Freeware games - FPS edition

I wanted to play something the other day, but as I was at work I didn't have any of my CDs around. So I searched a bit for freeware games and here's what I came up with.


Check this out - Paintball2, Quake2 engine based "nonviolent" FPS, standalone game, freeware. This is possible because Quake2 engine was opensourced a while ago (respect to John Carmack and his team). What's cool about this, is that it's an online game - You play with other people right away.
I downloaded the game from here.
Warning: Man, it's addictive!


[Not a standalone game] Next I found this weird port - .NET Quake2, but it needs the datafile(s) of the original game as only the game engine was released under the GNU GPL, not the data. They say they did it to illustrate that C code can be compiled with Visual C++ .NET into "managed" C++ code. They also extended the game with a radar widget to illustrate the extensibility with .NET.
Read their whitepaper.


[Not a standalone game] And we also have a Java version, but it seems to be written from scratch by German geniuses from Bytonic. As the Java tradition demands, it's named Jake2. It demonstrates how this is done in Java. They have some benchmarks there also that show the performance compared to original C code and it's quite impressive I must say. But as it isn't a standalone game as Paintball2, You need to provide the baseq2 directory with the respective data files in them, like in the case of the .NET version.

(Actually I put those two here just for fun, because come on - why would You want to use anykind of virual machine if You can have the native port.)


[Not a standalone game] With Q3 engine also GPL'd, we have a similar project named "icculus.org/quake3" or ioq3 for short. This serves as an examplary work how community can revive a good project and make it fly again. All You need, is again the original datafile (pak0.pak) from original game. Pity it isn't a stand alone version and also too bad I don't have 12 linux servers and 24 LCD monitors hanging around. On the other hand it worked like a charm.


[Not a standalone game] And of course we have the similar kind of project for original Quake called QuakeForge.


Another great game for free is Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. It was supposed to be a expansion pack for Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but the project was cancelled and people at Activision decided to give it to us for FREE. It's a teamplay/multiplayer/multiplatform online game. I had the trouble of comprehending who the bad guys were at the beginning, but I guess it's a newbie phase that'll pass.


Of course I described only a handful of first person shooters here, but there are loads of other genres, other free cool stuff out there just waiting to be found. So You'd never get bored.