Free game Friday: gaming with science and Wikipedia

This week’s games will have you helping out with cutting edge science and using one of earth’s largest repositories of knowledge to make your own RPG. Plus, there’s a platformer and 8-bit Borderlands

EteRNA

EteRNA is a joint product out of Carnegie Mellon and Stanford which hopes to use RNA chains produced in the game to create a real life library of stable RNA patterns for research. While that’s all well and good it also helps that the game they created to do it is ACTUALLY FUN and proves that science, when properly packaged, is still the best puzzle game on the market. Note that to score and play anything but the tutorial, you need to register.

A Tale of Colours

A Tale of Colours is another platforming game with a retro 8-bit style, but what distinguishes it from all the other free games with that general description we’ve featured on Free Friday is an emphasis on exploration with a genuinely large open world for you to run around in and discover new and exciting areas in. That’s not to say the game lacks dangers or platforming sections, just that there’s more here than that.
WB-RPG

Finally we have a game you’ll need to download to your PC (we’ve tried to move toward browser-based games on Free Friday for maximum compatibility) but the game’s hook makes it worth it. WB-RPG is a an an RPG game that takes random sections of Wikipedia to create a game’s story and world and allows the player to connect them using text of their own invention. The result is a storytelling tool that never produces the same adventure twice.


8orderlands
Borderlands 2 will release soon, but who can resist the lure of an 8-bit Borderlands that they can play in their browser?
The Border Lands lets you play as one of four characters, on a battlefield that allows killing, leveling up and weapon drops. Each level gets progressively tougher, until you exhaust your three lives. It's Friday afternoon: go play!