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Gaming is something that we, as humans, have enjoyed for the better part of the last century, but getting games hasn’t really gotten any easier. Even with the advent of digital games that allow you to purchase and play new games without ever leaving your house, they still take a long time to download. Patches, […]
Gaming is something that we, as humans, have enjoyed for the better part of the last century, but getting games hasn’t really gotten any easier. Even with the advent of digital games that allow you to purchase and play new games without ever leaving your house, they still take a long time to download. Patches, updates and other similar files all have the same problem, which can leave gamers sitting around waiting for hours before their games are actually playable. So what’s the solution? Torrents!
Torrents? If you know a little bit about torrents then you probably think this means ‘illegal torrents’. However, you are in no way recommended to download or use pirated games. It’s wrong! Instead, download your free games, your patches, your updates, and if things get desperate, the game you’ve already purchased the key code for vi a torrent. While not all games available via torrent are free, you can root them out using an easy web search. So what’s free and where can you get it?
The first and most popular download option available online is the free game. There are literally hundreds of free games that you can choose to download and play and the majority of those are available via torrent. For example, the Vuze bittorrent client allows easy one click access to free game torrents via their client and they also monitor the torrents to ensure that they are all legal. What can you find – zombie games, RPGs, MMORPGS, and more. Because they are free, it really won’t matter if you don’t like them very much because you can always just delete them and not have to worry about it. However, there are quite a few very high quality games available via torrent, including Planetside 2, Wartune, and League of Legends. In fact, you can find free games in nearly every genre.
Chances are that you probably don’t really want to wait the whole 20 to 60 minutes for your game update to download, but chances are you won’t have to if you have an older game. Many game publishers, including Blizzard and a great deal of Indie games offer patches, fixes, and older updates via torrent so that you can download them more quickly. In fact, Blizzard actually updates World of Warcraft and Starcraft via Bittorent technology. While you won’t need a bittorent client to do the downloading, you are using a torrent. A great place to find these kinds of free updates and patches, as well as a great deal of guaranteed legal game downloads is GameUpdates.org. They have game patches, games like Total War and over 1,300 free downloads for you to look through.
Before you download a free game, take two minutes to make sure you aren’t breaking any laws. How? Copy the name of the game and paste it into your internet browser. What comes up? If it’s a store and the names of the game for sale, then you’re out of luck, this is not a free game. If it comes up as a free to download game then you’re good to go. Most free games pay for their development and upkeep via advertisements and in-game sales, so you can expect any decent free games to feature one or the other of these functions.
If you don’t know how to go about searching through the massive amount of data that is the internet to find free games, don’t worry. There are plenty of places that ‘collect’ free games for you to go through without having to worry about illegal games popping up. Free to Play is one of the best search terms you can use to find a game, because just ‘free’ will also bring up trials and illegal torrents.
Torrents are an extremely popular technology because their main benefit is fast and easy downloads. Because torrents break files up into smaller parts, and each computer seeding the file uploads it, you can actually start sharing with other people when you have only downloaded part of the file. Essentially, the more people who have a file and are seeding, the faster the file download. If you are new to torrents, you will also need a torrent client to download, and those are also free. There are clients available for every operating system, although some have better or more features than others.
Michael Herbert is an avid gamer who fully supports legal peer to peer sharing. When not playing his favourite zombie game, he’s most likely on the internet lobbying for personal rights.
