Do you like multiplayer First Person Shooter games? How about free ones? Sauerbraten (a.k.a “Cube 2″) is a freely available FPS that’s available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

Sauerbraten has great online multiplayer gameplay, featuring several modes of play, such as Regen Capture (an addicting Capture-the-Flag type of match), Instagib, and Cooperated Edit. And you can play “normal” FPS mode too.

The game has an amazingly easy to use level editor integrated. Nearly everything in a Sauerbraten level is made from varying-sized cubes. The cubes can be stacked, punched-out, textured, and molded into non-cube shapes to build pretty much anything you want. You can add place water, lava, glass windows, invisible barriers, ammo, powerups, flags for Regen Capture, etc. to the level. If you get bored editing maps by yourself, you can take it online, or just across a LAN, with Cooperated Edit. There’s no way you can imagine the chaos of ten people editing the same map at the same time.

Sauerbraten is a very well-made game, reminiscent of Quake III, as some have said, and it’s highly addicting. The game’s two strongpoints of multiplayer gameplay and editing earn it a Knights of the Joystick rating of 4.5/5. There’s still some room for improvement, but the open source community will see to that. Open source packages are constantly evolving, and I have no doubt that Sauerbraten will become even better in the future.

In Desktop Tower Defense, your objective is to stop the lines of “Creeps” from crossing the desk. They go from one side to the other, though in some difficulty levels, there is more than one line of enemies.

To stop them from crossing the board, you place “towers” with various abilities to zap them before they get to their destination. For every creep that you miss, you lose one of your lives. For every Creep you zap, you get points and gold. Gold is used for buying/upgrading towers.

The tower types are

• The Pellet Tower, which is the cheapest of the towers. It fires reasonably fast, and it’s damage levels are okay. It’s cheap, so start with this one.
• The Squirt Tower fires real fast, but doesn’t damage the creeps much.
• The Dart Tower is the heavy artillery. It’s not exactly cheap, and it fires slowly, but it packs a punch.
• The Swarm Tower fires a group of four tracer missiles to take out flying creeps.
• The Frost Tower slows your opponents so your other towers can do their work.
• The Bash Tower repeatedly emits a shockwave to seriously reduce the health of nearby creeps.

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Harry potter and the Order of the Phoenix, the videogame, is the fifth installment of the Harry Potter videogame series. It has great graphics (the best so far), but there’s not much you can do. It has been called over and over, and I agree, “just an endless chore simulation”.

You start out at Grimmauld Place and learn how to do basic spells.

• Wingardium Leviosa: The Levitation Charm (you use this to help pack Ron’s trunk)
• Reparo: The Fixing Charm (Sirius has you fix everything in the house with this).
• Depulso and Accio: Depulso is the Knockback Jinx and Accio is the Summoning Charm.

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While not the most cutting edge game, even when it came out, the game that really got me interested in computer games was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, by EA Games.

Back when I was ten, I got the game after reading all of the Harry Potter books. If your a Harry Potter fan, you’ll probably like the game, while others may not.

The game has a few innovative concepts, but nowadays I’d say it’s too linear. The sequels, Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban were much better (though Goblet of Fire was horrible). From what I’ve seen, Order of the Phoenix, the newest of the Harry Potter games, will not only be the best of the HP games, but one of the most innovative games in general. (more…)

Lego Racers is one of the few good racing games. I know what you’re thinking. “What?!“, right? I’m serious. Unlike most racing games, it’s not a simulation. It’s Lego, which means cartoon-y, basically.

Instead of just driving, there are shortcuts, a wide array of power-ups, and other features that set it apart from the rest.

Lego Racers has the best power-up system I’ve ever seen. There are four classes of power-ups, each a different colored Lego Brick. You have the red Attacks, the green Boosts, the yellow Hazards, and the blue Shields. Then there are the white Modifier bricks, that change what the base brick does. For example, you pick up a green brick, which is normally a five-second (about) speed boost (a jet engine appears at the back of your car). If you collect two white bricks before releasing the power-up, you get two jet engines, wings, and like 15 seconds of ultra fast boost time. If you collect the maximum of three white bricks, you go into hyperdrive, teleporting way ahead.

If you get hit with a cannon ball (the base Attack power-up), your car flies into the air, and lands hard…giving the other cars a chance to speed ahead. There are worse power-up than that, believe me. There’s the Curse, which reverses your steering temporarily, and there’s the MagnaBeam, which holds your car back for 5 seconds. That’s just a small sampling of the vast array of power-ups.

It’s really fun in two-player mode, where you race another person (just plug in an extra controller).

Even though the game is no longer available in-store, you can buy it used. Lego Racers works on Windows XP, though I’m doubtful about Vista compatibility. Then there are console versions available used as well (Playstation 2, Gamecube, etc).

Lego Racers is my favorite racing game, seriously.

Stop laughing! I’m serious; Lego Star Wars the Videogame and the sequel, Lego Star Wars the Videogame 2: The Original Trilogy, are great games.

If you’re a Star Wars fan, or a Lego fan, you’ll like these games.

Here’s the general idea: The Star Wars movies with a Lego twist. Think Star Wars, but a lot funnier. When players/enemies are killed, they collapse into a pile of Lego bricks. You can use the force to build things out of Legos, you can fly Lego spaceships, you can fight with ligtsabers/blasters, and more.

You play through the trilogies with Lego versions of the characters, finding bonuses along the way. After playing a level, you can do it again in “Free Play” mode, where you get to pick the characters you want to bring along (even from other episodes). The developers obviously wanted the game to be funny, as there are tons of hidden jokes throughout the whole game. It’s not just in-game things either, the cutscenes are even funnier.  One example is the part where Luke buys R2-D2 and C3P0 from the Jawas. After the sun sets, they come back, you see silhouetted Jawas running into the building…and running back out with the droids. Luke runs into Kenobi when he goes to find them (a little different from the movie, I suppose).

The Jawas cause mischief during actual gameplay as well. When you’re in the Mos Espa Spaceport, they run off with your landspeeder if you leave it unattended (you just chase after them on foot and kick them out of it if it happens).

Lego Star Wars is a very enjoyable, long, game with plenty of replay value. The game is really funny as well. I highly recommend it, just keep an eye on the clock…or you could unknowingly spend six hours playing it.

I’m sure you’ve heard of RuneScape by now. RuneScape users play it at libraries, they rant about it on forums, and they talk about it nonstop. Some people bash it nonstop instead. On forums it’s all too easy to find people arguing about whether RuneScape is A: a great game or B: total garbage. Having recently hit the “one million users mark,” it can’t be as bad as some people say it is.

I’ve been playing RuneScape for the last few years, though I haven’t been playing four hours a week like I used to. Currently I log in now and then, every couple weeks or so. (more…)

Bored? Do you have enough time for one or more 5-minute rounds of flash-based fun? Try Stick Arena. I recommend registering so you can save your scores and for other reasons. You don’t have to though. If you don’t have much time, you can have a random temporary name assigned to you (you’ll also go into a random game. NOT recommended!). You should signup, login, and pick/create a game.

In Stick Arena there are swords, sledgehammers, 3 types of guns, and baseball bats. You move around with the Arrow keys and attack by clicking the mouse. You collect the weapon power-ups to change your weapon. The easiest level is called “XGen HQ”. That’s pretty much all you need to know to get started. But if you want to win…. (more…)