Didn’t get that game you wanted for Christmas? Can’t afford to buy it yourself? Don’t worry, the Internet has you covered… sort of.
With the increasing sophistication of browser games, you can get a little bit of your gaming fix for free through the various sites that host Flash games. They might not be quite what you wanted, but they’re not bad substitutes in a pinch.
Call of Duty: World at War —> Warfare 1917
World War I has been underrepresented in video games, and for good reason. How do you make a fun game about getting cut down by machine gun fire 30 seconds after your commander orders you out of a trench, or having your foot slowly rot from gangrene over the course of months? Most developers, like Call of Duty’s Treyarch, stick to the killing fields of WWI’s blockbuster sequel.
Well, Armor Games has done what some thought impossible. Warfare 1917 is simple, but engaging, with just enough strategy to keep it from being a cakewalk. You order up units from the menu at the bottom. More advanced units take longer to become available. You can also call in artillery strikes or mustard gas shells. An RTS-like upgrade tree lets you focus your strengths between rounds.
As your soldiers come out, you can order them up and over the trenches to assault enemy positions, where many of them will doubtless be cruelly cut down in ways that are surprisingly well-rendered for such small sprites.
Be warned Warfare 1917 is much shorter than the World at War you’re replacing, though. Once you finish the missions in an hour or so, you’re pretty much done for good.
Left 4 Dead —> Urban Dead
Crave that multiplayer zombie action, but don’t to shell out full price for Valve’s offering? Urban Dead has you covered.
The game is set in a city that has been locked down under zombie quarentine. You can make a survivor with a range of starting skills, or you can jump right into the action and make a zombie.
As a survivor, all the zombie movie tropes are there. You can loot malls, barricade buildings, scavenge weapons and go hunting for deadheads.
You can’t really die in Urban Dead, you can just change sides. Survivors who fall to the hordes rise up as zombies, and zombies can be brought back to life by tech-savvy survivors. “Killing” a zombie only temporarily inconveniences them.
Like old BBS door games, you get a certain amount of turns per day that you can spend. The interface and graphics aren’t much more sophisticated than a BBS game either, though. This won’t replicate the frantic action of Left 4 Dead, just the setting.
Burnout Paradise —> Off Road Raptor Safari
Ok, ok, including Burnout Paradise on this list is a bit of a stretch, since it’s already nearly a year old and is probably pretty cheap in the used bin by now. But you can’t talk about browser games without giving a nod to Off Road Raptor Safari.
Off Road Raptor Safari has you driving a Jeep, for no adaquately explained reason, in the age of dinosaurs. Your job is to kill velociraptors, either by running them over or hitting them with a spiked ball dangling from the back of your vehicle, and shoving them into various time portals for food processing in the future.
For an even less explained reason, your driver is a velociraptor in a pith helmet and monocle.
The game is 3D, and requires the installation of the Unity plugin to work, but is still free.
Notably, Off-Road Raptor Safari rewards you for playing however you want to play. You can tool around and do stunts, you can try tight driving to get through checkpoints, or you can slaughter feathered dinosaurs as stylishly as possible, and you’ll still rack up the points.
Me, I get obsessive over getting the spiked pickup ball to tag raptors cleanly and releasing it to throw them over long distances into the export portals. Before I know it, it’s hours later.
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