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…of the game, that is. Here are 10 games that are addicitive enough for you to feign headaches!
Haunting the back of your mind all the while and making it increasingly difficult for you to concentrate on anything else, you desperately will be waiting for your next ‘fix’. In this article, we have compiled the list of the ten most addictive games we have come across. No reasons to fret here if you hate shareware or have a box from the Stone Age-all these games are free and should run on most PCs out there, and you’ll find most of them on our Jan 07’s CD and DVD. That said, let’s get started on the countdown.
What It Is
This game is simple. No story… literally! No complicated controls, no complicated options, no nothing. Just start the game and get straight to business. The objective is to guide your ship to dodge and destroy waves of enemy ships with differing weapons and AI on the top of the screen. As you destroy waves after waves while not dying, you will encounter the final boss of that tier who will be much more difficult to deal with. The game becomes more difficult as you keep playing-the enemy ships become harder to dodge. The controls are rather simplistic-just the mouse movement and the good old left-click can control the entire game.
Why It’s Addictive
Laserage Gold has absolutely nothing other than raw addictiveness to stand up for it. The controls are simple; the power-ups that spawn as you battle through your enemies keep things a bit interesting. But the game has a kind of tendency to train your reflexes to a point that you click restart every time you die, without even thinking about it. The high score feature adds to the motivation of playing the game; you will be constantly hungering to beat your last high score. Laserage doesn’t have much, and has plenty at the same time; you will be getting yourself a ‘fix’ of it every single day.
9 BIKEZ II
What It Is
In Bikez II, you are a mercenary biker in the future; the state of the city is bleak with gang wars erupting everywhere. Enter Bikez, the local criminal faction that has just signed a contract with you to complete missions for them, which become increasingly difficult over time. And of course the missions don’t include babysitting or bringing vegetables for them-it’s about a whole lot of action, killing, guns and blood.
You can satisfy your destructive desires with the weapon attachments on your bike. The world is fairly big for a freeware game, and there are outlets where you can customise your weapons-including things like homing bullets and an increased rate of fire. Of course, customisations require precious moolah, which you can earn by completing the missions thrown at you.
Why It’s Addictive
There’s already a shortage of Bike games in the market; couple that with something like Carmageddon on a bike, and you have a game you will not want to let go of. The hunger of firing a weapon at its maximum rate of fire drives you to complete missions for the money to buy them. However, that’s not the only way to earn money-if your bike is too damaged to complete a mission, you can always run over innocent citizens to generate money, repair your bike and go on to the missions. And for bullet time lovers, there’s also a slow motion key to drool over the carnage you dish out. Bikez II is sure to keep you hooked for hours completing one mission after another, you will forget what the words ‘quit’ or ‘exit’ mean.
8 ICY TOWER
What It Is
It seems the developers thought, “Guess we better add a story?” and just slapped one into the readme. Icy Tower’s story is rather simplistic-one day, Harold had nothing else to do when he came across a huge tower after which he thought “Ey, I bet a homie like me can do some mighty cool jumps and moves in here”. And so it goes-you have to help Harold make the highest and coolest jumps in history.
You choose from up to 3 players to play in the game. It’s a 2D game which consists of you trying to jump up levels of icy floors, the screen will scroll up faster as you go to the higher levels, you die if your character disappears below the screen as it scrolls up, or if you fall down, so make sure to keep jumping up without looking back…er…down.
Why It’s Addictive
If you are thinking, ‘What’s so addictive about jumping up platforms?’, then you really need to get a taste of the game to find out. Icy Tower requires a decent amount of skill to get a good score. There’s more than just jumping up platforms. There are tricks to make higher jumps, your character accelerates as it moves further and makes higher jumps. You can make combo jumps, or have your character bounce off the walls to get to a difficult to reach platform, or jump only on special platforms (we’ll leave it to you to find out what they are like) to make sure you rake up the points.
You will find yourself hooked on boosting your overall score, or finding different ways to perform jumps. If that’s not enough, there’s also the ability to save your replay and upload it to the main Web site to give you your fifteen minutes of fame.
7 ICE WARS
What It Is
Ice Wars looks like a side scrolling action game at first glance. However, it’s a lot different from being an action game. Set somewhere in the Arctic Circle, Ice Wars is a turn based strategy game where your goal is to eliminate all players of the opposing team using a large variety of weapons. The game’s setting reminds you of Worms Armageddon, but there’s the added feature of letting you choose your players from 3 different classes, each with its own strengths and attack stats along with special attacks. As you play the game, you will realise it’s a lot more than just aim, shoot and end turn. You will often end up stuck deciding on what weapon to choose for maximum damage. Even the maps are strategically designed; everything you read in Sun Tzu’s Art of War will come into play when playing this.
Why It’s Addictive
A single game of Ice Wars could stretch for up to an hour. The number of ways to take out your enemies is tremendous, with the huge array of weapons at your disposal. You are limited to the amount of moves you make in a single turn, requiring you to carefully calculate your moves before making them. Adding to the fun is the fact that you can play multiplayer with your friends with game modes like Last Man Standing and Capture The Flag. The replay feature is something you will often find yourself using after you have just whacked four enemies with a single shot. For this game to truly shine it has to be played in multiplayer, and believe us when we tell you that you will never go back to chess after this!
6 COUNTER-STRIKE 2D
What It Is
Counter-Strike (CS), originally nothing more than a mod for the legendary Half-Life, is still the most played multiplayer game, even now-almost ten years after the game was released. If your PC is something that would soon make its way into a museum showcase, or if you still can’t convince your dad to shell out around Rs 1,000 for a computer game, there’s an answer for you-Counter-Strike 2D. Almost everything in the game is the same as Counter-Strike, except for one major change-it’s 2D. You have a top view of your player and control him along the map.
You can play as terrorists or counter-terrorists, and your objective is either to plant the bomb as the terrorists or to defuse it as the counter-terrorists. You can also have different objectives like rescuing hostages.
Why It’s Addictive
Counter-Strike 2D is a mini-CS at heart, and shares its big brother’s addictiveness.
Though it’s primarily a multiplayer game, you can also play with bots. In multiplayer, the game truly shines; you can play with teams on the same maps for CS, including de_aztec, de_dust, etc., except in 2D action. The large amount of maps included with CS2D adds to the replay value of the game. Not enough? Well, there’s also the fact that there’s a simple to use map editor included within the game itself to keep you busy for quite a few hours. Even heavy console and cfg-tweakers (that’s configuration file tweakers) will be satisfied with the vast amount of commands and variables offered with this game, most of which are similar to the original Counter-Strike. Well, actually we could have probably just written the review in a few words: it’s 2D, but it’s still CS!
5 WORMINATOR
What It Is
Like the name suggests, the story of Worminator is similar to the ever-popular Terminator. However, instead of the good of worm-kind, you fight for the Worminators, who are fighting a losing battle against the rebels led by Wrom Conner. You are a prototype Wormborg, just created at one of the factories controlled by Dirtnet, the leader of Worminators. No one knows exactly who, or what Dirtnet is. You must escape the factory surrounded by the Worman rebels; you are now the Worminators’ last hope.
The story is unique and funny to the core, but that’s not all. Worminator is a side scrolling action game that allows you to choose from up to 12 unique weapons, and 12 kinds of enemies to test them out on. There are also small nifty features like your character changing its appearance as it takes damage (a la Wolf 3D) and skin support for the interface.
Why It’s Addictive
Like RPGs, side-scrolling games never fail to grab our undivided attention and Worminator does so perfectly. The main campaign itself is lengthy and tough enough to keep you occupied for days. Even if you do manage to finish it, you will want to play it again and again. If you do get bored, which is rare, you can always make your own levels with the integrated editor. The 12 weapons, including the BFG (yup! ou heard us), keep your experience fresh and varied. This is one of the few games which will keep you addicted despite lacking a multiplayer mode.
4 BLAST DOORS
What It Is
Blast Doors doesn’t have a great storyline; at best, it’s clichéd. Set in the 21st century, nations are thrown into a chaotic war for depleting resources. Enter Militech, a company touting the motto “Bigger guns for a brighter future”, selling weapons to the highest bidders. Now if you have a problem with some other country, use Militech’s weapons and wipe them off the world map.Who says wars cannot bring peace and that treaties help settle matters? .jpg)
The game itself doesn’t have anything to do with the story, literally, and it’s just slapped in there for the sake of it. The goal of the game is simple-destroy your opponent by firing missiles at them in turns. It’s reminiscent of classic cannon games where you set your angle and shoot at your enemy, except in Blast doors the world is shown in 3D and you can also select bearing. Again, the fun here is in the number of players you can play with in a map-up to 8-carnage indeed.
Why It’s Addictive
The game isn’t just aim-and-shoot-you will be spending the majority of your time choosing weapons, shields and other accessories. Weapons, shields and upgrades are plentiful, and you can even design your own weapons. The more powerful items require more money and prestige, which is your entire reason for getting addicted. You will often find yourself choosing to play 250 rounds, despite not really wanting to just to see what those elite weapons, that can cost 1000 prestige points, are made up of.
The ability to play with up to 8 players against the computer or your friends over the network adds to the overall fun and addiction the game has to offer. You simply won’t get bored of this one. Blast doors will stay etched on your desktop, for a long time.
What It Is
You must remember the good old days of Street Fighter; how we miss bashing everyone’s heads in spamming fireball after fireball with Ryu. This game fulfils all your retro desires, with more spice added to it. A fighting game to the core, it comes with ten different characters, each with their own style of fighting; the game lives up to its name…literally! The fighters are actually smaller than you would expect them to be, but that doesn’t deter the amount of fun that Little Fighter 2 offers.
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You have up to 10 different backgrounds to fight in and 5 game modes to choose from including the Versus mode, 1 vs. 1 championship, 2 vs. 2 championship, Battle mode and Stage mode. The Stage mode is something that gives the game a different feel to it, turning it into a side scrolling action game.
That’s not all this small game has to offer, there’s also the fact that in a single ring, you can have up to 8 different players and divided to up to four teams or independent, this makes it a must-play for a great multiplayer experience
Why It’s Addictive
The option of playing with up to 8 players, is why. There’s nothing better than the surge of glory in seeing yourself as the last man standing after a long match. The items that are dropped randomly on the level, like rocks, bottles, boomerangs etc in the middle of a fight to pick up and throw at your enemies, adds to the fun and makes every game unpredictable thus the amount of repetitiveness is extremely low and the addictiveness bar is high. Oh and just in case you forget-the key to exiting the game is [Alt] [F4], but we don’t expect you to remember that anyway, especially when you are in the middle of a fight at 4 AM.
2 BABO VIOLENT 2
What It Is
Babo Violent 2 is an action packed multiplayer game featuring support for up to 32 players, and no, all of 32 players won’t be snoozing around trying to shoot slow missiles or spend half an hour camping. It’ll be carnage, absolute carnage, with rapid firing machineguns, chain guns, bazookas, dual machine guns, bouncing grenades and Molotov cocktails. You control a ball armed to the teeth from the top view with both your keyboard and mouse simultaneously. As you fire your weapons at your enemies, your player (the ball) will be bounced back because of the recoil thus requiring constant attention to both aim and movement. There’s no shortage of maps to play in, either-you can choose up to 13 different maps to frag your opponents to smithereens..jpg)
Why It’s Addictive
Babo Violent 2 is extremely fast paced, requiring constant attention to control your ball and frag your opponent in style. Imagine 32 players on a single map going crazy bouncing each other all over the map, there won’t be any boring games to remember in Babo Violent 2. The three modes included with the game make sure you don’t get bored playing only one game type-you can add in more variety by playing Free for all, Team Deathmatch or Capture The Flag with your friends. This game is well worth wasting your hours on; just be sure to stay away from it during your exams for the sake of your grades!
1 DINK SMALLWOOD
What It Is
You are Dink Smallwood, just another simpleton in a small village and performing simple chores like tending to your pig farm and helping out the village folk doing petty chores. However things change fast, as once, when coming back from your chores, you find out that your house is burnt and your mother is no longer in this world. After the grievous incident, you venture farther from the village and encounter a horde of adventures while becoming famous along the way, going on from being a no name pig farmer to the saviour of the world and whatnot. The story seems to be something straight out of a classic fantasy book, complete with kings, castles, goblins, demons, flying dragons and tiny magicians wearing pointed hats to complete the recipe. .jpg)
Played in an RPG setting, as you interact with characters in the game and complete quests, you gain experience and upgrade potions for attack, defence, and magic…and of course, the usual inventory where you can equip yourself with swords, bows, bombs, potions and spells to help you stand up against your bloodthirsty enemies. Even the music is nostalgic, reminding you what it was like gaming in the old times, and of course, the cheesy humour to go along with it to constantly remind you that it’s a game you are playing after all.
Why It’s Addictive
RPG games are notoriously known for their effectiveness for pulling the players inside their world. Dink Smallwood is no exception to this rule and does this rather well, you will be craving for the next quest or to see the area which you can’t explore yet or can’t wait to interact with the next merchant offering newer items (Vorpal sword with an attack rating of 835692 anyone?). Looking for secret areas alone, will take a huge chunk of your time, but in the end, it’s all worth it. While the amount of inventory items is not particularly high, they are rare, which gives you that satisfying feeling of accomplishment when you finally get one. Even the enemies get crazily tough as you progress, forcing you to spend a good amount of time towards upgrading your abilities before engaging them.
The main story is rather long, keeping you hooked on it as you are constantly kept wondering “What’s next?” The world’s size is rather big, the map you acquire later in the game doesn’t do justice to the area, and it brings out the true definition of small-scale maps. You will constantly want to finish off all quests in the current area possible to advance to the next. Even if you complete the main story and are left hungry thereafter, you can always download add-ons free from the developer’s Web site, or make your own maps with the included editor. This small 16 MB game will keep you busy for days while you are cut off from the rest of the world.
Final words
As you may already have seen from the list, a game needn’t have DirectX 10 graphics or a Havok 2 physics engine, or make a dent of Rs 1,000 in your wallet to be fun. Games, at the end of the day, are just games, and even ones with mediocre graphics will grab your attention with superior gameplay, compared to something that will run on a box only Russian Czars and BIll Gates’ relatives could afford, but fail to grab your interest because of boring gameplay!