Freeware Bread

Also, listen to this guy. Cho Ren Sha 68k is the fucking best. I'm still trying to make it to Stage 0, but it's a pain in the later levels.

ow

I'll be back with another list later. In the meantime, please observe this Rando fondly

Alright, everyone set? With renewed hopes, let's continue onward.

> en.touhouwiki.net/wiki/Len'en_Project
The Len'En Project. Basically, this one guy decided to play this sick prank where he built his own shoot-em-up engine from scratch and remade the PC98 touhou games for April Fools, and while ZUN was (probably) amused, he told him not to release them to the public. So, this guy's sitting on his own game engine with nothing to do, and resolves to make his own series. The games (obviously) play like a touhou game, but if they were not shit and actually hard.

The fifth(?) game should have a translation patch, but the first few needed an update to make it possible. I don't recall if the dev ever pushed those updates or not, but there's that.

Also, stay away from their wiki. A german sjw that doesn't fully understand english attempted to write the pages in english while also using gender neutral pronouns since the dev never outright stated whether they were loli or shota, and you can imagine how that turned out.

> cavestory.org/pixels-works/list.php
I'm linking to Daisuke Amaya's other works. He's famous for Cave Story, and I'm assuming that we're not posting alongside people so underage that they haven't even heard of the game that sparked the indie gamedev revolution. If you haven't, what the FUCK do you idiots think you're doing?

That aside, a lot of his other works don't have the same depth as Cave Story, but they have a lot more variety. Some of them are his hand-made music composition programs, others are things like Jil Jil (a weird shmup), Ikachan (Some people call it a proto-cave story just because it looks similar, but it's an entirely different game), and Azarashi (Throw some darts at some stupid seals)

I'd personally recommend Guxt. It's a small and simple shmup, but that's part of what makes it great.

> agtp.romhack.net/project.php?id=lamulana
La-Mulana 2005. This one is an endeavor in and itself. Nigoro released it a while ago as freeware, and released a remade Wiiware version in 2012 (that was later ported to Steam). The original version has clunkier controls (particularly, with double jumping and the grapple claw), but some of the puzzles and bosses play better than the remake. On the flipside, the remake has reworked graphics, refined controls (with the exception of one boss in particular), and reworked puzzles.

I'll say this; I am eternally salty about the stupidity they did with the Confusion Gate in the remake. There's a riddle where a fool is met with a fork in the road. Thinking highly of himself, he goes right. Self-deprecating, he goes left when he realizes that it's the wrong path. the solution was simple; if a fool is going left and right, be wise and take the path untaken by going up, climbing the invisible ladder next to the sign. Because people were too stupid to figure it out, you instead have to solve that riddle by being a fucking idiot. I will never not be mad about that.

That aside, both options are a good choice. Around Christmas, the remake is guaranteed to sell for about $2.50 on Steam if you wanna pick it up there, but naturally, you can get it for $0.00 if you just fucking pirate it.

Also, bear with me if any of these descriptions sound a little weak. I've typed this out by hand for so many threads, I need to just fucking save these posts to paste later.

> store.steampowered.com/app/382490/
Relic Hunter Zero. Some huehues wanted to make a game with a similar format to Nuclear Throne, being that it's a procedurally generated twinstick arcade shooter. Unlike Nuclear Throne, it's freeware, open source, and doesn't have idiotic bugs for no good reason. The main game is also really short, but that's where endless mode comes into play.

> yumenikkifg.wikia.com/wiki/.flow
.flow is a Yume Nikki fangame. Being that it's a Yume Nikki fangame, it's a fucking walking simulator.

It's much shorter and less archaic than Yume Nikki was, with enough similar imagery that you can piece together some semblance of a story as you progress without outright stating that one exists. It's also edgy as fuck and has a cool style to it. If you've got the time, I'd recommend giving some thought into playing it.

> sc2.sourceforge.net/
The Ur-Quan Masters. Toys for Bob released Star Control II for MS-DOS a long-ass time ago, then released the source code (without copyright content) for their loyal fans. The easiest way to describe this beauty, imagine Mass Effect combined with a Vs 1v1 shoot-em-up. It can be hit-and-miss for some people, but I personally enjoyed it.

One beef I have with the game is that the aliens speak as though they're a hivemind, of which there are only two (maybe three) such species in the game like that. It's a bit jarring when you talk to the captain of a ship of aliens that look like they're composed of a series of prolapsed anuses, blow them up, and speak to the same captain in your next encounter. It could easily be explained by saying that you're connected to a command center to speak to an individual, but that's not the case.

Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah did nothing wrong

> bitbucket.org/opentyrian/opentyrian/wiki/Home
Similar case to the above, but a completely different game.

Episodic vertical shmup where the focus is building a badass ship, rather than not getting hit. It's filled to the brim with cheesy dialogue, secrets, otherworldly terrors, exploding things, and a giant carrot as a ship. Need I say more?

This game was also a big inspiration for a lot of the cheesy dialogues in Iji, on that note. One of General Tor's attacks is even called the Tyrian claw (it's the purple spheres he fired occasionally).

Also, a handful of the member from the Gang Garrison community are working on an overmeme demake. I personally have not played and have no opinion of Overmeme, I just thought it was worth noting.

Hydorah is pretty fun. Some decent replay value, easy to pick up, a nice artstyle, some goofy voices, and this gets pretty challenging later on.

This shit is baller. I'm no shmup expert though, so I'm still having a tough time getting to passed level 4. Still, It feels amazing when I'm doing really well and beating my own high scores is really fun. Also a great game to keep on a flash drive.

Damn it

Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah did nothing wrong.
What the fuck, they did EVERYTHING wrong. If anything, the Kzer-Za did nothing wrong.
FRUMPLE

Aaaand, right after I post this, I blow my old score out of the water, get to the level 4 boss, get to level 5 on my last life with a 1-up due, and I manage to get pretty far in.

This game is great

Do fan games count as freeware?
If you like Sonic games, or 2D platformers in general, Sonic Before The Sequel and Sonic After The Sequel were really fun. The dev is now working on Spark the Electric Jester. It looks promising. Also, The soundtrack for those games are really good.
Also, Sonic Robo Blast 2 is a pretty fun 3D platformer if you haven't played that yet.

If you live under a rock, A2MR is a Metroid fan game which nintendo ordered a C&D. It's really sad that Nintendo is actively trying to attack it's fanbase instead of embracing the community or at least being agnostic.

...

Sonic Robo Blast 2 is great, and it just got motherfucking SLOPES recently, so it's even better. I haven't played AM2R yet, but I've heard great things about it.

That Spark game looks really cool. Like an interesting mix of Sonic 3&Knuckles, Kirby, and Megaman X/Zero.

AM2R download if you'd rather not download it from the latest shady website willing to host it

mega.nz/#!dksERarQ!izDUEFY-Nm1jgsoi3LGAt_aqYTCrz2so25kiyU9y9kw

The Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah are completely justified in their cleansing of the galaxy. The Ur-Quan Kzer-Za are nothing but betrayers, while the Ur-Quan Kohr-Ah did what was necessary to free their species from the shackles of the Dynarri's psychic compulsions

My only beef with AM2R is that the difficulty scaling for the Metroid battles is crazy. The larval stages aren't that bad, but when they become bipedal is when it becomes unfair. Fuck Zetas.

Oh, and if you're having trouble getting cutscenes to work, you may need to make sure you have flash installed (maybe the activeX version.) I remember having problems getting it to work on windows 7. Also, here's some music from Sonic BTS. - Converted from flacs.

AM2R related- here's an image of Sonic the Memehog at it again.

I haven't been 100% up to date on Sonic fan games so I might have missed a few. Looking this up, is this a generations mod?

Not a mod, just a fan game. Pretty fucking janky, but the people that liked the adventure games won't care about that.

Okay, that music convinced me to play this.

Now, to add my own stuff to the thread:
Two collections of some experimental games made by Cactus AKA John Soderstrom (or something) who more famously worked on Hotline Miami.
A very short visual novel that's completely nonsensical, but it'll make you laugh.
A shmup with several different game modes that emulate the mechanics of some very popular shmups. All stages are extended boss battles, and there are a ton of stages that go from beginner difficulty up to extreme difficulty even for bullet hell vets.
A very pretty and very fun shmup that takes you through the generations of shmup, starting with Space Invaders, moving into Galaga, and then beyond into bullet hell territory. What's interesting is that your ship will evolve as you proceed through each generation, meaning the goal of each stage is to evolve your ship during the boss battle so you can defeat it more easily. The biggest draw to the evolutionary stage is that the evolutions are based on how you play the game. If you get hit a lot, you'll gain the ability to slow time. If you stay at the top of the screen a lot, you'll get a powerful close-range weapon. If you like to hide at the bottom of the screen, you'll gain a shield you can put up in front of you.
Super Mario Maker before Super Mario Maker. Not much else to say. It's good.
A nifty Mega Man game where the stages are based off of Street Fighter characters, who you then face as the boss at the end of the stage.
RPG Maker game. I won't go into details because you've likely heard of it by now.
Online multiplayer arcade emulation. It doesn't get any better than that.

If you're on PC, all single-player games are freeware if you know where to look.