I have decided to bring back game reviews here at Ghacks by reviewing one, free game, every Saturday. I call it Game Saturday and it begins with a classic. The Streets of Rage series was extremely successful on the Sega Genesis. Sega released a total of three parts and ported it to other systems over [...]

I’ll come clean and say that I’ve still not been drawn into the whole Angry Birds phenomenon, but that’s not to say I haven’t heard about it.  It’s very difficult not to have heard about Angry Birds after all! Movie studio 20th Century Fox are counting on this as it’s now been announced that the [...]

As far as killing time with games is concerned, you will be hard pressed to find a better game than Gridwars. Gridwars is very much like the secret game Geometry Wars that was the secret bonus game tucked into Gotham Racing 2 for the XBox (Which then evolved into Geometry Wars: Retro, available for XBox [...]

Following pressure from the US military, EA Games have decided to remove a feature from their forthcoming multi-player Medal of Honor game that would have allowed gamers to play as members of the Taliban. In a statement on the Medal of Honor website, Greg Goodrich, the Executive producer for the game said… In the past [...]

Microsoft’s latest game for the XBox 360 console, Halo: Reach has made $200 million in its first 24 hours after launch according to data released by Microsoft and reported by TechFlash.  The previous Halo game topped the all time games sales chart until it was dethroned by Call of Duty 2: Modern Warfare.  Now the [...]

Trolling seems to be a huge problem on Blizzard forums at websites like battle.net or worldofwarcraft.com as the company has just announced plans to switch to Real ID posting on the forums. Real ID has been introduced as a feature a while ago to make connections with other players on battle.net easier. It basically displays [...]

Remember LAN gaming? Gaming on Local Area Networks was the way to play back in the 90s. You had to haul all your equipment to your friends or a central location if you were not lucky enough to have enough computer systems standing around for the weekly game of Quake, Half-life or Starcraft. Most games [...]

Ah the good old days. When adventures were hard to crack and players could really die when they made the wrong moves. Sierra On-line was one of the big dogs of adventuring back then, they produced series like Leisure Suit Larry, Kings Quest, Space Quest and heaps of other remarkable games. The games are still [...]

It’s been a long time since I offered up a nice Linux game for the Ghacks audience. So I thought, today I will introduce them to one of my favorite Linux time killers Chromium B.S.U. When I first discovered this game it’s original title was simply Chromium. Obviously this was  a serious conflict of interest [...]

This year’s E3 gaming convention had some very interesting hardware and game announcements for all popular gaming systems and the PC. The convention is still underway until June 17 but most developers have already shown their upcoming releases in conferences. The following selection includes some of the most promising looking games and devices that were [...]

If you have recently installed a game that uses the anti-cheating software Punkbuster to reduce online cheating in the game you may have noticed the two Punkbuster services PnkBstrA.exe and PnkBstrB.exe running in the Windows Task Manager even if the game has not been started in the session. Punkbuster gets installed as two Windows Services [...]

Text Twist is a very popular online game that is offered on many different websites. Two of the most popular versions of the Text Twist game are offered on Yahoo and MSN Games with the MSN game only playable in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Text Twist is a word game where the player has to form [...]

PC games publishers, like the music or film industry, face the challenges of piracy. A game for instance is usually available on the Internet before it can be purchased. The Internet game comes without copy protection and other forms of protection. Regular buyers on the other hand have to wait longer and face copy protection [...]

Let’s face it, we sit at our computers for hours on end. Be it administrating, working, or just plain killing time. Everyone knows that the interwebs is a sure-fire time killer. But what happens, gasp, when those interwebs are down and you’ve no way to pass time? You shrivel up and die right? No! You [...]

Tinker was one of the few Windows Vista Ultimate extras that were released by Microsoft. It was a classic puzzle game that put the player in the role of a robot that had to solve 60 levels with classic puzzle elements. Microsoft made an announcement a few weeks ago that they would release some of [...]

Valve is currently running a games sale on their Steam platform with games up to 75% off their usual price. The games that are offered for a discount change regularly with some bargains being offered the whole time. Current deals include a THQ and Lucasarts Complete Pack as well as discounts for Dragon Age: Origins, [...]

Apple has taken another small step today towards making the app approval process more clear, making a lot of iPhone devs nod and say “well, something is better than nothing”. Plus we have still more iPhone apps to talk about. Get over to the other side and get started.

The folks at Mac are at it again. They are offering to give you 6 great Mac apps completely for free. if you were to buy them individually, you would have to pay $154 for them. But in the MacHeist’s NanoBundle, they will be yours for free. Do not lose any time and get over [...]

Good news iPhone lovers and users in general, we finally have apps in the App Store that do things we have always wanted to do with the iPhone. First up, we finally have Marvel Comics titles available on the App store (yay!). Then we have this cool new app that translates your speech as you [...]

The iPhone has been one of the major driving factors behind the exponential growth of Apple in recent times. Their latest financial report for Q3 2009 shows growth that has blown everyone away, including themselves it seems. Despite the soft economy, they have actually managed to remain terrifically bullish and have gained 12% year on [...]

Are you a fan of Arena (and Arena-like games)? Do you long to play these games on your Linux box? Are you one of those that proclaims that Linux can not and will not have games? If any of these apply then I am happy to show you OpenArena. Yes this game is based on [...]

The PS3 Slim was yesterday confirmed at Sony’s press conference at the Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. The new gaming system will be sold at $299 (€299, £249) and will be available in the first week of September. The biggest differences when compared to the old Playstation 3 system are the bigger 120 Gigabyte hard drive [...]

It has been 2 ½ years since the PS3 has launched and since that time it has been trailing both the Wii and Xbox 360 in sales. Granted it has been doing better then it has a year ago, but you’d expect that Sony would be able to convince hardcore gamers that the PS3’s superior [...]

I have a confession to make. My favorite game of all time is Zombies Ate My Neighbors. It was a classic Super Nintendo game that had you playing either a young boy or girl who uses various toys (such as a squirt gun) to save their neighbors from getting destroyed by zombies! This game is [...]

In this entry to the Linux Games department I am going to introduce you to a very fine RPG entry created by Basilisk Games called Eschalon Book I. This game is one of the few full-blown RPG games available for Linux, Windows, and OS X. Eschalon Book I won the 2007 Indie game of the [...]

Microsoft has found themselves in yet another mix-up, yet its CEO personally apologized to devastated gamers. Microsoft CEO, Steve Ballmer, has apologized for unclear remarks made last week regarding careless word choices that led gamers to believe that a Microsoft would be releasing a new gaming console. Ballmer reportedly made an announcement that that a [...]

I am a child of the 80s (born in 1967), so I remember well the likes of Tempest, Zaxon, Galaga, Zap, Centipede, and many more games that stole my quarters over the years. These games helped to define my generation as the first to stare, glassy-eyed at a screen in hopes of having their name [...]

Computer users often hate having to have a CD or DVD in their drive to run a game. To circumvent this, images are often burned to hard drives or cracks used. Cracks are rapidly found for Windows, but it can be an extreme chore to find them for Macs. EA use a product called Cider [...]

We all need a break from our daily routine, and many PC users like that break to be in the form of a game. This is where most people say Linux doesn’t have any games. Au contraire mon ami. Linux does have games. Not your modern full-on 3D games that require more computing power than [...]

This year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo was packed with exciting game and hardware announcements from virtually every gaming company in existence. One presentation dominated the gaming hardware announcements; And that was Project Natal for the Xbox. Project Natal aims to offer controller-less gaming on the Xbox gaming systems. It looks a bit like a mixture of [...]

E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, has opened its doors yesterday. It is one of the biggest gaming events of the year which usually sees a lot of game announcements, trailers and ingame video feeds for the PC and video consoles such as PS3, Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii. The following list is a collection of [...]

A new chapter in the Battlefield series is coming out soon, and there are free beta keys being handed out, so go over there this instant and get one for yourself! The new game brings a huge change, instead of going for realism, they went for a cartoon look, which looks pretty stunning I think. [...]

Recently I have gotten back into gaming, which means a huge 2 hours a week about, but nevertheless, it is a good way to blow off some steam. If you want to run some very modern games though you might need to squeeze every last bit of memory and CPU power out of your laptop [...]

OpenTTD is an open-source, cross-platform clone of the 1995 classic ‘Transport Tycoon Deluxe’. The game allows the player to run a transport company, where they will be expected to become a transport tycoon and operate a network of trains, lorries, ships and aeroplanes. You have to move people between cities and move goods like oil [...]

If you need another reason why DRM does not make sense whatsoever read on. The PC version of Gears of WAR apparently has a expiration system build in that ran out on January 28, 2009. That’s right. If you legally bought the game you cannot play it anymore because the digital certificate expired. Does it [...]

World of Warcraft is an online roleplaying game by Blizzard. It is without doubt one of the most popular roleplaying games with 12 million subscribers. A great feature of the World of Warcraft game is its extensibility. Users can install so called WOW addons which work very similar to other addon based programs like Firefox [...]

I don’t usually blog about games, but this one is so great, simple, yet unique and quite a challenge that I just have to show you. The premise in Tork (a play on the word “talk”) is that our antagonist crash lands on an alien planet where everyone speaks in sign language. The basic task [...]

Piracy in gaming is huge. The earliest form of illegal practices in computer gaming I can remember is a person buying a game and giving it to a friend to copy in exchange for a copy of his game. Gaming companies wised up to that and today most PC games come with some kind of [...]

Whilst first person shooters are mainly confined to the console, several good FPS games are available for PC. I’m nothing more than a casual gamer but I enjoy shooters and I was surprised by the sheer number available. I use a Mac, so this article will primarily focus on cross-platform shooters. AssaultCube AssaultCube is a [...]

One usability addition to Windows Vista was the so called Windows Game Explorer that would display all installed Windows Vista games in one menu. It would not only display the usual Microsoft games that ship with the Windows operating system but also games installed by the user of the computer system. Previously installing games meant [...]

I’m really not a big gamer. I play occasionally, but when I do I’m generally only interested in Real Time Strategy (RTS) titles such as Age of Empires III, Command and Conquer 3, Settlers, Rise of Nations etc RPG’s are possibly my least favourite games and for this reason I have never got into any [...]

This is the second time that publisher Electronic Arts has eased the DRM restrictions of some of their upcoming games due to Internet protests from gamers worldwide. Electronic Arts had initial plans to force users to activate the games Mass Effect and Spore over the Internet which had to repeated regularly if the player wanted [...]

FlashOffliner is a starter and central management application for flash games that have been downloaded to the computer. The software program ships with a few example flash games that can be used to check the program’s functionality but it requires that the user knows how to download flash games from various web games portals. While [...]

Many gamers throughout the world use Teamspeak to communicate while gaming. Many gaming clans use Teamspeak for professional gaming but it is also common among friends who play their nightly World of Warcraft session. Mumble is an Open-Source multi-plattform Teamspeak alternative that comes, like Teamspeak, as a client and server application which is distributed together [...]

Electronic Arts had lots of plans with Spore. It was developed by The Sims creator Will Wright and one of the game titles of the “new” EA that did not simply shell out game update after update each year of the same series ripping gamers of their hard earned cash with mediocre games and official [...]

I’m not that much of a gamer these days. My game-playing skills are restricted to Solitaire and an occasional online game. But in the early 90s, games fascinated me. My introduction to gaming came with Prince of Persia, followed by Super Mario, Commander Keen, etc. So when I read about the Good Old Games site, [...]

Let us talk about a major PR blunder for a short time. Ubisoft apparently temporarily (pulled by now again) released a fix for their game Rainbow Six Vegas 2 that fixed a problem for users who could not update and play the game in the latest version. Nothing problematic so far one would think but [...]

The best games every Tuesday that I have found and written about at my games website Take 9. I do like to play games every now and then and have discovered many throughout the years. At least one game is reviewed every day at Take 9. All games are free of course and either browser [...]

If you play a lot of real-time strategy games then this will be very much of interest to you. Wildfire Games are independent game developers who have been around for nearly a decade now. Their sole completed project has been a mod for Age of Empires II called “Rome at War” which successful enough to [...]

Almost two months have passed since the creation of my game website Take 9. A site that I love to write for because I only review games that I like to play. The games are free as well which probably makes it an interesting website for you as well if you have a similar “game [...]