Free games advertised here on Apolyton

[Boris Godunov]

Ok, so there are all these banner ads for free online games here on Apolyton. My question is, are any of these games worth playing? Even as a small time-wasting diversion? I'm curious to hear what people think of them.

[Asher]

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[Grandpa Troll]

Originally posted by Asher
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What are the levels like?

Are they hard?

I bet its a B!@tch stopping them to advance?

Looking forward to how ya play?

Gramps

[DrSpike]

Stop being such a cheapskate.

[Felch]

I've played a couple. Travian and Ikariam. I haven't played the others.

They're all right for killing time, but they're just spreadsheet games. If you played OGame (we used to have an Apolyton alliance for that a couple years back) they're pretty much the same thing.

The gist is that it's real time, but very slow. So you can get some fun in small doses over the course of the day. The problem is that you either don't care, and wind up not really playing, or you get hooked and wind up living your life around it. And they kind of require you to keep an eye on them as you get deeper into it.

Also they tend to gimp the interface so that you get frustrated with the tedious aspects of the game and upgrade to the paid version, which has a somewhat better user interface.

There are some RPG ones that I haven't bothered playing. The strategy games are more my style, and if I'm going to play an RPG it'll be something with more class, like Fallout or NWN.

[robinp]

I too have played Travian and Ikariam (and contributed to the Wikia wikis devoted to them). I agree with much of what Felch says. They start very slow, so that you can't do anything for hours at a time while something gets built, but after a few months when you have more cities and stronger enemies you can want to be giving them attention 24/7.

Civ games also start slowly in terms of actions per year, but you can start the next year a few seconds later or a month later, at your option. Real-time games can take over your life. I think I was playing on five different Travian servers simultaneously at my "best", having mistakenly thought that the early lack of action would leave me time to play on more servers. What do you do when you know that thousands of enemy troops will hit your capital at 4.07 a.m. and your allies could send reinforcements in time but are busy elsewhere?

At least each Travian game has a conclusion, after about a year, with alliances striving to be the first to build a World Wonder in one of their cities. I'm not sure whether Ikariam has conclusions; it's changed a bit since I played.