I love simple 2-D games where you basically just go from left to right, up and down, jumping to avoid things being fired at you, stuff like that.
I used to have a shareware game like that on my old laptop years ago and haven’t come across anything like it since. Does anyone have any suggestions for free shareware 2D games, or sites where I can download them?
I have googled already but there’s such a bewlidering array of games out there, and I don’t like downloading stuff that hasn’t been recommended to me by someone.
Thanks.
Ooops…I just threw away a bunch of my old shareware CDs. Of course, they probably would be insane to play on a modern computer. Commander Keen and the original Duke Nuke’em were two that I played.
An emulator is a program that allows your computer to pretend it’s a different machine, basically. Using an emulator gives your computer a means to run software not written for it; for example, a SNES emulator is a program that will let you play SNES game software on your PC. There are emulators for virtually every single gaming machine ever made, right up to work-in-progress XBox, PS2, and Gamecube emulators. For emulator programs, go here. They’re easy enough to run, just download, install, and run like every other program. If you need recommendations or help, feel free to ask.
Now the games for emulators… that’s a tricky one. There are a wide range of home-made, public-domain games that’ve been made for most systems, and those are perfectly legal and freely available. Commerical games, even if they’re now utterly unavailable, are… well, they’re illegal. Basically. There’s a bit of debate, but they’re essentially illegal, since they’re copyrighted works. However, the game companies are well aware of their existence and only ever take action when they see something harmful to their properties taking place, which is rare. The industry has even taken, in recent months, to headhunting people from the game fan-translation scene that I’m part of.
All that said, if you’ve got a hankering for some oldschool gaming action, I can’t recommend emulation enough. But it helps to be somewhat respectful about it; a large portion, at least of the translation community, refuse point blank to emulate any system still readily available for purchase, since that way the only games being… stolen, basically, are ones that are no longer purchasable (usually) and thus no-one’s losing out.
You’re a cat and you have to do the usual “cat things” to survive and get the female feline. Eat fish out of the fish bowl, catch mice, and steal milk from sleeping dogs are some of the things you have to do to survive in this surreal masterpiece from Bill Williams.
