Gather your ammunition and hide the children (if you have any)! Hell’s thermostat is broken and RurouniQ is actually following through on a promised article series by doing a second volume. Yes, that’s right, it’s time for another edition of Free Play [on]. Because while the best things in life may be free, sometimes the just-pretty-good stuff is, too.
My love for achievements is probably well-known to anyone who has listened to the show. Even though this addiction has slowly been waning over the past months, there is one site which still kindles that flame of trophy-collection desire. Kongregate is a site that intends to be "The YouTube of Games," and in some ways comes awfully close. Anyone can submit a flash game and have it reviewed by the users of the site, and each week the best-reviewed game gets a cash prize. It should be noted, however, that there are a lot of games here which are just plain good. Protector, 3D Logic 2, Desktop Tower Defense, Portal: Flash Version (think 2D Portal)… all examples of games that have eaten hours of my time, and I mean individually. Plus, because we’re talking largely indie developers responsible for these games, there are a not-small number of games that could be considered very artistic, such as Areas.
Oh, and lest I forget… remember that achievements thing I mentioned? A lot of the games available on Kongregate have a Badge system, which is just like achievements, so the achievement-mongers out there can still get their jollies here. Be warned though; the ratio of easy-to-hard achievements here is much lower than it is on the 360, so expect to put in a lot of time just to get a few.
M.U.G.E.N. – open source fighting game system
no official website – en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.U.G.E.N
I loves me some fighting games, and one of my favorites is the king of mashups, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (which, if you haven’t heard of it for some godforsaken reason, is exactly what it sounds like). Copies of MvC2 can be a little tricky to come by, however, as Dreamcast discs are rare these days, and the PS2 & Xbox versions are rare enough to command $60-80 price tags wherever found. For the rest of us, there’s the next best thing: M.U.G.E.N. Technically, M.U.G.E.N. is nothing more than a 2D sprite-collision engine that comes with rules settings for a fighting game and only one character, but the reality is that the game is completely modular, meaning that extra characters, stages, select screens, sound effects, EVERYTHING can be plugged in by hand.
Now I’m not going to kid you, managing M.U.G.E.N. can be difficult and is not for the faint at heart; what’s worse, the few torrents that come pre-packaged with a lot of things tend to be quite broken. The link above has many links to other M.U.G.E.N. sites which do a much better job of explaining installation procedure than I could here. Rest assured, the work and frustration will be worth it when you’re having your own knockdown drag-out fight of Peter Griffin vs. Iron Man.
Beats of Rage – open source brawler game system
Back in the days before fighting games, you know what we had? Brawlers. And dadgummit, we loved ’em. You youngins don’t know what you have, what with yer one-on-one matches. We used to have to take on ARMIES all by ourselves, uphill in the snow, with naught but our fists! And maybe the occassional shiv… Yessir, those were the days…
Streets of Rage, the original X-Men arcade game, the 1990s TMNT games; these are all examples of classic brawlers that stand the test of time. A group of programmers have attempted to recapture that essence with Beats of Rage, a brawler intended to be like a forgotten sequel to Beats of Rage, with one awesome exception: it, like M.U.G.E.N., is an engine, where everything can be replaced to make an entirely new game. Beats of Rage forgoes M.U.G.E.N.’s modular system, though, in favor of something more elegant: packages that are much simpler to install and contain entire games and character sets. Everything is self-contained. What’s more, there are tons of fan-made packages, ranging from Resident Evil to Dragonball. Supposedly, they’re not too difficult to make… Hmm.
So there you have it. More free gaming goodness to while away your hours with. Don’t disappoint me now; I don’t want to hear of you wasting good gaming time with stupid things like spending time with people or eating. If you do, the punishment game will be… hold an octopus in your pants for an hour!
