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Filed under: Games, Open Source

Original SimCity source code released under GPL

Sim CityThe folks who brought you the original SimCity nearly 20 years ago have now brought you the free edition of that game. Not necessarily free as in beer, but free as in speech. The SimCity source code has been released for anyone who wants to port it run on other devices or operating systems, or wants to modify the game to create their own version.

The decision to release the the SimCity source under a GPL license is due to plans to add the game to the OLPC's XO Laptop which currently runs all open source software.

Because EA, the game company that owns the rights to SimCity and other Sim games wants to protect its trademark, there have been a few changes to the original source code. All references to SimCity have been replaced with "Micropolis," which was the original working title for the game.

[via Slashdot]

Filed under: Fun, Games, Internet, Windows, Microsoft, Freeware, Time-Wasters

SimCity Classic online - serious Time Waster

Sim City Classic
Watching our friends play SimCity on their Nintendo DSes got so frustrating that we finally went out looking to see if there's a free version that can be downloaded. We didn't get that far, however, because a quick trip to Wikipedia informed us that Maxis - the original publisher of SimCity - offers a version of SimCity Classic that you can play online.

Unfortunately, it looks like this has been up for a really long time, as evidenced by the following error you are greeted with if you visit the site with a Firefox browser:

SimCity Classic Live requires Windows 95/98 or Windows NT with either
Microsoft Internet Explorer 3.0 or higher
or
Netscape Communcator/Navigator 4.0 or higher.


So your choices for popular modern browsers boil down to IE, and well, that's it. Oh, and the other big downside is that to play the game, you have to register giving a username, your first and last name, and a valid email address. And you have to consent to some legal mumbo-jumbo that we didn't read... you should probably read it and let us know if we owe Maxis our first born.

Game play is just as you remembered it - classic and bare-bones, but in full color glory. And it's still really hard.

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Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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