Everybody wishes sometimes they could be someone else, in a different life. Who hasn't thought about what it would be like to live in Roman times? Or to be a sports star? Or what the future will be like? Or what it's like to fly a plane? Our only limit is our imagination. However, we can also use
computer games to change our lives for a while, choosing our own new, virtual, risk-free reality on the monitor screen.
It all began with the famous
Pong, remember? Two simple lines at the sides of the screen, a circle as a ball and you just had to keep the ball from flying off the screen. It was archaic and rectangular. Even the curves of the circle were pretty poor quality. Then the first
pac-men arrived, the first
space invaders, things slowly began to develop, and the first 8 bit computers arrived to dazzle us with games in 16 colours.
Then there was the leap to 16 bits and the first
VGA graphics cards brought us 256 colours for our games. Some
graphic adventures in these formats were world-wide hits and are still popular today, as for example
Monkey Island or
Sam & Max Hit the Road.
Then the first
3D accelerator cards, do you remember
Voodoo?. They were the first cards sold just for gaming. They gave graphics rendering like never before. The first 3D games appeared. The famous
Alone in the Dark, after four adventures on our PCs went on to be particularly disappointing film. Thanks to graphics cards, games now offer incredible graphic design and some titles are truly works of art. Games like
Half-Life,
Doom 3,
Oblivion or
Call of Duty 2 leave us open-mouthed with admiration and absorbed in the story, at least in part bacause of their wonderful design.
And into this evolution came the
Internet revolution... Now you don't just compete against a machine: you can challenge your old friends or people anywhere in the world. It's up to you. In Europe the first game to make this sort of name for itself was
Counter Strike, a user-designed mod for the already classic
Half-Life. In this game two teams fought to eliminate each other. Now there are thousands of games like this and almost all
action games have a
multiplayer option for a more intense experience. But let's not forget the
sports games like
FIFA, which you can play online with anyone, or the
persistent worlds, which are so popular now, largely thanks to
World of Warcraft, an
online role-playing game, awaited eagerly by the fans of the legendary strategy series
Warcraft.
In Malavida we've selected some of the best demos on the market so you can
download free Internet games, have fun and try before you buy. The list below is our selection of the best
free games: