[MrFlibble]

uraganotkirki, on 18 June 2014 - 08:01 AM, said:

Hmm, I thought that this topic was for free, libre and open source games under some GPL license.

Well, that wasn't my objective. While I have indeed mentioned the GPL license in the OP I did not intend to only include GPL games on the list.

However, some time ago I attempted to compile a list of open source GPL games, which can be found here:
Free open source games

Not all of them are "true" FOSS games, but I tried to specifically mark those titles that are not entirely free. (e.g. only the source code was releasedunder the GPL).

[Max Payne]

Didnt see perfect dark, golden eye 007 or Turok. boooo

[MrFlibble]

You're welcome to find alternatives to those games, and I'll gladly add them to the list.

In other news, I keep forgetting to mention Wyrmsun, a real-time strategy that is greatly inspired by Warcraft II. It runs on a modified Stratagus engine and adds a lot of extra features such as individual names and traits for units, experience points, and a turn-based grand strategy mode. All graphics were done from scratch but have a distinct Blizzard feel.

[Flying Techbot]

Seeing games like these in existence is like something out of a dream. One would ask "What would happen if alternative free versions of favorite games existed?," and people out there made it happen. They are by no means perfect, but I am amazed by the little touches the developers of some of these games made to indicate their connection with the originals. I've played OpenArena, OpenDungeons, Blasphermer, Freedoom, Cube, and Priority: Survive, and while most of them are experimental, some of them I find enjoyable. Priority: Survive is a bit harder than StarCraft, despite having Age of Empires-like visuals. Blasphemer, to me, despite the interesting art style, feels uninspired as an alternative to Heretic. I feel the same about Freedoom, which I would want to see have more of a classic Doom feel while still having new art, enemies, and weapons. I have yet to play the free alternative to Hexen, because all there is in the download section is the story and the readme. OpenDungeons, though with simple 3D graphics and animations, is fun, because its Dungeon Keeper's essential gameplay quicker and to the point. I need to check the others out on your list.

I've been imagining alternative versions to classic popular games on a similar vein as the ones you've listed. The alternative games I've thought up are more like spiritual successors, but then these games kind of are as well.
I'd long to see some free alternatives to Shiny Entertainment's Sacrifice, American McGee's Alice, System Shock, Blood, Duke Niukem, Half-Life, Prey, and others. I particularly would like to see a free alternative to the original Deus Ex: one which retains the graphical look, interface, and gameplay of the original, but still is its own story, and provides an alternative version of the experience from Deus Ex (just in case anyone mentions it, I have played The Nameless Mod already). Doing such games sounds fun, though not everyone has the motivation to do a good quality free alternative to their favorite games. Although I am impressed with the work with Cube, even that game is not quite the quality of the original Quake. To be fair, it is hard enough to come up with a new engine with working enemy AI and weapons on top of imitating a classic game and not have it be buggy.

I too would want to see a free alternative to Turok and GoldenEye, if someone were insane enough to develop them. There ought to a development site which is dedicated to making more of these kinds of games, and maybe fulfilling gameplay features which the originals tried to pull off. I still have the idea for Duke Nukem's free alternative being the Earl of Radiation.

[Altered Reality]

One more freeware clone:

Mercenary trilogy

• MDDClone

[MrFlibble]

Annex: Conquer the World is a free, open source real-time strategy game based on the MegaGlest engine, which is apparently inspired by the Command & Conquer series of games, as well as Earth 2140 and sequels, Warzone 2100 and StarCraft. There are four playable factions, several terrain tilesets, customizable tech trees, campaign scenarios, skirmish and mutliplayer modes.

The same developer is working on another RTS with a space sci-fi setting, called Terra Centauri: Last Stand. A beta is available here.

openKB is an engine recreation project for New World Computing's King's Bounty, with planned support for the original game's files as well as a free open source data set. The development is in its early stages, so no downloads yet.

Free Mars is a free, open source turn-based strategy game inspired by Sid Meier's Civilization, Colonization and Alpha Centauri.

Rescue! Max is a remake of Rescue!, a Mac shareware game.

CATharsis is a project to create an open source clone of Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project in Blender. It's not an engine recreation, but rather a stand-alone game similar to DNMP but with its own protagonist, art, levels etc. Rather early stages of development.

OpenGGS is an open source remake of The Great Giana Sisters (a Super Mario Bros. clone). The author has permission to use original graphics from the Commodore 64 version, but there's also a free tile set as well.

In other news, recently a Windows binary executable was made available for LordsAWar!, a free open source clone of SSG's Warlords II. The version is 0.3.0, which features a two single-player scenarios, random map mode, and network multiplayer.

[MrFlibble]

Added the free/prototype version of Sublevel Zero to the list.

[MrFlibble]

Feudal Wars is a project of a free browser-based medieval RTS inspired by Age of Empires II. The list of features can be found here, and the project messageboard showcases the graphics and other stuff already done.

According to the FAQ, there will be a kickstarter for the game at some point. There seem to be no plans for a non-browser versions for now, but perhaps the authors will agree to release their assets into public domain and those could be combined with the OpenAge engine recreation of AoE2.

[MrFlibble]

Freedoom v0.10 is out, with lots of improvements. More monsters and almost all weapons have been replaced with higher quality art. Maps have been updated as well.

Wyrmsun v1.8.0 adds the custom hero option and inventories for heroes and high-level units.

[MrFlibble]

Freedoom v0.10 videos are up on the official channel:

[CryptKiller]

Download link for Special Agent is dead and the website for GazerStar is hacked, so it's probably wise to remove those entries. OpenGGS is also 404.

[MrFlibble]

Thanks for reporting dead links! OpenGGS is still available at SourceForge:
https://sourceforge....ojects/openggs/

Both GazerStar and Special Agent are accessible via the Wayback Machine, so I updated these links accordingly.

I also added a few other titles to the list.

[CryptKiller]

Great job! I think I'll upload Special Agent and GazerStar to archive.org, those are actually pretty nifty games (esp. SA).

[MrFlibble]

That's a good idea. I wonder if the original authors of either can be still contacted.

I think I'll drop the curator of the Classic PC Games Collection/Demu.org a note about these games.

[K1n9_Duk3]

IIRC, Special Agent was created by DavidXNewton. You should be able to contact him via YouTube.

[NNC]

Super Marisa Land and New Super Marisa Land should be mentioned as fantastic freeware clones of Super Mario Bros. I have to say that NSMB is my favourite Mario game now, or a top5 at least.

The Touhou stuff is interesting in general, Megamari do example is a good clone of Megaman.

[MrFlibble]

MrFlibble, on 06 July 2012 - 07:21 AM, said:

Quake

• Open Quartz (QuakeForge, DarkPlaces)
  
• OpenQuartz 2 (DarkPlaces)
  
• OQPlus (QuakeForge, DarkPlaces) [SVN]

Now the above Quake project have all been abandoned while still very far from completion, but it has been brought to my attention that a new project, LibreQuake, is under development and already looking very nice:

[wnderer]

Thief - The Darkmod
This is an amazing game. It started out as a mod to Doom3 but it is now stand alone.

[MrFlibble]

I can't believe The Dark Mod isn't on the list already but apparently so. I can't edit the original post anymore because there's a time limit here in which you can do it.

[NightFright]

Has any of you managed to get LibreQuake running with any of the current port like Quakespasm or Mark V running? I can't find any clear instructions about how to properly install this. Just using the id1 folder from the Github repo certainly won't be enough.

[FistMarine]

That LibreQuake project looks really nice! I'm looking forward to play it once it is finished.

[NightFright]

Got it working with Mark V now. You need to edit quake.rc and remove "example" from this line

startdemos example demo1 demo2 demo3

It's still very rough, though. Many monsters don't have death animations and there are no full episodes yet, among other things. Still, very impressive for an early version like that. This could be enjoyable once there are polished maps and gameplay is complete. The artistic style is already very Quake-ish.

[MrFlibble]

NightFright, on 20 July 2020 - 11:14 PM, said:

Has any of you managed to get LibreQuake running with any of the current port like Quakespasm or Mark V running? I can't find any clear instructions about how to properly install this. Just using the id1 folder from the Github repo certainly won't be enough.

I should have mentioned how I did that. In DarkPlaces, you should be able to launch LQ as a stand-alone package with the command

darkplaces -customgamedirname1 lq1

I also used Quakespasm, but I think I put the PAKs from OpenQuartz in there first and ran LQ on top of that.

[NightFright]

Has anybody ever tried Aleph One? It's a source port which allows you to run Bungie's Marathon shooter series also on PC.

Link: https://alephone.lhowon.org

The interesting part is that game files can be obtained legally through that website as well, effectively making these games available for free. (I know, technically this is not an alternative to a game, but a game available for free, but I had to put this somewhere...)

I have never heard of Marathon, but apparently these were really good shooters, technically ahead of Doom back in 1994-96 and offering a lot of story. On the Mac this was apparently quite something.

[MrFlibble]

NightFright, on 26 August 2020 - 06:02 AM, said:

The interesting part is that game files can be obtained legally through that website as well, effectively making these games available for free.

You can actually download a complete package (data + binary based on the port) for each game too.

I played both the original Windows demo of Marathon 2 (which was the only game in the trilogy ported to Windows), some Marathon 1 with Aleph One, as well as the Mac demo of the latter via Executor. Aside from odd levels of mouse sensitivity in Aleph One, it's pretty fine. There's a visual style and design approach that makes the series very different from Doom, shifting the focus from fast action only to a more brooding atmosphere and odd backgrounds, with a Lovecraft-esque vibe that is more pronounced than in Quake.

Marathon 1 is very similar to Doom engine-wise, but does different things with it. You have mission objectives that make it more like Dark Forces in a way, and you read a lot of background info via the terminals. The story is not straightforward either.

The games are very certainly worth trying out, and have their own distinct atmosphere. The action is not very fast-paced, there are sometimes puzzles and switch hunts, and generally both Marathon 1 and 2 feel more ancient than Duke3D. I haven't played very far into either though, but read quite a bit at a fan site. Everything about the games' lore is deliberately enigmatic and puzzling, in this they're a complete opposite of Doom or any other FPS I can think of. Unanswered questions as a creative method, that's what it is. It's pretty enjoyable in a way.

BTW, there's also an Aleph One port/remake of Pathways Into Darkness, which is the prequel of sorts to the Marathon series, and is also, in a way, Bungie's answer to Wolfenstein 3-D.

[MrFlibble]

Recently I went back to the concept of free alternatives and reworked the list from the ground up. Unfortunately the forum settings here do not allow to edit old posts to I cannot update the list in this thread, but you can check out the new version here:
Free alternatives to classic/well known games - dosgames.com

[jkas789]

Thanks for the update MrFlibble. I was just thinking yesterday about trying some of the games mentioned in this thread.

If I could suggest another free game, it would be Silver Knight Crusaders, which is a Castlevania SOTN-esque (I'm retarded and tired) free clone.

It's pretty good actually, and I totally recommend it.



I'm also gonna make a post about this one on the metroidvania thread as well.

[MrFlibble]

Hey, thanks for mentioning this!

I'm trying to focus on completely original projects though, this one seems to use modified sprites from proprietary games?

[Phredreeke]

NightFright, on 26 August 2020 - 06:02 AM, said:

Has anybody ever tried Aleph One? It's a source port which allows you to run Bungie's Marathon shooter series also on PC.

Link: https://alephone.lhowon.org

[MrFlibble]

Did someone say ALE Clone?