Babble Deluxe and Crossword Writer are both fantastic games that offer hours of fun. Great choices for anyone looking to challenge their mind and enjoy some quality downtime during the weekdays. Enjoy the games!

Both the links for the games above have been dead for a long time, but I've found alternatives:

Crossword Writer

Babel this is a Zylom game which you can either play online or download. The only site I could find that still runs Babel Deluxe for free is HERE, however, to play it you have to install iWins game manager to play it.

Just bringing this back to the front page as we have just been given a Shmup (Sat 1st sept 2018. :)

:)

Thank you, WhiteRabbit.

Here's more Shmups and similar games to find on Steam. most are decently priced. With the changes made to the giveaway site, to get to the correct Steam page you will need to copy paste the links I've provided. Hyperlinks no longer work properly. some security measure I think.

Gal-x-e http://store.steampowered.com/app/473510/ £1.59

Lew Pulsipher's Doomstar
http://store.steampowered.com/app/504750/ £6.99

............................................................................................................[/size]
Zenodyne R http://store.steampowered.com/app/466820/ £6.99
[center]

RX Squad http://store.steampowered.com/app/494120 £1.59

Galactic Fighters http://store.steampowered.com/app/513960/ £0.79

Bitmaster (itch.io) https://comigo.itch.io/bitmaster $0.99

Solar Shifter EX - http://store.steampowered.com/app/363940/ - £5.99

Starship Command (Itch.io) - https://evglabs.itch.io/starshipcommand $5 or more

Starship Corporation - http://store.steampowered.com/app/292330/ - £14.99

Star Drifter - http://store.steampowered.com/app/485330/ - £0.79

Super Space Pug - http://store.steampowered.com/app/466840/ - £0.79

Stardust Galaxy Warriors: Stellar Climax - http://store.steampowered.com/app/389650/ - £6.99

Space Codex - http://store.steampowered.com/app/469890/ - £079 (£0.39 till Oct 3rd 16)

Star Chronicles: Delta Quadrant - http://store.steampowered.com/app/383330/ - £0.79

Space Pirates and Zombies 2 has just gone on sale for the next 48hrs on steam. You can find the deal HERE.

The game is still in early access, so what you see in the following videos HERE, HERE and HERE, is not the final game. I have not checked through all of the content of each video so cannot guarantee any inappropriate language that I may have missed.

In SPAZ 2 you must survive in an evolving post apocalyptic Galaxy. The zombie threat is defeated, infrastructure has collapsed, fuel is scarce, and scavenging means survival.

Initially the Galaxy contains hundreds of fleets, each trying to survive. AI captains do everything the player can. The player is not special and is not the center of the Galaxy.

As resource scarcity becomes critical, ships come into conflict just to survive. Factions may form for protection or split due to starvation. Old friends must become fodder.

Stronger factions establish and defend territories, set up resource hubs, and establish star bases. Weaker factions may resort to banditry. Each captain is unique, persistent, and shapes the Galaxy.

When factions meet, combat is usually the result. While the strategic side of SPAZ 2 is about exploration, territorial control, and faction building, the action side of SPAZ 2 is about ship construction, tactics, and salvage.

Combat creates damaged ships and dead crew, but it also provides new salvaged parts. All the parts in SPAZ 2 are modular and randomly generated. If you see something you like, break it off an enemy, grab it with your tractor beam, and connect it to your ship. Ship construction can be done live during battles, though sometimes beating an enemy to death with their broken wing is also fun.

Back on the star map, battles will attract other captains looking for salvage. Take your new parts and run. Upgrade, repair, and prepare to fight another day, for darker threats are about to emerge.

Key Features:

1) ... Two hundred persistent Captains that are able to do everything the player can, including forming dynamic factions, building structures, controlling territory, and going to War.
2) ... A true living galaxy that is not player centric. It will develop differently each game through the interactions of the agents.
3) ... Build your own faction from nothing.
4) ... Randomly generated modular parts. Build the mothership that suits your play style, on the fly, in seconds. Every part has its own unique stats that contribute to the mothership. Every part has its own hull integrity and damage states. Every part is a real, working, ship component.
5) ... Strategic ship building. The mass, location and shape of parts all matter. If a part blocks a turret, it will not fire. If a ship is too long, it will turn slowly. Too many engines will mean too little power for weapons. Every design choice counts.
6) ... A fully physics based 3d environment where everything is destructible, takes damage from impacts, can be grabbed and even thrown at enemies with the tractor beam.
7) ... Natural movement and controls. Movement is on a 2d plane and screen relative, much like an FPS. The combat feels like huge pirate ships battling on an ocean. Focus on tactical positioning and manage system power to unleash hell at the right moment.
8) ... Epic ship to ship battles. Tear the enemy apart piece by piece over minutes, instead of seconds.

You can actually get The Renegades of Orion 2.0 via the Otakumaker Bundle 17 at the moment, which is available HERE till 26th October next month. Also included in the bundle are five other games:

Pills4Skills
The Grandfather
The Lady
Volstead
Alien Run

The total cost of the bundle is less than the cost of The Renegades of Orion 2.0 at only $1.49 whereas on Steam the game is $1.99 pl;us you get the other games. If you are into giving games as presents to friends and family, Otakumaker have some very generous offers. You can get two keys for each game for an additional $0.50 and 5 keys for an additional $1.50 and 10 keys for each game for an additional $3.50.

I'll be giving away a lot of games once the review site that Whizzy (giveaway name) Mavadelo (Steam name) has created for me is ready. So such deals are perfect for me. I've already been purchasing bundles from this site, but only recently started to get 5 or 10 bundles. I have over 10 000 spare Steam keys, so it's going to take a long time to give them away. :)

Renegades of Orion 2.0

You can check out Renegades of Orion 2.0 via the Steam store by copy and pasting the following link into your browser. Clicking on hyperlinks now only take you to the home page even though the address is correct for the games page:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/434780/

A long time ago in another dimension called the astral plane, began a great battle. The battle was between Forces of Light against Renegades of Orion.

The Black Magicians and Reptile Creatures. They fight to be the kingdom of Earth. During this battle there was a transfer of consciousness of a fighter who had the most power of cosmic light. He's called Shen!

With intention to join the troops of Orion and to fight the renegades. Take the divine crystal to raise its power. If you falter the devil catches you!

In the new version The Renegades of Orion 2.0, Now there is a crystal (Divine crystal) which guarantees more power. He appears randomly.

There are more demons, some totally take your power. Other makes you go back to the beginning of the stage or even before that.

The dynamics to remain free of these demons and gain power through the crystal to make sure you skip the level.

"Another good detail of the game! Enemies and obstacles (except bosses) always arise from random and unpredictable in every time you play."

Here are some more Shmups and other related shooters that are on sale over on Steam until the 3rd October. I'll be leaving these up even when the sales end as they are related to this post. I may consolidate the whole thread once I've added the shmups released over the last several years. At least those available on PC.

For some reason, linking directly to the Steam page from these forums no longer works, so I've had to remove the codes that allowed you to click on the name of the game. instead I've had to post the direct links, but clicking on these will only take you to the sales page and not the actual game. To do that you will have to copy and paste each link into your browser to see the Steam page. The giveaway site have added something to the forums that won't allow direct links, but only to the home page.

I will see if I can find an alternative method when I have time.

Shmup Love Boom - 70% off £0.59
http://store.steampowered.com/app/387110/

Renegades of Orion 2.0 - £1.59
http://store.steampowered.com/app/434780/

Void - £3.99
http://store.steampowered.com/app/503710/

1917 - The Alien Invasion - £3.99
http://store.steampowered.com/app/470060/

War Birds: WW2 Air strike 1942 - £1.39 (50% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/451670

Bladestar - £2.44 (65% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/424760/

Infinity Wings - Scout & Grunt - £0.99 (50% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/448790/

Freespace 2 - £3.49 (50% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/273620

Uriel's Chasm 2: את - £0.99 (75% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/414580

Zotrix - £2.49 (75% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/343280/

Zotrix - Solar Division - £6.99 (Tower Defense in space)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/351720/

CDF Starfighter VR - £8.49 (15% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/433190/

Naval War: Arctic Circle - £3.74 (75% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/200050/

Fair Strike - £0.69 (75% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/352120/

Descent: FreeSpace – The Great War - £3.35 (30% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/273600/

Space Codex - £0.39 (51% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/469890/

LUFTRAUSERS - £1.74 (75% off till 3rd Oct)
http://store.steampowered.com/app/233150/

Hi Delenn, yeah, sadly Scubaguy passed away some years ago (not sure if you knew), though I don't know what happened to Lockett or Webmaster?

I so miss Lockett, webmaster and, especially, Scubaguy. ;(

P.S. See, StrayCat, it worked. Thanks!

It's about time I started to update this thread; especially considering Shmups are still one of my favorite arcade genres.

Just found the following bundle called Fall Gamebundle, that includes 3 space based games two of them shmups and one strategy game. They are Battlestorm, The Fleets of Sol and Astrokill. You can pick all three up for a little over $3.50. I've added a few more space oriented games to the Shmups thread, all from bundles that are live at this time.I've only checked the indie Gala and Game Bundle sites so far. There are at least 60 bundles live at the moment. most bundles retails for much less than $5, so you may find some excellent shmups if you check through the indie bundles that I've linked to in the Weekly round up of games thread over in the Game discussion sticky section. The three space games are worth more than that the cost of the whole bundle alone, in fact, the cheapest of those three games Battlestorm costs more if you buy it directly from Steam. All games come with Steam keys. You can find the deal HERE.

The following are several other space oriented games you'll find in one of the several Indie Gala bundles that are available at this time. You'll find Indie Gala
Idie Gala Prime Bundle includes Nightork Adventures - Beyond the Moons of Shadalee - Pilot your spaceship through procedurally generated dungeons Fight against evil demons, to save the galaxy in 30 missions, or IACTURA - It is your job to save the planet from its decay. Only you can prevent an extraterrestrial species from taking over all of humankind. G Prime - a gravity gripping steampunk slingshot simulator. Space Ranger ASK - a classic arcade shoot'em up game, featuring asteroid blasting, spacemen rescues, UFO destruction, asteroid mining and Boss fights! Two excellent real time space battles waged with waves of fighters and massive battleships are available in the form of Haegemonia: Legions of Iron and it's stand-alone expansion Haegemonia: The Solon Heritage are available via the Anuman Interactive bundle and you'll find even more space oriented games in the The Indie Gala Mogul bundle for example RX Squad a side scrolling smup (ground based). You can find the Indie Gala bundles HERE

There's another bundle on the Game bundle site that is soon to end called The LaborDay Bundle that also has a decent Shmup called Nordenfelt, which you can find HERE and see on Steam HERE. The usual cost of that game is £5.99/$8.99 but you can get it and nine other games for $3.73 (approx £2.88)

AStrokill

Battlestorm

Fleets of Sol

Haegemonia: Legions of Iron

Haegemonia: The Solon Heritage

An alternative to MP3 Toolkit:

Audacity, once considered just a simple wav editor, now possibly one of the most powerful sound file editors on the planet. Open source, free (as in free beer), and cross platform as well. I use it a lot to record old vinyl, clean up pops and clicks, automatically detect silence (between songs), and create track tags for the resulting FLAC files.

Only feature missing is "rip a CD". Lots of freeware solutions for that... I use VLC which is also free, open source and cross platform.

Yep! Nice one Whiterabbit. Looks stunning and absolutely tremendous!

It's brilliant

Wow! Got to play this one real real soon!

Thanks to Chazzo for bringing the portable apps site to my attention. you can now get a portable version of Scorched 3D. Scorched 3D is the best artillery game i've ever played.

You can get the portable version HERE

Scorched 3D was updated again since my last update over a year ago. This is well worth getting if you don't already. a great artillery/strategy game with great graphics and fun challenging game play. You can get the latest version which is v43.2a from the developers site HERE

Sorry for being about 3 years late. But see Capriccio for a new great score editor. Its free, very functional.

SnowFox Total Video Converter can easily be replaced [and bettered] for free by
Freemake Video Converter

A very good alternative to 1AVCapture is BB FlashBack Express – at least if it's as good
(or better) than version 2.0.2 build 455 (which is the one I've got).
To view info and download, go to http://www.bbsoftware.co.uk/BBFlashBack_FreePlayer.aspx
I believe the program has no spyware.

Screen Monkey - 100% Multimedia Presentation Freeware for Two-Monitor PCs

Alternatives to AllMyNotes I use (or have used) are:

Keynote (both the original from Marek Jedlinski (AKA Tranglos) and the NF (for New Features) taken up by Daniel Pradov after Tranglos declared a "hobby programmer bankruptcy, a writer's block, an intellectual meltdown to incapacity".

Original (Still available but quite old): http://www.tranglos.com/free/keynote.html

Daniel Pradov's version: http://code.google.com/p/keynote-nf/

Evernote (both the new (limited when free) 3 version and the older version 2).

I'm fortunate to have kept a copy of version 2 from my old computer as this is the one I use (and like) the most for its capacity for text, graphics and HTML (Web page) abilities.

The two programs Ashraf has mentionned are flawed (for my use at least), Cintanotes is too simple and only text oriented and FruitfulTime Notekeeper is an end-of-line product (no longer maintained) which I have tested and found so intrusive (it would insist on loading at Windows startup with no way of telling it not to) and was so awkward to use that I just gave up on it.

Scorched Earth has been updated. The latest version is build 43. The some of the links above are still hosting earlier versions except the first one which has een updated (cnet). you can get the latest version from Gamershell (which may still be giving a spurious WOT rating of RED (don't have it installed at the moment so not sure). You can download the latest version HERE :)

This is still one of my favorite freeware games from over a thousand that we have posted in this project. :)

Alternative to Start Menu program offered on GOTD several days ago.

SE Tray Menu - Freeware

Freeware options for today's giveaway (UMark Pro Watermark Software):

Watermark V2 - freeware

Watermark Magick - Freeware

G-DOC Free PDF Creator

Per the developer, this program does the following (and it's 100% FREE):

"Create, view and print your enterprise-quality PDF files using gDoc Creator, the easiest way to convert documents from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into PDF or XPS! And gDoc Creator includes PDF to Word conversion too!."

Two free online alternatives for today's (23.01.2010) GOTD "Crave World Clock":
Both have a broad array of options and information:

http://www.worldtimezone.com/datetime.html

http://www.timeanddate.com/
with Free Clocks for Your Web Site

An free alternative to Odin Screen Capture from January 17, 2010

PicPick Tools from http://picpick.wiziple.net/

It has many capture settings and it also features a built-in editor, color picker, pixel ruler, protractor, Magnifier and more.

After install, all the tools are available from a trayicon menu.

A 100% Freeware Music Player/Organizer is:

Media Monkey Standard-CNET Editor Rating is 5/5, CNET User Rating is 4/5.

Happy Saturday,
Inas