Sports have played a big part in our society for a long time. It’s only natural we want to show off our strength, our speed and our skill.
Sports games have been around for a long time as well (think Pong, for instance), but there aren’t a lot of up to date, free sports games around, never mind car sims. For this article, I went looking for the best (and free) online racing games on the block.
You might recognize some of these car racing games, but I’m sure there’ll also be some new finds.
The Art of Racing
Cars! They’re the first decent toys most children get (toy cars, in particular). We grow up with them. Play with them. Then, when we’re older, we go get ourselves a real one, only to be disappointed we can’t drive 200 km/hr all the time. The closest we’ll get to our childish fantasies is the autobahns in Germany….or racing games of course!
We have two nominees; Driving Speed 2 for the fans of the more realistic driving sims, and TrackMania Nations, a game for the more surreal and acrobatic orientated people among us.
Driving Speed 2, a Wheelspin Studios game, is a highly realistical driving simulator. If you want to drive laps in high detail, this is your man.
The game features two different circuits and eight different cars. You can either play alone, against the computer, or with friends (up to eight players!) using LAN or the internet.
If you’re like me, an adrenaline addict, someone who likes the wind not online up front, but all the way around. If you don’t just want to drive but you want to fly. I present you: TrackMania Nations Forever.
TrackMania Nations Forever is a sequel to the immensely successful title Trackmania Nations. In this expansion, we get new tracks, new cars and even more excitement.
TMNForever is a futuristic race game, with loopings, jumps, accelerator zones and so on. You can race for medals on your own, trying to put down the best possible time and thus increasing in the national or global rankings, or online. Here you can test your skills against a multitude of other onliners, on one of the 65 official or 32.000 user-submitted death defying tracks.
Thats right, user submitted. You can make your own tracks and put them online, hereby delivering back to the insanely huge community.
Type: Futuristic Racing Platform: Windows Download: 503.87 MB
+Great graphics +Intuitive steering +Great multiplayer +Over 32.000 tracks available - Only 1 type of car -More addicting than nicotine
Also see screenshot
Other Great Online Racing Games
Of course these aren’t the only decent speeding freebies. Read on for a short list of other great free racing games that didn’t make this article.
ManiaDrive (an also acrobatic clone of TrackMania)
(By) Simon is a student from Belgium who wastes his time relaxing, gaming and surfing the net. He would tell you to check out his blog, only he doesn't have one (yet)!
Once upon a time, there was a boy who spent several sleepless nights just to solve the mystery of Myst or to fight head to head with Bezita or to manage his own football team. Now the boy has become a man and “working 9 to 5″ is the new game of his life. But deep inside, the little boy is still alive and waiting for the chance to crawl out.
Does the story sound familiar? We all have the playful child inside of us, and for Daisuke Amaya - better known as Pixel - the child is extremely persistent. During the period of five years, he single-handedly developed a tiny 2D game voted by gamers as one of the best RPG’s out there. It’s so well known that it has its own Wikipedia page. The game is called Doukutsu Monogatari, a.k.a The Cave Story, and it has been translated to English by fans who called themselves Aeon Genesis.
I urge you to find more background stories, tips and tricks, discussions, and everything else about this little game yourself as the searching process itself is another enjoyable quest (and revealing everything here will surely decrease the fun of playing the game).
But here’s how to get you started as soon as possible :
2. Make sure your computer has an archive application to extract “.lzh” compressed files. WinRAR can do this but you can also use the free “Universal Extractor” that Mark reviewed last August.
3. You will need patches to translate the original Japanese language into English. So, unless you speak Japanese, please download the Windows patch or the Mac patch. Follow the documentation on the “readme” file and you’re good to go.
For the Mac, you could just use the English patched installer here
4. To make sure that nobody ever needs to go through the trial and error of figuring out which key control does what and can go directly to the fun stuff, here are your Controls guide:
Tab = toggle fullscreen/windowed mode
Arrow Keys = movement
Down arrow = use/pick up object, door, etc.
Z = jump/confirm
X = fire
A = previous weapon
S = next weapon
Q = item screen
W = map (once map system is acquired)
ESC = pause (F1 to resume, F2 to reset, ESC again to quit.)
And no mouse required!
5. For those who aren’t strong willed and have a less adventurous soul (or who are just already too frustrated), aside from the tips and tricks that you can find easily on the net, there are several (OK, many!) videos on YouTube showing you how to play this game level by level, starting from the first one :
So, please enjoy this oldie but goodie fun but challenging game. Share your opinions and experiences of playing this game in the comments below.
There once was a great cat, named the WAMPUS cat. However, this article is not about that cat. This article is about a server. A great majority of websites are run by a trio of services - Apache, MySQL and PHP. Apache is the web server, which handles browser requests and sends the information across the internet to your browser. PHP is the programming language that many sites are written in - this creates dynamic content which in turn is sent to Apache, which sends the data to your browser. And finally, MySQL is the database which stores the information for programs. PHP is used to access this database.
It is a tried and tested trio which works phenomenally well. Usually to gain access to this trifecta, you need to purchase hosting, and this hosting is usually run in a far away datacenter running on a Linux server. However, not many people know that it is available locally, and for Windows as well. You can use these services for running your own applications, and also for locally testing software you are writing, before uploading code to a production server.
WAMP stands for Windows Apache, MySQL and PHP. Compare this to LAMP, which is Apache, MySQL and PHP on Linux.
There are several ways to get these services running locally. Each service, by itself, has Windows installers. That being said - once the programs are installed, you need to know how to configure the services. That may not be simple unless you happen to be a system administrator.
We are going to focus on WampServer. In my experience, using WampServer is the fastest way to get up and running. Wikipedia has a nice list of all Wamp servers.
Step 1
Download the latest WampServer. As of the writing of this article, it includes Apache 2.2, PHP 5.2 and MySQL 5.0.
Step 2
Run the installer. It will warn you to uninstall WAMP5 1.x if you have installed that already. You can use the defaults and it should install without problem.
Step 3
Start the services. You will see a small icon in your taskbar. Left click on it (right clicking does not display the right menu) and select “go online”. The icon will then make a little animation, and your services will be online. You can view your homepage by going to http://localhost/.
Thats it! Wamp is now running. You are ready to install your application, or start learning some PHP! The public website directory is ‘c:\wamp\www\‘.
Any directory you create in this directory, shows up as a ‘project’ on the main index page.
Advanced Settings
PHP Customization
Depending on which type of program you want to install onto your server, you may require additional extensions that are not loaded by default. There are a whole variety of PHP extensions you can load that come built in, but disabled. Left-click on the Wamp menu, go to PHP->PHP Extensions and click off the extension you would like to reload.
You can also edit the configuration file, php.ini through the menu. Edit anything you need, and save this file. The most common edit is the memory_size, but there are many options you can tweak to your liking.
After making any changes to php, make sure you reload apache. I’ve learned the hard way that changes aren’t automatically pushed to the server, until it is reloaded.
Apache Customization
For you advanced tinkerers out there, you can tweak the apache configuration files to your heart’s content. Make sure after making any changes, to reload apache.
MySQL Customization
Depending on your project, you may need to create a database in MySQL. This can be done through phpMyAdmin, which is handily included within the WAMPServer install. By default they include no password on the root MySQL user, which is not the best thing for security reasons. I would recommend changing this password. phpMyAdmin can be reached via the Wamp Menu, or via the url http://localhost/phpmyadmin/
In Summary:
Don’t let the fun stop there. Install a blog and start experimenting with PHP and templates. Run your own Wiki. Run your own music server. The howtos on how to install some neat programs are coming in some future articles.
One of the greatest things about running a home apache server, is that you can use it in combination with a VPN (Hamachi) to access your server anywhere in the world, securely. You can even change your setup to host pages to the outside world, if you so desire.
There is no limit to what you can do! OK, maybe it won’t cook you breakfast in the morning - not yet anyway!
Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, or need help with the install!
Dave is an IT Manager by day and technology consultant by night. He is interested in all things internet, but especially interested in security, history, and networking. He lives near Philadelphia with his family. You can follow Dave on twitter.
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Sports have played a big part in our society for a long time. It’s only natural we want to show off our strength, our speed and our skill.
Once upon a time, there was a boy who spent several sleepless nights just to solve the mystery of Myst or to fight head to head with Bezita or to manage his own football team. Now the boy has become a man and “working 9 to 5″ is the new game of his life. But deep inside, the little boy is still alive and waiting for the chance to crawl out.
