Yeah Yeah.... I know I made a thread earlier asking if Liberated games was legal & I promise this is my last thread of the sort for awhile at least. Its just something about this strikes me as odd, because after typing in the word free on there in house search engine, I noticed a startling amount of free games going through like 30 or so pages. Now I understand this site is ran by IGN which leads me to believe that it is in fact legal, but it just seems strange that they would have so many free games.... some of which are actually good. Anybody know if this site is actually legit or if anybody can just upload anything to the server & whatnot?

It is legal, it is safe.

Getting a little paranoid, aren't we? :D

Damn Skippy Hippie. Last thing I want is for the FBI to show up at my house ready to throw me into prison because I accidentally downloaded something illegal.

yeah... I'd be more spooked of downloading from say... Pirate Bay or any of those other randomly named Warez/hack sites that could and may be tracked by the FBI, and as such, illegal to utilize. Even Home of the Underdogs brought their downloads that werent 100% free for distribution down so that they maintained legality since no one really marked which side each property was on... Another note FilePlanet actually has seemed to gathered up quite a few "free full" games of note like "Tiberian Sun" but games like that tend to be packaged up by the developer/publisher to allow it to be distributed as-is... Usually they will be placed there because sales have dried up and the games getting old so yup... dont worry about your downloads from Fileplanet, GoG, Steam, Battle.net, J-List/Jastusa or any other WELL known site online..... (other than Pirate Bay ofc)

Well its not just that.... there were fan games & such there as well. I was under the impression that fangames were illegal (I'm talking blatent Mario ripoffs here & Nintendo is known to be insanely protective of there IPs).

It is pretty paranoid. Even downloading from the Pirate Bay is virtually risk free. There's strong debate over whether piracy is ethical or not (it generally isn't imo), and part of the issue is because it's basically never punished or monitored.

Fileplanet is a part of the IGN network and it's their servers that host the games for D2D so yes they are both legal and safe.

Ohhh I realize that. I just like to stay on the right side of the law. It would be my luck that I'd be the one SOB who would get caught if I pirated a game. Yeah I know D2D is. I have actually purchased games from there before. That is part of the reason I was iffy.

Realistically, I think the worst one would fear from piracy would be a stern letter from their internet provider. There are some horror stories from music piracy, but the game industry hasn't gone down that route yet.

As noted before, Fileplanet is a free and legal service.

What you probably will find is that most of the free games are either:
* MMOs (where you will probably have the option of small payments for cool items or features);
* Ad-supported games (this is really common with anything that says "US & Canada only");
* Freeware / open source games that are generally hard-to-find otherwise; and
* Older games which have genuinely been released as freeware (and there are some good ones available now)

There used to be quite a few good file directories, but Fileplanet is now probably the most useful one still standing (which is a real shame, as it appears to be getting less accessible all the time). Gamershell also has a decent repository, though it's even harder to browse.

For a few years, before the Steam age and when every gaming website was a PlanetSomething, Fileplanet managed to secure some pretty interesting special offers for Beta access to games, as well as piloting a few ad-supported full games. Steam is now the powerhouse that's securing most of those deals.

Which reminds me, Steam is building up a decent selection of free games on its own.

I kinda got that impression

For example
[url=http://www.fileplanet.com/10617/10000/fileinfo/Croc:-Legend-of-Gobbos]http://www.fileplanet.com/10617/10000/fileinfo/Croc:-Legend-of-Gobbos[/url]

I'm almost certain that the full game was not 16MB.... I could be wrong though. I'm thinking of downloading it to see, but I'm still not 100% on the legality. I believe the most of you and all, I'm just a bit iffy because of the things like what you said about Pirate Bay.

Oh, that's the other thing I forgot to mention and this might be such an example.

I don't know where they find all the time to do it but there are a lot of game creation programs out there where savvy kids can bits of data from old games and totally revamp them with updated graphics and new content.

For example, there are various incarnations of Street Fighter that you can get from this site as well as a few developer sites.

This isn't considered piracy because most of the game is the independent user's hard work and the games are not sold for profit.

They're considered more as fan-based MODs.

For instance you can get two different variations of Turrican for free that fans made.

Also the old Eye of Beholder game has been totally remade by an independent person to be used with the NeverWinter Nights engine.

Given that the filename is "crocdem6.exe", and that the path is shown as "Home / Gaming / Adventure / Croc: Legend of Gobbos / Demos", I'm pretty sure that'll be a demo :)