The cheapskate's guide to online gaming on the PC

I remember my first foray into the world of online PC gaming. It was a game of checkers on the MSN Zone, with a random stranger who beat me quite easily. Even though my first experience wasn't a good one, it was an addictive one. I probably spent the rest of the night losing to other random strangers. It was awesome.

I was hooked on online gaming. Over the years, I've tried many online games as well as many different formats of online games. Some of the games had me going for months until the next big thing came along. Others were written off as bad experiments.

Counter-Strike was the first game that I really sunk my teeth into. Or it sunk it's teeth into me. This was back in the days when we had 56k modems for our internet connection. I spent a lot of time optimising my CS configuration until my ping times to the server were just right. In the 56k days, a ping of a 150ms was quite good. Man, those were the days...

The problem with online gaming recently is that most of the good online games are not free. A lot of them aren't cheap either.

Games like World of Warcraft have a monthly subscription fee of £8.99 a month. StarCraft 2 is an excellent game but it still has quite a high shelf price. EVE Online is one the best MMORPG space combat simulators available, but it has a monthly cost of €14.95. That's a lot of money!

So here are three games that have been keeping me very busy over the last few weeks. These games are free-to-play, sometimes limited in functionality, but always fun.

Team Fortress 2

• The game is free-to-play on the Steam platform
• All the different classes are available to you immediately
• You get random drops of special items the more you play the game
• The only time you need money is when you need to buy a key to unlock secret crates. These keys are obtainable at $2.50
• Or you can trade those crates with other players who are willing to buy keys.
• Overall, this is really a game that you don't have to spend any cash on and you can still enjoy the full game

Heroes of Newerth

• The game is a free download from their website
• You get access to 15 different heroes of the 83 available in a rotating hero pool
• The HoN store allows you to buy access to different heroes permanently
• The more you play, the more coins you get, so you also don't have to spend money if you don't want to.
• Quite a small download, clocking in at just over 600Mb

Warhammer Online

• This game is as close to World of Warcraft that you can get
• Based on the excellent Warhammer Fantasy universe
• You can play as much as you want to on the Tier 1 missions, until you're ready to upgrade to a premium account
• The game is also quite friendly to new players.

Between these 3 games, you won't have to look at another paid-for game for a long time. They are all premium quality games with lots of replay value.

You should take a good look at these games and give them a try. They will give you hours of gaming pleasure.