Son of 'Summat for Nowt'

A while back I posted a few online PC games that were available for free, and I received an amazing amount of comments on the subject .Unfortunately all of it was spam for online casinos.Even so, I thought I'd post some more.'Cos I'm nice like that and everything.

Anarchy Online:

Get it here

Interesting one this, traditionally MMORPGS (the term for games like 'Everquest' and 'Star Wars:Galaxies' where large groups of people play role player games on a single server, for those of you still interested it stands for Massively multiplayer online role player games), are rarely free, in fact they're the opposite as you have to pay for both the game and then a monthly fee for the privilege of using it.
Anarchy online is an exception in that, if you're prepared to play the "vanilla” version of the game you can download it for free and pay nothing for a year.
How does this work? Well in essence it acts as a "shareware" version of the game, you can do many things and go to certain areas in the game, but after a while if you want to try a certain weapon or go to a more exotic area you're told you have to have one of the add-ons to do it .You have to pay for these and to use them there’s a monthly fee. This is fair enough, as FunCom (the company behind AO) need to make money, and it’s quite possible to play the game without ever getting to an area that requires you start shelling out.
The game also has a unique enough twist in that rather than the beardy goblin bashing of everquest etc, its Sci Fi led with a great back-story.
BUT , but, but, but, but!! I have to mention how many problems I had with A.O.
I found the controls to be really awkward and while the other players seemed decent enough it wasn’t that much fun. The second day of playing the servers were shut down for what was supposed to be 3 hours but ended up being about 8.Then the game informed me that it needed a patch, which it downloaded, installed, then informed me that it needed to download the (already downloaded!) patch, which then timed out...did a full download of the manual patch (after downloading a totally mislabelled one first) this time when I ran it and it had unpacked all the data, told me that it had to download the patch from the AO server which then timed out, and so on ...
Eventually from an unnofficial forum I found out that the fix to this was to download the manual patch, extract all the data from it using a zip program, manually run a file, then edit a config file in the game files so that the version number was changed >then< run AO.
At that stage I had it working but was too pissed off to bother playing.
A few days later I decided to give it another try, ran the game, which then informed me there was another patch to be installed. Ran that and it bombed out 1/2 way through and any attempt to run the game again to patch it gave me an error that "the game had corrupt files and needed to be reinstalled".
Cue me deleting it from my hard drive. I may have been unlucky though so if you fancy playing this type of game but don’t want to spend money give the link above a try

Runescape:

Get it here
If you're on a dial up connection/rubbish PC or if you don’t want to commit to installing a large client then Runescape might be the one for you.
It runs from a java client on the runscape webpage (...er www.runescape.com), and uses a basic 3D graphics engine that’s scalable for use on lower end pcs.There's no charge to play, and although there is a premium version that you can pay a few quid a month to play, you'd have just as much fun playing the free version. Game play wise its probably closest to a somewhat basic version of Baldur’s gate or possibly Diablo. Kill things/ buy armour/ learn spells/mine/blacksmith/do quests, all from a simple mouse based control system.
Faults? Well Its because its designed to run on as many pcs as possible its horribly ugly. It can get a bit repetitive at times. Worst of all, because it’s free it tends to attract the kind of gamers who can’t afford to pay a monthly fee for gaming. I.e. kids. Quite often you'll feel like the only person above 12 on the server, and you probably will be. Plus expect outbreaks of "STFUn00b" and "OMGWTFLOL!!1!" every few minutes .If you'd seen some of the garbage these kids say to each other you'd weep for our future, I know I did.

Torus trooper

Get it here
From the guy who brought you Tumiki Fighters (mentioned last time) its torus trooper!! , 'Wipeout' meets 'Tempest' on happy drugs as you fly along a wire frame ...er torus shooting other wire frame yokes ..Amazingly fun twitch gaming, and free!!

Well that’s the lot for now, me? I'm off to play World of Warcraft, which not only costs money, also costs you something much more important, all your free time (as its that bloody addictive!!)