD edition of Blood shareware features extra content that includes video sequences and CD Audio soundtrack. You can also get the CD shareware at RTCM website which is dedicated to Build engine games.

[MrFlibble]

Recently I've read about an old-style top-down RPG called Realmz, which it's an old (1994) top-down shareware RPG that has apparently enjoyed considerable popularity (numerous third-party add-on scenarios were published) - but on the Mac platform. It was ported to Windows in 1999, and nine years later the author, one Tim Philips, released Realmz for free. Soon afterwards his company's site, fantasoft.com, went down for unknown reasons.

However, there's a functional mirror of the website, which can be found here. Note though that the links at the https://fantasoft.powweb dot com/downloads.html - downloads page are broken because they still point to the old website address, but the files themselves are present on the site. Therefore, to download the demo versions, you need to copy the link then replace "http://www.fantasoft.com" part with "https://fantasoft.powweb.com" (I would have posted the correct links but forums software won't let me for some reason). The registration codes for both versions are available from the website as well.

More info about the game, as well as additional links, can be found in the Wikipedia article about Realmz.

[dotkel50]

Something's missing.

The downloads page link just tried to infect my computer with a trojan. BEWARE!

[MrFlibble]

The downloads page link just tried to infect my computer with a trojan. BEWARE!

I'm not getting any warnings, what antivirus/anti-malware are you using?

[Edit] You can go here for alternate download links.

[dotkel50]

Microsoft Security Essentials caught it.