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MrFlibble

Free alternatives to classic games

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Okay, I've put the Astral Entertainment website on this list instead, and also added some more titles here:

 

A-Train

Carrier Command

Duke Nukem

Escape Velocity

Half-Life: Counterstrike

Quake III: Arena, Unreal Tournament

Star Wars: TIE Fighter, Descent: Freespace

Super Monkey Ball

 

Also added another section to the list, with the liberated games that have both the source code and all assets released for free, thus making it possible to create new builds of the entire game.

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Risk... I must check out.

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Atlantis

Puzzle Bobble

BurgerTime

Dogfight

OutRun

Oxyd

Paratrooper

Planet Defender

R-Type

Rampart

Sentinel

SimCity

Solar Fox

Space Spartans

Star Strike

Starion

Telengard

Lode Runner

Wing Commander

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I release you have purged the thread due to previous reviews, but do you have any other free / recently reverse engineered old school games?

 

Currently I only know of C&C95, RA1, Dune 2000 and warzone 2100 (which you list) - which all took old freeware/abandonware games and made them run on modern systems in high resolution with fixes.

Edited by r34ch

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I've reworked the list yet again. The shareware clones and the open source liberated game build sections were dropped, and now board game implementations are a separate category.

 

Also, added the following titles:

 

Castle of the Winds, Ancient Domains of Mystery

Diplomacy

Panzer General II

RPG Maker

Sid Meier's Civilization

Titan

Wizardry VII

I release you have purged the thread due to previous reviews, but do you have any other free / recently reverse engineered old school games?

 

Currently I only know of C&C95, RA1, Dune 2000 and warzone 2100 (which you list) - which all took old freeware/abandonware games and made them run on modern systems in high resolution with fixes.

Warzone 2100 is different because it is my understanding that there has been an official source code release, whereas the Westwood Studios games are independently reverse-engineered by the people who work on them.

 

A complete reverse engineering project with further re-writing of the code and the resulting ports to modern OSs is that of yet another WS game, Dune II, and the project is called OpenDUNE.

 

Also I've just learned that the leader of the XL Engine project has been recently working on completely reverse-engineering and rewriting The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall (details are in the blog) with a view to create a 100% compatible and authentic implementation of the game, plus the much needed bug fixes (reportedly, Bethesda lost the source code of Daggerfall at some point).

Edited by MrFlibble
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If Black Mesa is considered a remake replacement, what about Goldeneye Source and Renegade-X? Those are remade on a different game engine.

 

Edit: the following titles are missing from the first post of the list:

driller
m.u.l.e.
netwars
atlantis
burgertime
dogfight
rampart
simcity (mobility)
Space Spartans
star strike
starion
telengard
lode runner
Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (Aleona's Tales)
Edited by zocom7

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Renegade-X isn't a remake -_-

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If Black Mesa is considered a remake replacement, what about Goldeneye Source and Renegade-X? Those are remade on a different game engine.

I know that Renegade X uses original Renegade data (speech), I suppose without any explicit permission from copyright holders (if I'm wrong on this please correct me!). Conversely, the guys who created Black Mesa had to re-record all dialogue in addition to creating all other game resources from scratch, as Valve asked them not to use any materials from Half-Life.

 

I know nothing about Goldeneye Source, thanks for mentioning this, I'll check it out,

 

driller

m.u.l.e.

netwars

atlantis

burgertime

dogfight

rampart

simcity (mobility)

Space Spartans

star strike

starion

telengard

lode runner

Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness (Aleona's Tales)

Well, first off Aleona's Tales is on the list. Secondly, I never stated that I'd include everything I find or is mentioned in this thread into the list in the first post. Currently I don't include remakes that preserve non-trivial (and probably copyrighted) titles of the originals that they are recreating. Remakes are a different thing altogether (although they overlap with clones to some extent) and should be considered as such.

 

Mobility is a shareware game now, no longer freeware. As a matter of fact, it was from the start not a freeware game, but a free commercial game because it was sponsored by the German government; when government sponsoring was withdrawn they switched to the shareware model to support the project.

 

Turbo Lode, while being inspired by Lode Runner obviously, is a completely different game (different mechanics). It might get on the list, as Scorched 3D is a similarly "inspired by" game with substantial differences.

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Mr. Flibble, what about Plants vs. Zombies? Is there a free alternative to that great tower defense game?

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Frankly I have no idea what kind of game Plants vs. Zombies is. You can look up free tower defence games (e.g. here or here) and find out if there are any that are like it.

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Plants vs Zombies is a tower defense game in (horizontal) lanes, where the attackers actually destroy your defenses if they get far enough in the lanes, and where you need to place down specific things (sunflowers) to give you the resource needed to place down defenses. It's a pretty nice concept :)

 

plants_vs_zombies_moneymaking.png

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@Jehal, I have already owned and played the game several times already! :P

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It's not much of a free alternative when the originals are free. I would hope being free isn't the point of OpenRA.

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