F2P MMOs ITT |OT|

[A Black Falcon]

Guild Wars also has some minigames only available for a limited time during the various festivals, such as the Dragon Festival (Chinese New Year I think?), the year-end festival (New Years'), etc. During these periods some special minigames are available, not playable at other times. Most of them are new variants on the usual "click the eight buttons on the bottom while running around and targeting enemies" stuff, but there are a couple of more unique ones, such as a kart racing style beetle racers game in the year end festival. You do use skills, but you're also racing down a hill. It's a pretty fun one. In the dragon festival, my favorite minigame was the battle one. It's sort of like a normal battle, except everyone has the same, special skillset, and you use preset weapons too. It's sort of like a dodgeball arena combat thing, sort of, kind of cool and an interesting change from the normal game -- the skills you have in that mode are quite different.

There are some others too, such as some single-player ones, like one where you have to fight snowmen or something like that... :)

I wish that these modes were available more often though, or that they had more stuff like that in the main games, because you can only play them during the festival events, and it's nice to have the variety. The only minigame I can think of in the main game is the "Guild Wars meets card battle RPGs (or Pokemon) even more so than usual" game in Eye of the North. You start with a few default monsters, and then can get more by fighting certain NPC people who play the game. Not sure if there's a PVP mode with it, never looked... it's decent though, you have the various monsters, but can only take three to a battle. In battle you use skills like normal, but you can't fight yourself, only the monsters, and they mostly fight via skills. I haven't played it in a while so I don't remember the details, but it was alright. But still, even there, even though the gameplay was somewhat different, you still were clicking the skill buttons as your main gameplay. And while I haven't played a huge number of them, I've played enough other MMOs to know that that's how that whole genre works, and GW probably has more variety than most, which says something I think about how lacking in variety the genre is...