Today’s Free Game Friday special is a long-time favorite of mine. Taking the best aspects from that era’s Ultima and Bard’s Tale games, Wasteland improved upon them and created something unique. In the post-nuclear world of Wasteland, you create a party of desert rangers, assigning points to their pistol, SMG, assault rifle, and other various skills, my favorite being brawling. It’s quite obviously a predecessor to the Fallout games. You can eat hobo dogs and drink snake squeezins, fight outlaws and robots, and can even contract wasteland herpes.

The game marries Ultima’s top-down view with Bard’s Tale’s portrait-and-text battle system beautifully to create a strategic combat system not equaled until Baldur’s Gate was created years later. And the game is so small that you can store the exe on a USB drive and play it during your lunch hour.

If you play the game, a bit of advice: rope is always important, melee combat is a surprisingly good option, the toaster repair skill is actually not useless, and for the love of god, keep every servomotor you find.

Download from Abandonia

Although this is probably one you’ll only enjoy if you’re a fan of the original version, I know for a fact that there are fans of the old Bruce Lee game. If you’re aching to give it a shot and don’t feel like using an emulator, this is the right solution for you – you don’t even have to install this game. Just run the executable to unzip the file, then run the exe. No install required.

Download Bruce Lee