The Best Free Online (in-browser or downloadable) Games

ok fallen london is pretty damn cool

waiting for actions to refresh is super annoying though, am i missing something

It's better than it used to be but it is incredibly annoying, yes. You have to get used to the whole 'play for five minutes, wait for five hours' thing; a lot of free games do this now and it makes me want to kill. Does FL really count as a game of this year, though?

Also, allow me to say FROG FRACTIONS just one more time.

I think FL has been updated enough (including the new name and stuff) that it should count as this year... and it's definitely the kind of game you periodically check into instead of play in big chunks of time.

Story Nexus might be the exact 2012 release... Tom Chick included FL on his list of best games here.

the waiting killed FL for me pretty quickly, it seems more than a lot of these games to call for an immersive experience but never gives you time to get immersed, much less so than something like Kingdom of Loathing.

having said that, i'm curious to revisit because Tom Chick's review makes it sound a lot stronger than it was when it started.

Mordy (or anyone else), have you tried any of the other games on StoryNexus now they've opened it up for public development?

http://gamejam.bossastudios.com/

is this a qwop type deal or am i just terrible

it's basically impossible

http://blog.keithclark.co.uk/creating-3d-worlds-with-html-and-css/

demo of above: http://keithclark.co.uk/labs/css3-fps/

Fucking bonkers.

oh my lord, frog fractions

http://jayisgames.com/games/400-years/

sweet.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/briderider/fps-man

cute

okay, what is this
http://chrome.com/maze/

addicted to MMO bomberman: http://bombermine.com/

xp turns a webpage into a Marble Madness type game. Also if you have a phone that uses the Chrome browser, the phone can be used as a motion controller.

!!!!

it's been over a month since i mentioned this, so i feel obligated to say that i am perhaps the best Marble Madness player of all time, at least on NES. i gotta check this out.

"turns a webpage into something that makes Chrome use all your CPU and doesn't do anything" is a more accurate summary of my experience so far, but it sounds p. cool

(my laptop is pretty underpowered for gaming, but more so than a phone? I hope not)

Yeah, the page doesn't do anything at all for me. Just shows a few loading bars at the bottom.

xp the phone is just used a controller for the game running on a PC/Mac, there's some weird pairing procedure to get them working together with the game. Although a mobile isn't actually required. However a fairly speedy computer is necessary (how fast? faster than mine apparently).

the phone is just used a controller for the game running on a PC/Mac

oh i see. that's clever if... probably not the future of gaming

(NB never pay any attention to what I think is the future of gaming. I've been waiting for this 3D fad to die out since Descent came out... any time now...)

uh, i don't know if you ya'll have tried this yet, but this is pretty amazing

i mean, forget the game itself. it's just an amazing concept.

http://www.krillbite.com/theplan

tried it - cute

http://jayisgames.com/games/simian-interface/

very cool

that was cute clever and brief. good find!

Yeah, that was a pleasant little sideways-brain activity!

For fans of (the non-porny elements of) visual novels: No-one Has to Die

looks interesting, will check it out when i get home. the lack of porn and death may be a turnoff.

lol that's what i thought but i am a sucker for well-made VN in any mode

it were alright, brief enough to play thru anyway. not crazy about the writing and the puzzles were way too easy.

whoah. i really dug that! i'm a sucker for that... genre

snesbox.com is blowing me away - a snes emulator in flash!

it says "free trial" - how much does it cost, eventually?

I think that might have been an ad rather than the site itself..?

oh, you're right! god, i feel like an old fart (but not ilx user "old fart"). anyway, tried it out earlier and now i'm 2 hours into secret of mana. of course, emulators are nothing new but it's pretty cool to have a free flash version that works well.

http://www.depressionquest.com/

Between this, Cart Life and Actual Sunlight, 2013 really is the Year of Bleak Realness in indie games. Frankly, I'm pretty inspired by it. Yeah, you could say they cover a narrow, first-world perspective of depression, but to me they've been incredibly, hauntingly on point; I want these games to get noticed not just for the topic they address, but for bringing new voices to gaming.

respectfully, i think i disagree. specifically about depression quest.

as you say, it covers a narrow perspective of depression, but i'd go further. from what i've played - admittedly not much - i found the game's assertions about depression pretty frustrating.

i'm in a strange frame of mind at the moment and i have to make allowances for that, but there's something troubling for me about bold statements on what depression is and what it feels like. i'm irritated because i feel that something complex, existential, subjective, problematic is being nailed into a tick-list of symptoms.

and in this game in particular it felt like a very class-constrained, vanilla experience.

i'm worried that groups that advocate for recognition of some mental illnesses or disabilities create quite a constrictive definition of impairments that are far more fluid and evanescent - like in some way they are disabling or medicalizing people's soul (psyche, whatever you prefer)

i'll probably come back to this game cos it seems well done and i might want to explore but right now, it doesn't sit right with me somehow

I played Depression Quest a little while ago, and yeah, there's stuff to like about it, but I found it way too oversimplified. Like, I get that they tried to show that sometimes you can't choose the 'right thing' if you're already suffering by greying out options, but it's far far too easy to guess at the paths to choose if you want to get your character to die in a mire of depression or to be on the road to recovery. And maybe that's partly the point, but I already know this shit and it doesn't help. Most of the criticisms I have, I do think they thought about and tried somehow to deal with, but it's not successful. I don't know if it could ever be successful.

i'm worried that groups that advocate for recognition of some mental illnesses or disabilities create quite a constrictive definition of impairments that are far more fluid and evanescent - like in some way they are disabling or medicalizing people's soul (psyche, whatever you prefer)

I pretty much entirely disagree with this, though. There's a reason why this shit is medicalised, and it's because it's debilitating. I can choose to live with my special depressed snowflake life, or I can get help, or I can kill myself, but none of those options really change the fact that I have a medical disorder, and that a public offering of help to other people who have the same disorder is a good thing, even if I don't want that help myself. Fuck a soul/psyche.

i think i want to reply to that on the depression thread when i get a chance. i take your points tho.

The perspective i'm coming from is that, by and large, most people do not understand depression at all, despite it being a common ailment. I completely agree that the game simplifies the struggle, but i welcome the attempt to communicate it, even in a pretty raw form such as this. Admittedly, perhaps that is too forgiving, but we all gotta start somewhere...

i'm worried that groups that advocate for recognition of some mental illnesses or disabilities create quite a constrictive definition of impairments that are far more fluid and evanescent - like in some way they are disabling or medicalizing people's soul (psyche, whatever you prefer)

I can choose to live with my special depressed snowflake life, or I can get help, or I can kill myself, but none of those options really change the fact that I have a medical disorder, and that a public offering of help to other people who have the same disorder is a good thing, even if I don't want that help myself. Fuck a soul/psyche.

I agree that it is horrifically obvious where certain paths go, so as a game, that doesn't work. i tried to role play it as best I could (would I really seek treatment at this point? would i open up to this person?) and a good game would have a greater dimension to this. That said, I really did appreciate the breakup scene towards the end where every option is terrible.

isn't cart life 2012?

i... wait what's going on here?
http://candies.aniwey.net/

basically leave it running in a tab and come back to it occasionally.