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THE COMPLETE
Indie Zone started
life as a very small column called Free Play in the news section of
PC Zone, covering freeware releases. After just two issues, it was
incorporated into a proper regular section featuring commercial
independent games as well as freeware, and ran for just under a
year, until the magazine was bought by Future Publishing and your
correspondent was summarily fired. Since it's basically just a bunch
of small game reviews, the whole thing has been collected here onto a
single page, with obsolete original links updated to the best
available live ones at the time of writing.
FREE PLAY - ISSUE 138 (Feb 2004)
Achtung viewers! Welcome to Free Play,
an excellent new regular section of PC Zone in which we bring you
the very best in free PC gaming. It’s probably worth taking a minute
to define our terms – for the purposes of this column, “free” is
defined as a game you can obtain in its entirety without paying for
in advance. Therefore, shareware games which come as a few levels,
with the whole game available only when you pay for it, are NOT
eligible for inclusion here. On the other hand, games which you can
download/play in their entirety, but are invited to subsequently pay
for if you enjoyed them, ARE allowed - naturally, we strongly
encourage you to play fair with such games and make the requested
donation if you feel the game is worth it. But what we’re mostly
going to be focussing on here are games which are completely and
permanently free, which some enormously generous soul has created
and distributed for nothing other than the sheer philanthropic joy
of sharing them with fellow gamers, and which fill Free Play’s heart
with a warm and glowing love for humanity.
Such a game is our first offering, the
glorious Warning Forever. An all-boss freeware shoot-‘em-up from
Japan, Warning Forever does something that’s been sadly missing from
shooting games ever since R-Type – giant enemy ships you can blow up
piece by piece, rather than just having to pour fire into one weak
spot for hours until the whole thing illogically explodes. There’s
far more gameplay cleverness to discover in Warning Forever than we
have space to tell you about here, so just dive right in, admire the
aesthetic and design elegance, and then destroy it. With bullets.
http://www18.big.or.jp/~hikoza/Prod/
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FREE PLAY - ISSUE 139 (Mar 2004)
Atari’s classic Super Sprint belongs
to a special category of games – the victims of technology. Like 2D
platformers and football games you don’t need a degree in rocket
science to play, racing games viewed from overhead where you can see
the entire track all the time simply don’t get made in the 3D era.
It’s a bit weird, because there’s no logical reason that people
would suddenly stop enjoying that style of gameplay just because
some completely different kind of racing games also became available
– if a new limited-edition Mars bar comes out, you don’t stop liking
roast beef, do you?
Anyway, where the games industry fails
us, you can be sure that heroic bedroom coders will step into the
breach, and so it is with Super Sprint games. GeneRally (Free Play
is unable to ascertain if you’re supposed to pronounce it as
“generally” or “Jean Rally”) is a simple and
ultra-customisable engine for the creation of Super Sprint-type
racing larks, and has spawned a huge mod community creating
countless original and inventive race tracks, but also – and as far
as Free Play is aware, this is a first for the genre – accurate
mappings of real-life race tracks.
When you come to think about it, it’s
kinda odd that nobody ever released a commercial Super Sprint-style
game featuring real racetracks, but it doesn’t matter now, because
dedicated GeneRally fans have mapped and translated Monaco, Spa
Francorchamps, the Hungaroring and all your other favourites, all in
a variety of styles (some, for example, just recreate the track’s
basic shape to whizz round in a few seconds, while others use the
game’s alterable scale function to implement realistic length, so
that a lap takes a couple of minutes in real time). You can race in
all manner of different vehicles, on street or rally tracks, against
humans or computer opponents with individually-selectable skill
ratings, and just generally tweak and tune everything until you’ve
created the Super Sprint game of your dreams. Sweet.
http://generally.rscsites.org/ - central hub for new versions
and extra tracks
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