My Favorite Freeware: January 2010

We’ve entered another year. Obviously, the most important thing about this is getting more free PC games! Here’s this month’s list of my freeware favorites.

Kill frenzy! GTA2 is my favorite game in the Grand Theft Auto franchise, mainly because of the crazy, over-the-top violence and the totally ridiculous world and its inhabitants. To me, the game feels like a huge joke and doesn’t take itself seriously by any means. It’s just… damn enjoyable. As the player, you travel around the game’s three main locations doing various jobs as a mercenary for three rival gangs. Jobs include a wide variety of objectives, ranging from wacky (capturing people to turn into hot dogs), to more “traditional” (drive people into the nearest water source and drown them alive). Fun!

Shadowgate meets Tex Murphy in Paul Eres’s Fedora Spade series. An adventure game similar to one on a console of the past, Fedora Spade takes a simplistic route for playability and design. But that doesn’t mean it’s bad – rather, it’s one of my favorite indie excursions of the last several years. In four separate episodes, you play as homicide detective Fedora Spade solving cases. The game’s nature makes it emphatic upon story and plot, so if that’s your thing, be sure to check it out.

Okay. So. This game is hard. Like, really hard. The kind of hard that classifies itself as “the hardest game you ever played” hard. I did not know this going into the game for the first time. I heard it was a challenging game, but not along the lines that I initially envisioned. I Wanna Be the Guy prides itself on its over-the-top difficulty, and even goes so far as to kill you within the first ten seconds of the game. It’s a platformer that takes inspiration from numerous sources of the 8-bit era and provides an experience of incredible frustration and masochism on the highest level. If you’re looking for a tough game, look no further.