Four Awesome Tips To Play 20+ Games Without Spending A Dime

Compared to other forms of entertainment, gaming is quite cheap, especially if you know how to play. Best of all, everything here should be legal (although emulation is a bit more of a gray issue).

With just a PC armed with an internet connection, you can play many good games for free. I won’t be going into renting, trading, or borrowing games (just take a look at Craigslist, the Bangladesh video game section is barren).

As long as you have something running Windows 2000 or better, with half a gigabyte of ram or more, it should be able to do most of the stuff here (albeit slowly). Hard drive space may become an issue if you don’t have at least dozen gigabytes to spare. For an Internet connection, the biggest issue is having something better then dialup, (the faster the better) mainly for lower latency, although download times may be annoying on slower connections.

Tip 1: Install Steam

Having Steam opens many opportunities for gaming, many being free. For example, many can get Half-Life 2 Deathmatch for free if you are running a qualifying Radeon or GeForce GPU (integrated GPU often work for this!), although this does not include the SourceSDK that you will need for many Source Mods.

Completely free games include:

• America’s Army 3
• BattleForge
• Between
• Codename Gordon
• COIL
• Mightier
• Peggle Extreme
• Sam & Max: Episode 4
• Spacewar
• TrackMania Nations Forever

Many more mods are available for free if you own a game that includes the SourceSDK, but this will cost money. All of these are listed and linked at this handy Steam Forum post.

For those wanting to shell out money, Steam is a great marketplace, but it does suffer from some issues when going international (Prices in Europe and Austrailia are generally higher than in the U.S.). Since many in Bangladesh don’t have an international credit card, it may not be an option for you. Still, Steam offers great packs and sales (especially the holiday sales). For those willing to truly shell out, the Valve Pack offers just about every Valve game (22 titles) for the price of $100 USD (about 6910 BDT), although last month it was on sale for a short time for $75 USD.

Of course, Steam isn’t the only way to game on the PC.

Tip 2: Play Retro

Although more of a legal gray area, emulators are widespread, and often run on specs less then those I recommended earlier. There are many, many emulators, although they do not come with ROMs.

Although some emulators will even allow you to play Wii, Gamecube, PS2, DS, Gameboy, or Dreamcast games on a fairly modern computer, these aren’t the emulators I suggest trying, because far older games can still be just as fun.

Two of my favorite emulators (which both happen to be for Nintendo consoles) include Project64, and ZSNES, which emulate the N64 and SNES respectively.

Although Project64 will allow emulating some of the best Zelda games around, and Mario’s first steps into 3D, it can be a pain if you don’t have a controller with an analog joystick, making it often easier to just play your hardcopies on an N64 (although less rewarding; save-states are infinitely more awesome to have).

ZSNES will enable you to play classics such as Super Mario World, Donkey Kong Country, several Final Fantasy games, and my personal favorite, Tetris Attacks!. Since the SNES didn’t really have an analog stick, this is probably one of the easiest emulators to pick up on the PC as well. Additionally, safestates, speeding up and slowing down gameplay, and even rewinding gameplay are all available since the computer running the emulator is usually a magnitude faster then the SNES was.

Tip 3: Play Online Games

Perhaps not as glorious as other suggestions, those with true time to waste, and a browser can get into myriad flash based games at sites such as NewGrounds, or Kongregate.

First person shooter fans may also want to check out Quake Live, where you can run, completely in your browser, without Flash, a multiplayer FPS. [Ed – Also check out Battlefield Heroes]

MMO fans may find Urban Dead, and Kingdom of Loathing interesting.

Tip 4: Other Free Games

FEAR Multiplayer

America’s Army

Combat Arms

Narbaular Drop, the game that spawned Portal

Gang Garrison 2, a demake of TF2

Marathon Series, the series Bungie made before Halo

The Elder Scrolls: I & II, great for fans of Morrowind or Oblivion

Tribes 2, an MMO

Gaia Online, another MMO

Ragnarok Online, yet another MMO

FreeCiv, an open source Civilization 2 clone

StepMania, a rhythm game, although probably less useful if you don’t have a Dance Dance Revolution pad

This concludes my post. Anyone want to share any tips on how you game cheaply?