Monday, September 22, 2014

FreeCol For PowerPC Macs

If any of you were downcast that the strategy game FreeCol required Java 1.6 and wouldn't run on PowerPC Macs, today's your lucky day. Thanks to the compiling talents of reader Javier A., we now have a new version of FreeCol that runs on Java 1.5. He uploaded it to his Dropbox folder (direct link), and it's only a 30 MB download.

Here's a blurb from the FreeCol website:
FreeCol is a turn-based strategy game based on the old game Colonization, and similar to Civilization. The objective of the game is to create an independent nation.

You start with only a few colonists defying the stormy seas in their search for new land. Will you guide them on the Colonization of a New World?
So it's a little like FreeCiv. FreeCol somehow escaped my attention, but I tried it out a little bit and it looks great. In addition to single player, you can also join multiplayer games over the internet. I'm not sure about the security implications of that, since Java 1.5 is outdated. From what I understand, only the web browser plug-in was vulnerable, but maybe someone can weigh in with a comment. I only do single player, anyway. It's humiliating enough when the A.I. kicks my ass ;)

1 comment:

  1. I seem to have found a few additional strategy games for this category. First there's Dune Legacy, an open source rebuild of Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty. It has full PowerPC support even in it's current release, but you'll need the original game data files to play it. After that we have our abandonware titles StarCraft, Age of Empires, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds and a couple others that you can find over at macintosh garden.
    If you're still hungry for more strategic power you could try running DOS classics, such as X-COM Enemy Unknown & Terror From the Deep, inside DOSBox or (the more convenient & user friendly) Boxer emulator. Don't worry about laggy emulation. In my experience strategy (or even just plain old side-scrollers & turn-based) games run quite well under emulation, even on an alien architecture like our PowerPC processors. It's the first person shooters & 3D games (like Quake & Doom) you should avoid emulating. Run them natively instead. The Strategy Core website has some of the best mods & community made game patches for DOS strategy games, especially the X-COM series.

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