What Are The Best Free Games Online?

almostdead writes "CNET has just put up a story about what it thinks are the best online flash games of all time. These include titles like Line Rider, Bejeweled, Desktop Tower Defense and Portal, all of which I enjoy playing a lot. But my thirst for free games is peaking at the moment, probably due to an incredibly boring job and lack of imagination. Can you suggest any more good free games online?" Two words: Puzzle Pirates.

This is your boss speaking

[psychicsword]

I also enjoy the portal game...
I mean get back to work

Re:This is your boss speaking

[ShieldW0lf]

I've been playing a fair bit of OpenArena:

http://openarena.ws/?about [openarena.ws]

Open sourced Quake III code with new models and textures and whatnot.

Battle for Wesnoth is a good networked turn-based strategy game, my girlfriend likes it too.

http://www.wesnoth.org/ [wesnoth.org]

Zombies is a fun single player game that's open source (Windows and Mac only):

http://www.codenautics.com/zombies/ [codenautics.com]

For anyone who liked Tron, there's a maddeningly difficult game called Armagetron Advanced that lets you race the bikes:

http://www.armagetronad.net/ [armagetronad.net]

There's a good list of open source games for windows here:

http://osswin.sourceforge.net/games.html [sourceforge.net]

And a big list of general open source games over on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_games [wikipedia.org]

They're not Flash games, but they're Free.

Re:

[AKAImBatman]

The purpose of the article is Flash Games in specific. So your examples are neither here nor there. Personally, I'm amazed that no one has mentioned Newgrounds Rumble [newgrounds.com], one of the best brawlers of all time! It was one of the highest rated games over on Newgrounds, and hung around for AGES. More recently, it was ported to WiiCade [wiicade.com] so that you could play against your friends on the WiiMote controller. (Which is a lot more fun than trying to share a keyboard, let me tell you.)

Actually, I should probably expand o

Planarity

[Cap'n.Brownbeard]

http://www.planarity.net/ [planarity.net]

So simple, and yet so addicting...

Re:

[cbiltcliffe]

Death by Hinge.
http://funnyjunk.com/games/328/Death+By+Hinge/ [funnyjunk.com]

You can pretend it's your boss......

Nethack

[Hatta]

Try Nethack. You can play online at nethack.alt.org. All you need is telnet.

Re:Nethack

[cromar]

Or Angband [rephial.org].

Re:

[kalirion]

Isn't that what a MUD [wikipedia.org] is?

Re:mangband?

[nschubach]

That's perfectly understandable. Take Hellgate:London. It's pretty much a 3D Diablo, but it's just not the same as that isometric classic. I think it's harder to play, control, pick up items, etc. Maybe if they patched a locked camera mouse activated control scheme into HG:L it might actually be fun to play.

Re:

[cromar]

MAngband seems pretty cool from the little I've played. I like the real-time mechanics when playing a melee class, but I couldn't imagine playing a spellcaster... it's a neat idea, but without a large player base, it's pretty much like playing solo Angband.

Re:

[Mr. Sketch]

You mention Nethack and yet fail to mention the 8th Annual /dev/null Nethack Tournament [devnull.net] that's going on right now?

Portal

[Mondoz]

Portal looks like fun, but does it let you save your game in progress?

Re:Portal

[TheRaven64]

The flash game can be completed in a single sitting quite easily. If you quit it and come back later then it allows you to skip to the last level you were on, which is as much saving as I cared about (I don't remember if it keeps any kind of score for you). Definitely a fun game, but not much replay value.

First post---doh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Trying to get first post on Slashdot is one of my favorite online games. As you can see I kind of suck at it.

Re:

[SQLGuru]

You failed to mention Goatse in your post....that's the FLASH game most trolls like to play.....

Layne

slashdot: the game

[mcmonkey]

"The only winning move is not to play"

IIRC Hitchiker's is online along with Adventure...

[filesiteguy]

Of course, my current favorite is Theseus and the Minotaur: http://www.logicmazes.com/theseus.html

Oh, back to work....

Puzzle Pirates is Not Flash

[eldavojohn]

Two words: Puzzle Pirates.

Well, believe it or not, Puzzle Pirates uses Java 1.4, not Flash (like the title of the article states). From the installation requirements [puzzlepirates.com]:

Puzzle Pirates runs in Java 1.4 and is presently supported on Windows 98, ME, 2000, and XP, on Mac OS X 10.3 'Panther' on Linux and other Unix platforms.

If this article were not restricted to flash only games, I think the quality of the games would be a bit better.

Re:

[toleraen]

Article Title: What Are The Best Free Games Online?

Question at end of summary: Can you suggest any more good free games online?

I'm not seeing where the restriction to flash only games comes into this Ask /..

Why Does Puzzle Pirates require unlimited access?!

[arete]

Why Does Puzzle Pirates require unlimited access to my computer?

Re:Why Does Puzzle Pirates require unlimited acces

[Mercano]

Cause its a full-fledged application, not some applet or flash object. Quite frankly, given the amount of graphics & sound files the game involves, you really don't want to be downloading this thing every time you play; it would take 10 minutes to load up on a good connection, and who knows how long on a slow one.

Re:Why Does Puzzle Pirates require unlimited acces

[Anonymous Coward]

It uses OpenGL, so it needs to be able to talk directly to your video card.

That said, the code is signed, so it should be safe. And if it isn't safe... you know who to sue.

Re:Why Does Puzzle Pirates require unlimited acces

[Sparr0]

Why does your OS classify the very limited needs of Puzzle Pirates as "unlimited"?

Slashdotted

[LarsWestergren]

Long time Puzzle Pirates player here.... It seems we have Slashdotted the servers, the installation download is really slow. Try again tomorrow. :)

Kitten Cannon

[hodagacz]

http://www.addictinggames.com/kittencannon.html [addictinggames.com]

Re:

[Joebert]

http://www.addictinggames.com/renstimpyscrazycannon.html [addictinggames.com]

Missing Options?

[ScuttleMonkey]

Dwarf Fortress [bay12games.com] has been a decent time waster for offline play (great for airplane rides as it turns out).

For an online flash game I can't believe they left out Gold Miner [123games.dk], one of my favorite turn-brain-off-and-play flash games of all time. Great for those long corporate meetings...shhhhh. :)

My choice

[firstojune]

http://www.orisinal.com/ [orisinal.com]

Cutest amongst the cute.

9 Billion Miles from Earth

[ultravibe]

http://www.adultswim.com/games/ninebillion/index.html [adultswim.com]

How about offline flash games?

[EricR86]

One letter:

N

Free, flash, but you play offline on your own computer.
Of course for the online competitive people you can still submit scores online.

500 levels of amazing platforming goodness :).

gratuitous links

[BadMrMojo]

I'll second N [harveycartel.org]. Edges out Cave Story [gameflaws.com] as my favorite platformer of all time.

Best of all, the two are pretty drastically different, so it's worth trying both.

Hapland,

[Cedric Tsui]

Hapland is one of my favorites. Not abundantly popular, but it makes for a really good think.
http://www.foon.co.uk/farcade/hapland/ [foon.co.uk]

Also... If you're on slashdot, you've probably already heard of Notpron [deathball.net]
If you haven't, you'll be unproductive for the next 16 hours, at which point you'll be stumped on level 21.

Me no RTFA

[Riddler Sensei]

For the love of all that is unholy, don't RTFA. It's literally about 1.5 sentences per page along with the name of the game.

I've been playing Bejeweled for years. Not online mind you, but actually on my cell phone. It's an amazing five minute distraction during that short break in a two hour lecture.

I tried the demo of Peggle this week, and...well...while "entertaining" I doubt I would be willing to spend more than a few dollars on it. Now if it were ENTIRELY free, I could probably see myself playing it for

Re:

[secolactico]

You can play peggle for free at zone.msn.com, I believe. The levels are slightly different than the downloadable version, but other than that, I don't see much difference. I don't get very far in this game, so I don't know if later levels are different.

Back In My Day

[phobos13013]

We didnt have all these sophisticated environments to waste our time in... We played SOLITAIRE in visual basic and WE LIKED IT!!!

N?

[davek]

The greatest free cycle eater in the universe doesn't make the list? I can't believe it.

http://www.harveycartel.org/metanet/n.html [harveycartel.org]

Average play time ranges from 30 seconds to 10 hours. Perfect for those long software builds when you've already checked your email 30 times in the last 5 minutes. No scrolling, just perfect stick-figure ninja goodness.

Re:

[evanbd]

Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be a Debian package, and the downloadable version won't run on my machine. Did they really have to link against a specific version of the libc?

Re:

[kalirion]

I have that game, but can't get past level 3 or 4 or something. I just suck at Load Runner type games.

fl0w

[Jaysyn]

I love me some fl0w.

http://intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing/ [usc.edu]

phosphor

[brunascle]

Phosphor [rasterwerks.com]. a shockwave based FPS. yes, that's right, an FPS. pretty good graphics too.

I've struck

[Seakip18]

the Motherload! [xgenstudios.com] Great game. You dig with a miner unit, get money, upgrade and then dig deeper and deeper for the big scores. I wasted hours playing that game.

Re:

[WebGangsta]

You dig with a miner unit, get money, upgrade and then dig deeper and deeper for the big scores. I wasted hours playing that game.

The question, of course, is whether you've reached the bottom.... and survived. [cue maniacal laughter]

The ten most addictive??

[More_Cowbell]

TFA is titled "The ten most addictive online flash games ever made"
Why then are three of the ten rated 2 out of 5 on their own addictiveness scale? A fourth is rated only 3/5...
Maybe they should have called it "the first ten flash games we found links to"?

shamless plug

[Jarik C-Bol]

for good old fassioned runescape (.com) cant beat a free MMO that plays in the browser with half decent graphics.

Kingdom of Loathing

[evanbd]

Doesn't use flash, just standard HTML. And chok full of lovely absurdist humor. And undead elbow macaroni.

Kingdom of Loathing [kingdomofloathing.com]

Completely free, no ads, donation supported. Fair warning: a few of the items are easiest to get by donating, but those are nice-to-haves, and it's certainly no big deal if you don't have them.

Re:

[funaho]

An Adventurer is You!

I've been addicted to KoL on and off for a couple of years now. It's a great way to kill time at work when nobody is looking. :-)

There's always Game!

[Mad Merlin]

You could always play Game! - The Witty Online RPG [dyndns.org].

BattleMaster

[Joe the Lesser]

Check out BattleMaster [battlemaster.org]

It's kind of a mmorpg web-based feudalism simulator.

2D Portal?

[roystgnr]

I never finished it. Partly that's because I was playing in Linux, where the performance of this 2D game was awful on a system where Valve's 3D Portal ran smoothly at moderate-to-high quality settings. It's kind of sad that the Wine programmers can use Linux APIs to implement Windows APIs so much more efficiently than the Adobe programmers can use Linux APIs to implement their own Flash player.

Anyone want to spoil the ending for me? Was there 2D cake, and was it delicious and moist?

Muds, yo!

[Mongoose Disciple]

Some of the best free games online are still MUDs. Like microbrews in an era of WoWeiser the King of MMORPBeers, they're capable of catering to specialized tastes in ways a game meant for the masses (for its strengths) just can't.

Granted, not Flash games. There's something of a disconnect between the title of TFA and the title of the Slashdot story, here.

A few gems (and the november Nethack tournament)

[pthisis]

Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based strategy game; raise armies and fight battles. Play solo campaigns where you can advance your troops' skills, or play short battles against other players online. http://www.wesnoth.org/ [wesnoth.org]

Freeciv is a Civilization clone, also single player or multiplayer online. http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page [wikia.com]

And if you're willing to go really old-school, nethack is always available; the annual tournament is ongoing in the month of November. Current standings at http://nethack.devnull.net/tournament/scoreboard.shtml [devnull.net] or enter for free at http://nethack.devnull.net/tournament/howitworks.shtml [devnull.net] ; you can always telnet to nethack.alt.org to play or download from http://www.nethack.org/ [nethack.org]

There are all kinds of trophies for smaller achievements, so first-time players can hope to get something but it's still competitive for experienced players--I pulled off 6 ascensions in a row at the June tournament and didn't make the top 3 for most consecutive, so the level of play is quite high.

Two words?

[Brian Gordon]

One letter. N [harveycartel.org].

DTD

[DoofusOfDeath]

I'd recommend Desktop Tower Defense, but I can't in good conscience doom 50% of /. readers to getting less sleep and lower performance reviews over the next 3 months.

ive already done the work for you

[ehlo]

I just moved to a new city - from Stockholm, Sweden to Phoenix, Arizona, so Ive had a lot of free time on my hands and much of that has gone to looking for good, free games. I havent limited this to only flash, obviously. Beggars cant be choosers.
But here are some I found that were very addicting!

(flash)
Motherload
http://www.miniclip.com/games/motherload/en/ [miniclip.com]

A game where youre a miner on a mars colony. Deeper you go, the more dangerous, but the more valuable the gems. Upgrades and planning ahead are really im

Grow.

[meringuoid]

Grow [eyezmaze.com].

That is all.

Peasant's Quest!

[Dahamma]

Not just the best Flash game, but possibly the best use of flash in the history of time!

http://www.homestarrunner.com/disk4of12.html [homestarrunner.com]

Re:

[jellomizer]

Once you win it isn't that fun anymore.
TROGDOR! on the other hand will offer much more frustration over time.

Free simple opengl shooter

[tjstork]

I wrote a 3d shooter called Independent. You can download it from http://www.mightyware.com/independent.htm [mightyware.com]. It's shareware, but, since all of you folks put up with my loony rants, the registration code is 1138. Enjoy!

Thats an oxymoron

[nurb432]

Flash and best in the same sentence? Ick.

www.Orisinal.com

[GillBates0]

I find Ferry Halim's creations [orisinal.com] simple, creative, beautiful, artistic and addictive. For example, notice the simple, yet elegant 3D effects in this game [ferryhalim.com].

Great for a lonely/drunk Friday evening, when complex games are too mentally exhausting.

Neopets

[halcyon1234]

Neopets.com is a great repository of flash games. I partial to a faerie bubbles myself. If you get bored with the games, then there's the world to explore, neopoints to collect, etc, etc.

Two more words

[belgar]

Jelly Battle. [jellybattle.com]

how about a game over four thousand years old?

[Ryandav]

May I humbly suggest a game which has withstood the tests of time and remained a vibrant growing community of players, uses commonly available materials and requires very little resources to play and study? I speak of the oriental game of Go (or baduk or weiqi, depending on where you are from).

There are free java clients (such as KGS) you can download and play any of the thousands of constantly online players. I also work on an open source server to allow people to play Go as a turn based game, similar to

Multiplayer Asteroids.

[skrolle2]

http://www.nonoba.com/as [nonoba.com]

It's like asteroids, only multiplayer. Pew pew pew pew pew! :-)

Travian

[snack]

I'd suggest travian [travian.us].

Travian is an online multiplayer browser-based game developed by Travian Games GmbH in Germany.[1] For the international market the game is published by Gameforge AG.[2] In Travian, players interact simultaneously and compete with thousands of others in a virtual world set roughly in Classical antiquity, at the time of the Roman Empire. (Shamelessly copied from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org])

Netrek

[GodfatherofSoul]

The original. It was, is, and ever shall be.

Sniper/Subspace/Continuum

[Exuder]

Fun free 2D multi-player shooter (glorified asteroids)... Info: Continuum info [wikipedia.org] Client/Site: Continuum download [subspacedownloads.com]

Planeshift

[spikedvodka]

Personally, I love Planeshift http://www.planeshift.it/ [planeshift.it] It's Free, fun, constantly growing, and it has a great community

I'll be the first to admit, it doesn't have quite the polish of a full-blown MMORPG, but we're working on it, (Yes, Disclaimer: I am a dev), but it is highly playable

If you like MMORPGs, and want to get your hands dirty working on one, please look and see if you want to help out, we're always looking for artists (2D and 3D), and coders

WordsPlay

[Misch]

Wordsplay [wordsplay.net], the successor to Weboggle is a good casual game.

Does it have to be Flash?

[illumin8]

Right now my absolute favorite free online game is called Mythos [mythos.com]. It's a Diablo-like (or should I say Nethack/Roguelike?) hack-n-slash game that is incredibly fun. If there were a Diablo 3, this game would probably be it. The game is still in beta, but it's a lot of fun, and totally free.

Check it out if you get a chance.

Good games

[ZorbaTHut]

A [url=http://lineage2.plaync.jp/l2fun/flashGame.aspx]Japanese puzzle games[/url] tangentially based off Lineage.

[url=http://www.eyezmaze.com/grow/cube/index.html]Eyezmaze's games[/url], especially the Grow series.

Both are puzzle games, just FYI.

Re:

[ZorbaTHut]

Lemme try that again since I screwed up the last comment (too much vbulletin for me.)

A Japanese puzzle game [plaync.jp] tangentially based off Lineage.

Eyezmaze's games [eyezmaze.com], especially the Grow series.

Both are puzzle games, just FYI.

Love Hina

[WillAffleckUW]

It's based on the manga and anime series in Japan, and I think it's still available on newgrounds.com and other sites to play.

Watermelons!

Sheep Invaders

[rrohbeck]

http://www.addictinggames.com/sheepinvaders.html [addictinggames.com]
Must-have if you're a Scot ;)

Physics games

[Nullav]

Fun-Motion [fun-motion.com] lists quite a few of building games and other such timewasters, most of which are free. There's also the Linux Game Tome [happypenguin.org] (most of the games also have Windows and Mac ports).

My absolute favorites.

[DoninIN]

http://urbandead.com/ [urbandead.com] Zombies and survivors in a bleak text based post apocalyptic struggle, with player created wiki and a huge number of players. http://nexuswar.com/ [nexuswar.com] Angels and Demons fighting for the future of the next universe in a browser based graphically light role playing game. (Very fun, a bit like an old school pen & paper rpg with a couple thousand of your closest friends.)

Wurm

[Eudial]

Not flash, but wurm online [wurmonline.com] is _very_ addictive.

I just want to play Adventure

[vinn01]

All this talk about Flash games - it's as bad as that newfangled game called "Zork".

I want to play "ADVENT". I like it best on a Prime minicomputer running PRIMOS.

Damn kids, get offa my lawn...

EvE-Online

[selfabuse]

Eve isn't "free" free, but you can pay for gametime with in-game currency, so once you get some money-making things going on, it becomes free.

Runescape?

[nogginthenog]

U N00B IM LEVEL 61 LOL!

Boomshine

[fialar]

Very addictive game:

http://www.k2xl.com/games/boomshine/ [k2xl.com] (Boomshine)

Biggest collection of waste of time : Friv

[H0ek]

Can't decide what you want to play? No problem! Go here!

http://www.friv.com/ [friv.com]

It wastes my time, it wastes the time of my boys, but we're such a happy family, now. ;-)

Great - 10 more sites blocked

[The Fun Guy]

Thanks for giving our IT guys the URLs, Slashdot. As if they hadn't already firewalled all the good stuff already.

My pick

[bgspence]

would be any poker site dot net. All the dot nets are free and you win/lose money at the dot com ones.

WordBreaker is a lot of fun

[ekmo]

I'm totally addicted to a logic game designed for the iPhone (but playable in any web browser) called WordBreaker [wordbreaker.org].

BZFlag

[morrison]

Yes, I'm rather biased...but...
BZFlag [bzflag.org] is still a great on-line game.

It's a real-time strategy first-person shoot-em-up action game... kinda like playing chess .. with tanks .. in a slow motion FPS style.

Dwarf Fortress!

[MWoody]

http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/ [bay12games.com]

It might look like it at first, but while it does share many similarities with the genre, it's not a roguelike game. It's a sandbox-style kingdom-building game of absolutely incredible complexity. They just released a huge update about a month ago that gave your digging a z-axis and, combined with a fluid dynamics engine, you can do some pretty hilarious things to defend your fortress.

And to get you started, check out the "my first fortress" and other starting guides in the game wiki:
http://dwarf.lendemaindeveille.com/index.php/Main_Page [lendemaindeveille.com]

PseudoQuest!

[Xaroth]

Oh, sure, it's a bit of shameless self-promotion, but I encourage anyone who enjoys turn-based pseudo-RPGs like LORD or KoL to check it out. It's a free casual RPG I'm writing in my spare time, at least in part as an exercise in stretching what's possible to do with PHP and AJAX. So... maybe not a "flash game" per se, but fits the general theme of casual games one can play over their lunch. ;)

Now go kill some slimes! http://www.pseudoquest.com/ [pseudoquest.com]

Gridlock

[curunir]

http://www.corwin.ca/gridlock/ [corwin.ca]...

Would be addictive if there were more than 40 levels.

Conquer Club

[Micah]

If you like Risk, go to . Highly addictive, lots of play variation possibilities. Not Flash, but DHTML/AJAX (even better). Good playability. [conquerclub.com]

Check out Dofus

[code shady]

Funny name notwithstanding, it's a pretty cool little MMORPG that's done entirely in flash.

It has free to play and pay to play modes.

Re:

[Anxarcule]

The flash version doesn't do justice at all to the real Orange Box version. Plus it's only $19.99 for Portal standalone.

Flash vs Orange Version

[TheNinjaroach]

I disagree with your statement. Sure Flash isn't as glamorous when dropping three stories then soaring across the room, but the functionality, level design and problem solving are all very directly comparable to its Orange-boxed counterpart.

I obsessed over the Flash version for a full week, leading me to buy the Box for the real deal. While fully satisfied with my purchase, I still had a strong sense of "I've solved this already" when playing through the Orange version.

So it's not hardware accelerated, f

Re:

[Gulthek]

The flash version has absolutely none of the hilarious (and, at time, disturbing) dialog and plot that the real game has. The puzzles and game mechanic in Portal are a sidebar to the utter awesomeness of the writing. Everything that makes Portal, Portal is completely lacking in the flash version.

Also the flash version is buggy as hell. The third time I fell through several floors instead of going through the portal I closed it forever.

Re:

[radarjd]

Ditto on Kingdom of Loathing [kingdomofloathing.com]. It's not flash, but it's tons of fun.

Re:

[TheRaven64]

KoL was fun, but the lack of interaction with other players made it a bit boring after a while. Urban Dead [urbandead.com] is much simpler, but has a great many more metagaming possibilities. Some of my friends have been killing humans in the zoo in the name of animal rights, for example.

Re:

[shoptroll]

Hear hear. This weekend attended a gathering of players in Ohio. Awesome community :)

Re:gaiaonline.org and habbo hotel!

[meringuoid]

Habbo was fun back in the day, but it's not been the same since they closed the pool.

Re:Dice Wars -- pish!

[WebGangsta]

KDICE (http://www.kdice.com/ [kdice.com]) takes Dice Wars and builds it into an odd social-cum-gambling multiplayer version that I quite enjoy. Also, gpokr (http://www.gpokr.com/ [gpokr.com]) from the same dude.

I'm disappointed that my favorite Settlers of Catan server has gone away (http://settlers.cs.northwestern.edu/ [northwestern.edu]) but there is one over at (http://www.jsettlers.com/ [jsettlers.com]) that I've been on. Of course, these are Java, not Flash. Potato, potato.

Re:

[compro01]

heh. another player. fun diversion (it runs off a thumbdrive nicely), though the immaturity of most of the players grates me at times.