The economy isn’t doing too hot. Everything keeps getting more expensive, and we still haven’t gotten all that money AI is supposedly raking in. Things have gotten bad even for us here at the Load Last Save offices. I’ve had to cut employee’s pay by 90% just to keep paying myself my exorbitant CEO salary, and even then I’d had to make some lifestyle changes. I’m down to just one luxury bag per season.
In light of all that, I’ll be giving you a guide on how to game while the economy crashes and burns all around you. I’ll give you some tips on what free games you can play, where to score some deals, and what to avoid at all costs. At some point we’ll have a serious discussion on emulation, and why it’s a bad, evil, no good practice. You’ll have enough games to keep you busy while Sam Altman sends you that check.
This article will focus mostly on PC games. Most of the deals explored here are in USD, and the prices apply to the US. There might be some discrepancies when converting into other currencies, and deals might not be the same in other countries.
This was mostly inspired by the Cheap Seats segment on The Homie Big Picture Mode’s podcast , Crash to Desktop, which you should go listen to right now. Listen to it while you read the article for maximum gaming overload.
Starting off with the cheapest of the cheap: absolutely free.
Back in my day, getting a game for free would have been absolutely unheard of, but now we got companies just giving them away. Sure, a lot of them are monetized up and down, charging you a couple of dollar here for this, a couple of dollars there for that, but it’s mostly for cosmetics. Cosmetics that they’ll advertise every three seconds you spend in the game, and really, are you so broke that you can’t afford a $20 swimsuit for your waifu? They need that money to keep the game running, you know.
The first game on this list is one that’s completely free: Dota2. Now, I know telling people to play dota is like asking them to drink bleach, but hey it’s free. I’ve had my soul shaved down over the years, so I can tolerate dota. It’s a great game, on a mechanical level. There’s such an absurd amount of depth to it, that you can play it for over a decade and still find new things. It’s a marvel of game design, if you can handle the rat eating pit-dwellers that make up its player base.
The reason why I recommend Dota2 specifically is because it’s completely free. All you have to do is install the game, and sacrifice a portion of your humanity to play it, but that’s not a monetary investment. You have every single hero unlocked from the get-go, and there isn’t anything you need to spend money on. Everything in the shop is purely cosmetic; nothing affects the gameplay.
Compare that to League of Legends, Dota’s main (and admittedly only) competition. League has 173 Champions to pick from, but only 20 of them are free at any given time. The rest are locked. Sure, you can unlock them with currency you get by playing the game, but it’s going to take you several matches before you can afford your first champion, so if you watched Arcane and want to go play as your favorite character Vi, and go exercise excessive force on some punks, you’ll have to wait for her to go on the free rotation, or shell out a few bucks for the privilege.
This is also the only reason I’d recommend Marvel Rivals. It’s free, completely free. You can play as any hero just by installing the game, none of this unlocking nonsense. You have access to every character, every map and every kind of game mode without having to spend a single cent, unless you really want that aforementioned swimsuit skin.
If you prefer your shooters with less man chest, you can try Counter Strike 2. Valve is back on the list giving you another completely free game. It’s the time-tested tactical shooter that defined the genre, complete with its deep strategy and angry screaming Russian teammates calling you ancient Slavic slurs for not rushing B fast enough. Recommending this one is a bit obvious. If you’ve had a PC for more than a week, chances are you’ve tried Counter Strike at some point.
To complete the Valve three-piece we have Deadlock. It’s another MOBA, which will turn a lot of people away, and it’s also another shooter. It’s completely free, with every character available to play from the start. The game is still in secret closed alpha, and it’s not monetized at all at the moment, so this is subject to change. The fact that all characters are free isn’t likely to change. It’s a fantastic game, but its high skill requirements and barrier of entry make it suitable only for the most dedicated, or least employed, gamers out there.
If you still need more freebies, you can always do what I used to do as a kid, and go play some Flash games. Sites like Armor Games and Newgrounds are still up and running, offering a wide variety of flash games for no money down. They were good enough to keep an entire generation entertained during the 2000s, and they still get the job done today.
I personally recommend:
Submachine. A point-and-click room escape puzzle game with an eerie atmosphere. It spawned a whole series. Think Myst but with actual puzzles.
Kingdom Rush. A tower defense game. Build towers along a path to keep enemies from reaching your base. A solid tower defense game.
Bowmaster Prelude. A mix of tower defense with physics-based archery. Aim, draw and shoot your bow at incoming armies. Very satisfying, tactile gameplay.
Emulation is a legal gray area. Emulation is technically legal, but at the same time, it isn’t. Making an emulator is legal. Using a console’s BIOS when making an emulator isn’t legal, as the BIOS is proprietary, copyrighted software. Taking the BIOS from a console you own and applying it to the emulator is legal. An emulator is okay as long as you don’t distribute it with the BIOS file.
Can’t get the games, unless you own them and dump the ROM for your use. One copy per person.
Wait, what if I want to play God Hand, and I buy a used copy of the game, then dump it, can I play it? What if I then give that physical copy away to someone else? Do I have to get rid of my legally acquired ROM, too?
That’s a question for a copyright lawyer, which I’m not. If I were, I wouldn’t be writing about games for free on the Internet. The answer is probably whatever would make the company the most money, and would cause the most inconvenience to the consumer, so you probably have to erase the ROM once you no longer have access to your physical copy. What if the copy is damaged, or stolen, and you can’t use it? Uh… erase the ROM and buy a new one?
This whole business of buying used games is good and all, but I remember back in the day when game companies went after Gamestop for their used game model. They would sell you a game, then re-buy it as a trade-in, then sell it again. They’d sell the same copy of a game twenty times over in an act that could best be described as staying hydrated by drinking your own piss in an endless loop. It wasn’t okay for Gamestop to sell the same copy of Super Mario Sunshine seven times and make profit off it, but if I want to play Super Mario Sunshine, I have to pay 80 dollars to some skeevy dude for his scratched, cigarette-burnt disc? Nintendo doesn’t see a single cent from this transaction! What do they care if I emulate Chibi Robo? They sure as shit ain’t doing anything with it!
The same argument applies to abandonware. Abandonware is software that hasn’t been sold in years, leaving it in a state of abandonment. There’s no legal way to get it, and a lot of times, doesn’t really infringe on anyone’s copyrights.
Think back to a few paragraphs ago when I said that thing about copyright law, about how the correct interpretation is usually the one that inconveniences the end user? Well, abandonware is still illegal. Unless the company that owns the software declares it abandoned and gives it to the public for free, it’s still illegal to download and use.
DOOM 1993 is open source. Anyone can port it, play it and use it how they want. Same thing with Unreal Tournament 1999, and 2004. They were made publicly available.
Adobe Photoshop CS has been discontinued and abandoned by Adobe, but it’s still illegal to download and crack. You can buy a key off ebay, which I think is dubious, and you can use it if you own it, but you can’t download it, despite it technically being abandonware.
Same thing with games you can’t legally buy anywhere. If you want to play Universe at War: Earth Assault, you’re out of luck. It doesn’t matter that the game hasn’t been on sale since around 2011, that it’s been delisted from every store front, and the game’s servers were shut down. Someone owns the rights to it, and they can sit on it for as long as they want because, what if they want to release a remake of it at some point? You downloading the original would cut into their profits. That is a real argument I saw someone use online.
Even if your favorite online reviewer recommends something like Downhill Domination for the PS2, developed by a studio that doesn’t exist since 2009, a game that hasn’t been sold since 2005, isn’t available on any digital platform, you can’t play it. Unless you buy a used copy off ebay, because technically Sony owns the rights to the franchise. Same way Blizzard owns Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. I don’t even think they know they have it, but it’s theirs, and they will sit on it forever if they want, until they decide to add Glitch as a hero in Overwatch or something.
What if you don’t get caught? 99% of people who emulate don’t get caught, unless they make a big stink about it. I’ve seen big name streamers emulating to thousands of viewers on Twitch and they don’t get anything, but our lawyer made us change the name of this song- I mean- our lawyer made us say that emulating is bad, and even if you won’t get caught, it’s still wrong.
Except for Nintendo games. If you emulate those, Nintendo will send a squad of highly trained Goombas to stomp on your face.
So buy games, because when you buy them, you own them. Wait, that’s not true, either. Everything you buy on Steam is merely a “license” to the game, which can be revoked even after you pay for it. Same with the digital stuff on PlayStation and Xbox. It’s not really yours. Physical games are becoming rarer and rarer, and subscriptions are becoming the norm. We won’t own any games, and we’re supposed to be happy about it. The companies can take the games you bought and remove them from your account, but you can’t pirate the games they don’t even sell in the first place.
I’m going to jump off this train of thought before I write something that would get me a knock on the door.
So whatever you do, do NOT download and configure Retro Arch to play old, forgotten games. Also also, do NOT, under NO circumstance, should you download FightCade and use it to play Bubble Bobble with your friends. Do not use it to play obscure japanese Beat Em Ups like Denjin Makai 2, either. Wait for the company that owns the rights to Denjin Makai 2 to re-release it legally with rollback netcode and- pfff AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA that’s a good one. I can’t even keep a straight face on that one.
There are hundreds of semi-free games out there. I personally don’t recommend them, since they’re a lot more aggressive with their nickel and dime tactics, but others seem to like them, so I’ll give them a shoutout.
Overwatch. Formerly Overwatch, then Overwatch 2, now back to Overwatch. This is free to play, technically, but you have to unlock most of the heroes. I bought the game back when it was still a paid game, and have access to all the heroes, so I don’t know how the free to play experience is, but I imagine it’s some crappy nightmare like most of these semi-free games.
There’s also a whole host of predatory gatcha games out there that exploit your thirst for anime girls to great effect. One that I kind of sort of semi-recommend is Goddess of Victory: Nikke. It’s not much of a game, and it’s very obvious that it’s a phone game designed to get in your pockets, but it’s the only gatcha I’m involved with. The mini games they have are the real star of the show. They seem to get bootleg versions of popular games as side-activities for their events. They had Suika game when it was popular, and they also have a Kingdom Rush knock-off that’s, unironically, one of the best tower defense games I’ve ever played, and you know I like me some tower defense.
What if you’re more affluent, and can afford spending a few bucks on a game? Well, in this section, I’ll tell you about some affordable games you can get for $10 or less.
Starting off with Peak. This fun little friendslop game puts you and three of your friends on a mountain, where you have to climb to the peak, and get rescued. It’s a very simple premise that’s executed perfectly. It offers a good challenge, it’s full of moments that require teamwork, and it’s casual enough for anyone to learn quickly. It’ll keep you and your friends busy for a while, and it only costs $8.00. Highly recommended.
Meccha Chameleon is another meme-worthy multiplayer game you can grab for a few bucks. Paint yourself to blend into the environment, flexing your artistic skills in this clever twist on prop hunt. For only $6.00, you can convince your friends to get it, too.
Dustforce DX is a technical platformer/speedrunner. Play as a janitor and speed your way through dozens of complex levels where you have to maintain your momentum with precise jumps. Tight contols, great physics and levels that put every mechanic to the test. A great, underlooked gem for only $10.00.
Volgarr The Viking is a tough as nails arcade platformer inspired by Super Ghouls N’ Ghosts. It uses fixed jump arcs, which means you can’t change your trajectory once you jump, like the old Castlevania games. Every stage is full of precise jumps, deadly enemies, secret rooms and hidden treasure. If you think modern games are too easy, give Volgarr a chance, all for just $10.00.
Streets of Fury EX is a comedic beat-em-up with some serious gameplay underneath. Go through the mean streets of Paris kicking gangsters in le cule. Twelve stages over two campaigns, a ton of playable characters to pick from, a good amount of depth, guest starring the Nostalgia Critic himself, all for $10.00. If that’s not enough to convince you, I wrote about it last year, go read more about it.
Quake is, in my opinion, still the best first person shooter out there. You can get the original, ported to run on modern systems, with the expansions, with the soundtrack fixed, all for just $10.00. An unbeatable deal.
This was just a sample of some of the games I could find for $10 or less. There are a ton more great games out there, waiting to get snatched up for cheap.
What if you want to go look for your own deals, or find something a little more recent than Quake?
Isthereanydeal.com is a great tool for tracking sales and prices (for PC games). You can sign in to the site via Steam, import your wishlist, and get alerts when they go on sale. You can set price thresholds so you won’t get alerted unless there’s a deep discount, or set it to let you know when it goes under its asking price even for a penny less. The site gives you graphs showing the game’s lowest price in the last few years, so you can see if the deal you’re getting is the best one all year, or if you can wait another month for it to go back on sale. The site also has filters, letting you browse games that are 50% off, 75% off, or at their historical low.
It’s a great way to see all the deals scattered across dozens of sites. The kind of flash sales that happen outside of the normal sale schedule, which you’d normally miss, unless you were obsessively checking every storefront for deals on a specific game. I use isthereanydeal all the time, and I’ve found better deals there than on any Steam sale in the past few years.
GG.Deals is a lot like isthereanydeal, but this one also covers console games and key sites.
Wait, KEY SITES!? The heckin’ evil greymarket sellers that reddit warned me about? Things like G2A, where they literally rob babies at gunpoint for their Steam keys?
The sellers on GG.Deals claim to be legitimate, and I have bought games off some of them, and they have delivered working keys with no issues. I’m not affiliated with them in any way(I’m not affiliated with anyone in this article), and I’m not responsible for anything that happens with any purchases there, but I haven’t had any trouble with them up to this point.
I keep track of deals on both sites, and have used them both extensively. They make shopping for games a breeze. If you have your eye on a game, you don’t have to wait for Steam sales. There are dozens of little shops out there that have sudden sales, and you can’t keep track of all of them, so let these two sites do it for you. Pick your favorite and stick with it. They’re functionally identical, except for the key site thing.
Humblebundle.com has a ton of bundles, as the name suggests. Grab a bunch of games at discounted prices. They also have a monthly selection of games you can get for a few bucks.
Not really a deal site, but PC Gamer keeps track of the free games Epic gives away each week. You can check on the store itself, but this one’s good if you want to see it without logging in, or if you want to check previous weeks’ offerings.
Don’t think I don’t see you there, with all those unplayed games in your library. I know you went to Humble Bundle and got seven games for two dollars, and haven’t touched any of them. Why do you want to buy Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag Resynced? Because it’s new? No, it’s not new. It’s a remake of a game that came out 13 years ago! You probably played it already. Go play all those games you got on sale.
Now that you know what to do to game on the cheap, here’s a little reminder of what not to do.
Don’t buy games on release. Unless you’re a reviewer, or someone who has to play the newest games the moment they come out, you can probably wait for a sale. If you are someone who reviews the newest games, you probably get paid to do it, and can write it off as a business expense. I’d like to be able to do that. Not only to be able to earn money by doing what I’m currently doing for free, but to be able to buy some degenerate weeb game like Akiba’s Strip, and be able to write it off as a business expense on my taxes. I think it would be funny.
You don’t really miss out on much if you don’t get the latest, hottest Unreal Engine 5 Triple-A game on release. Sure you can’t join The DiscourseTM on social media, or you might get some parts of the game spoiled, but those two things can be solved if you stay off social media. If you want to get it to play with your friends, then feel free to do so. They’ll probably move on to the next new thing in a few weeks, so play it with them while it’s in their attention span.
There are a ton of games to play already. Too many, in fact. Even if games were completely cancelled from today, with no new games ever coming out again, you’d still have enough to keep you busy until you retire. I can bet a substantial amount of money that none of you have ever heard of Under the Skin, much less played it, and that came out over 20 years ago. You’ll never really run out of things to play.
If you can get the newest and latest games, for full price on release, then what are you doing here? Get out of here, Richy Rich, this is way below your tax bracket.
I recommend gaming, especially if you can do it on the cheap. You can find hours and hours of entertainment for a few bucks, or completely free, if you’re willing to do the legwork to look for it. There are even sites, like isthereanydeal.com and GG.Deals that do all the hard work for you, leaving you free to consume at your own leisure.
Just make sure you avoid buying Harmful Park. No matter how tempted you may be by High Brow Gag and Pure Shooting. Also, never, ever, ever pirate, even if the game hasn’t been sold in over 20 years, and the studio behind it doesn’t exist, and no one has thought of the IP in decades. It’s still illegal somehow. Don’t let Nintendo know, either, unless you want a knock on the door and a green shell down your throat. I’ve heard some of you are into that.
I hope you found all this information useful. Soon, when AI goes into full swing, and the GDP doubles, we’ll be living in a wonderful Fruitiger Aero utopia, where anime is real and we use Bitcoin to buy groceries. We will definitely benefit from this. It won’t be something that only benefits a small clique of Silicone Valley nerds. It’s most definitely not a bubble that’s going to burst horrifically. This is most certainly not a string of sarcastic sentences. Emulation is wrong.
The thing with all this AI mess is that, it’s supposedly good for the economy, but I don’t see any benefit. The green line goes up, Open AI makes billions somehow, investors invest the same bags of cash in the same ghost companies in an endless cycle, billions get circulated across two or three companies making it look like there’s a lot of economic activity, in an act that can only be described as staying hydrated by drinking your own piss in an endless loop, the green line goes up, but I’m still broke. I still have to pay ten dollars for a pound of ground beef. Then, when this whole scam finally collapses, and the bubble pops, we’ll be getting the short end of the stick. So AI does well, line goes up, we see no benefit, we pay ten dollars for beef. AI does poorly, everything collapses, we see no benefit, we pay thirty dollars for beef.
If it all goes down, at least you know how to get games for cheap, so you can spend your money on other luxuries, like food and shelter.
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