games. on a mac ? for free ?

I don’t generally bother with games that much, mainly because trying to get tens of Unix apps to play nicely after one of them has a security upgrade, or two of them just have to be tweaked to add a feature I want takes as much thought as an Infocom adventure. (Hmm, perhaps unfair; I’ve never finished an Infocom game, but I have had the apps work together. Mostly.) So that aside, here’s three games I’ve found very playable recently, and none of them involve aliens or bullets. Not even a phial of infected zombie blood in sight, so look away now if you’re an avid FPS gamer.

Krank. From the help web page:

“the aim of each level is to remove all anchors and magnets”

Sounds simple, but do yourself a favour and try it with a mouse and not a trackpad – think of Thrust, but with less of the annoying and terminal visits to the landscape, and far, far more OpenGL shinyness. Very addictive, even if you forego any sort of viewing of the details and just dive in and play.

Plasma Pong. From that page:

“PLASMA PONG is a variation of PONG that utilizes real-time fluid dynamics to drive the game environment.

Players have several new abilities that add fun twists to the classic game. In the game you can inject plasma fluid into the environment, create a vacuum from your paddle, and blast shockwaves into the playing area”

Wow. If the animation in Krank was pleasing to the eye, the first play of this game visually assaults nearly to the point of involuntary colour blindness. There is method to the madness though, as the colours represent various plasma densities, each of which will alter the trajectory of the ball, and I can only imagine how heated the action could get with multiple players. A widescreen laptop would be an advantage here…

MyMahj. Mahjong in either 2D or 3D. Not too sure about the 3D aspect, but being able to ’tilt’ the board slightly to correctly deduce the depth of a stack is a nice touch.

The first two of those games were found via FreeMacWare, via the daily RSS summary. The last was via freshmeat.net in the OS X catagory.