Can you compute for free?

Posted on 8 Oct 2008 at 12:47

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Game on

There are too many free Flash-based games to mention here, but we recently selected our top 10 online games, many of which are based on Flash. Visit www.computershopper.co.uk/news/220899 to see our favourites.

TrackMania Forever (www.trackmania.com) is different again. It's not strictly an online game, in that you have to download the client and you can then play it online or with other people on your network. However, it's fun if you like racing around tracks in the quickest time possible.

Last but not least, Facebook (www.facebook.com) offers numerous ways to lose hours of your life, and there are plenty of plug-in games for you to try. Scrabulous is no more, so our pick has to be the official Scrabble game. Type 'Scrabble' into the Search box to add it as an application. While it's always enjoyable to play against Facebook friends, the real joy is taking on strangers head to head.

Verdict

Make no mistake, paid-for games offer a level of professionalism and graphics detail that no free game has ever been able to rival. However, the same is not necessarily true for gameplay. A game is good if it sucks you in and makes you want to keep playing, regardless of its cost. Therefore, there's no need to spend £30 including VAT on the latest shooter, although you certainly wouldn't be alone if you fell for the lush graphics of Far Cry 2.

Overall Verdict

If there's one thing that should be clear, it's that free software doesn't equate to low-quality software. Quite apart from all the genres we've looked at here, consider the software we used to pay for but no longer do. Why pay for a media player when you can download VLC or use Windows Media Player? The days of paying £30 for Netscape Navigator are long gone, although that was the price less than a decade ago.

Free software has changed the way we use computers, with those on a limited budget being able to achieve things they could only dream of a few years back. You really can get away with paying zilch - even for the PC's operating system. There are compromises, and we don't dispute that the likes of Adobe and Microsoft can put money into research that results in more effective software. Someone's got to pay for that research. Luckily, it needn't be you.

Author: Tim Danton