Instead of one game this week, I’m going to give you several — because it’s Halloween and I missed last week because I was at Disneyland. So, go and check out this site, which offers a selection of free, spooky Flash games. And don’t forget this free game of the past, which is perfect for Halloween fun.

This week’s free game is a creepy one. But that’s OK, because we’re nearing October, the month of Halloween horrors!

Title: The Suffering
For: PC
Developed and published by: Midway
Age rating: Mature

A caveat first: “The Suffering” is the video game equivalent of a B horror movie, with all the blood and gore and scariness that implies. And like a horror movie, that’s a large part of what makes it entertaining. But take that Mature rating seriously; this one’s not for the kiddies. I first played this one when it came out on the original Xbox. It was pretty good, as I recall, though it has long since landed in the bargain bins of game stores. And now you can get it for free.

The corporeal dude in the picture up there is Torque, the anti-hero of the game. Torque is on death row in a fictional island prison off the coast of Maryland. He’s in for murdering his wife and kids. As the game starts the prison is overrun by monsters in the gruesome image of execution methods — a twisted being with swords for arms and legs represents decapitation, while syringe-studded wretches stand in for lethal injections, and so on.

These monsters are dumb but vicious, and there are also greater spirits at work on the island, like the vaporous guy in the photo, Hermes, who liked executing people so much that he committed suicide in the prison’s gas chamber so he could haunt inmates forever.

And then there’s Torque’s own inner beast to deal with. The most interesting twist of the game is that how you act while playing influences whether or not Torque was actually guilty of his crime. Leave helpless inmates to die — or worse, kill them yourself — and it’ll turn out that Torque murdered his family or was at least involved in their deaths. Work to redeem Torque and he’ll end up being innocent of the crime.

(Image from Mobygames.com)

When I was a kid we mostly played pretty traditional board games: Chess, Monopoly, Life, Connect 4, Balderdash, Clue, Pente, Scrabble, stuff like that. When I was a teenager my brother started playing Dungeons & Dragons — which I  never really got into (too abstract, I think) — and both of us occasionally played fantasy-themed board games like HeroQuest and Battle Masters.

In high school I played a lot of the popular card game Magic: The Gathering (I still have a box of the cards somewhere — anyone need a Vesuvian Doppelganger? I’ve got, like, four.), but I quit the game after myself and my lunchtime play buddies graduated — no one left to play with, you see. Since then my attention has remained focused on video games; aside from occasional matches of Pente or Boggle or whatever with friends and at family gatherings, I hardly played non-electronic games for years, and I certainly didn’t buy any.

I realized last year that I’ve been missing out. The catalyst was Catan, a board game whose cardboard version I’d heard talked up on message boards but which I’d never tried (its picture is at the top of this entry). Suddenly it was made available in video-game form on the Xbox 360’s Live Arcade — I played it a few times, and liked it. I wasn’t very good, but I had fun. And so I started looking into what modern board games had to offer, and discovered the existence of German-style board games, of which Catan is one of the most prominent examples.

Over the following year or so, more digital versions of notable board and card games were released on XBLA, including Carcassonne, Lost Cities and Ticket to Ride. I also figured out that there are more than a few board games based on video games. And now there’s even one based on Battlestar Galactica, pretty much my favorite show ever.

So I gave in. With a birthday coming up a while back, I put games on my list and received a couple doozies: Twilight Imperium, along with its expansion, Shattered Empire; Arkham Horror, based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft (thankfully minus the overt racism and classism that marked his writing); and a fun little word game called Quiddler. And about a week later my wife and I picked up a copy of Catan from Tom’s Toys in SLO, and liked it so much that we’ve put in an Amazon order for the Seafarers expansion.

With so many new things to play, I think we’ll be set for a while. Not that I don’t have my eye on a few games for the future.

Catan is the one we’ve played the most — the goal  is to gather resources and build settlements and roads on an island, with the first player to reach 10 “victory points” declared the winner (we’ve found the 10-point limit makes for a shorter game than we’d prefer, so we’ve been upping it to 13).

We haven’t yet had time (or enough people) to try out Twilight Imperium, but it looks like a blast — it’s a space-conquering game where three to eight players try to become the emperor of the known galaxy through conquest and political maneuvering.

I played a few practice rounds by myself to get a handle on the rather complex rules — this one isn’t a rookie game,  but figuring out how a beast like this works is half the fun.

And finally, Arkham Horror is a battle with the forces of chaos and madness. You have to maintain your character’s sanity and stamina while fighting monsters and  exploring alternate dimensions, then return to the city of Arkham so you can shut and seal the gates leading to these strange other worlds. Seal enough of them and you win; take too long and one of Lovecraft’s mythical monsters, like Cthulhu, wakes up and probably eats you. There’s a chance that you can send the creature back whence it came if it wakes up, but the odds are against you — the odds are always against you in this game. It makes for an intense, suspenseful game, and is the only board game I’ve played in which the players can all lose.

The point of all this is that board games these days are really neat, and if all you’re familiar with are the classics it would be worth your while to take a look at what newer games have to offer. Locally, it appears that Tom’s Toys and Captain Nemo Games & Comics have the best selections, though Barnes & Noble has its share as well. Let me know in the comments if I’ve missed and notable local sources. And by all means, discuss your own favorites!

(Images from Wikipedia)