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:
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