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We all suffer from delusions of grandeur at one time or another. Whether it's that crazy thing your boss did at work or the boo-boo your partner made at home, we all know how to do it better. And those guys in the State House and Washington? Don't get me started. So if you think you can do better, why not give it a shot? No, we don't mean that you should run for political office, or execute a coup d'état. How about playing a game instead?

NationStates will let you create the country of your choosing. Whether it's a workers' paradise or a totalitarian police state, it's all up to you. Pick your country's name and flag, define its style of government—ranging from Sensible to Psychotic—you even get to define the unit of currency and national animal. You'll determine the quality of life for your citizens, and you will interact with other nations—for good or for bad—just like real countries in the real world.

NationStates is provided as a free online service. You should be able to play it on most systems that have a recent web browser that allows JavaScript and accepts cookies.

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If you've always wanted to drive a race car like a bat out of you-know-where, but are prone to getting car sick, you could have a problem. For you or anybody else with a need for speed but the inability to follow through—whether because of that motion sickness problem or the lack of a major corporate sponsor for your racing team—a racing simulator may be your best friend. TORCS may be just what the doctor—or the mechanic—ordered.

The Open Racing Car Simulator is an open source multi-platform racing simulation. Choose from dozens of different cars, tracks, and opponents. You don't need any special hardware, since you can drive using your keyboard or mouse, as well as a joystick or steering wheel. It turns out that there's a pretty big user community out there as well: you can grab additional cars and tracks from other websites to add to the official offerings.

TORCS is available for Linux, Mac (OS X 10.3.9 ), and Windows platforms.

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Have you ever downloaded a deck of cards? Neither have we, but that's all about to change. With SVG-cards, you can do just that. Well, almost at least.

SVG-cards is a huge image that, when you print it out and chop it up, will give you a deck of cards. As the name suggests, this image is in SVG—scalable vector graphics—format. Unlike bitmapped image files, SVG are vector graphics. This means that you can resize them without making them all nasty looking, with jagged pixelation and all. It includes the faces of all the cards of a standard deck of 52 playing cards, as well as a couple of Jokers, and a design for the back as well.

You can choose to print them out as they come onto paper or card stock, or you might scale them down, or up, to make them into a size that works better for you. If you like the designs, you can also do more exotic things like put them on T-shirts as well.

SVG-cards are free to download.

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You don't have to spend time in Roswell to have to deal with aliens. Just fire up Spheres of Chaos, and you'll have more extraterrestrial enemies than you know what to do with, as well as a light show that just won't quit.

As you work through the various levels of play, you will encounter progressively more enemies that you have to eradicate before you can progress to the next level. Keep an eye out for black holes that can attract or repel you, and if you don't complete a given level soon enough, the bad guys will come looking for you.

Even on lower-end systems, the graphics are impressive. With that many bright colors and patterns, you'll wonder whether somebody spiked your Gatorade.

Spheres of Chaos works as a single-player game, or supports up to eight players at a time in multi-player mode. It's a free download, and it's available for Windows and Linux systems

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Did you ever think that maybe there just weren't enough dead aliens out there? Did you want to do something about it? Alien Arena may be right up your alley.

A first person shooter in the tradition of Quake III and Unreal Tournament, you'll be up to your ankles in blood-n-guts in no time. You can run Alien Arena in single player mode, server mode for playing against others, or even start up your own dedicated server.

There are several different game modes here, including Death Match, Capture the Flag, and others. The carnage is configurable, so you can have just the experience you're looking for. With the ability to reset everything, you can't break things in the configuration screen.

The lead developer claims that the game has been downloaded over half a million times in the last couple of years, so there's a big installed base out there. There is a large online game forum so whether its a configuration issue, or just a chance to gloat over your accomplishments, there's a big group of folks out there eager to hear what you have to say.

Alien Arena is a 3-D game, so you'll want to make sure your system has the horsepower required.

Alien Arena is available for both Linux and Windows systems.

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Are you an air guitar aficionado? Do you lust after that sunburst Strat hanging in the music store window? If you've got a computer keyboard, this may be your lucky day.

Frets On Fire is a keyboard-based guitar playing game. Using a combination of Function keys and the the Enter key, you play along with individual notes and chords to rack up a big score. You can start at Easy level to learn the moves; graduate to Medium as you gain confidence, and eventually you'll be at Amazing, shredding with the best of them. There are tons of songs available, or you can import from Guitar Hero, or even create your own songs.

It may not be time to quit your day job yet, but with Frets On Fire, you'll feel like that big recording contract is just around the corner.

Frets On Fire is available for Linux, Mac (x86 processors), and Windows.

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Whether you're a Human or an Alien, you'll enjoy Tremulous, an exciting multi-player first-person shooter that incorporates elements of real-time strategy. Based on Quake 3, the goal in Tremulous, of course, is to wipe out the opposition. This is accomplished not only through killing them, but also by destroying their "spawn structures," effectively keeping them from replenishing their ranks.

Humans advance by receiving credits that allow them to purchase new weapons and upgrade their arsenals, while Alians evolve into new classes of beings, each more powerful than the last. Start as a Dretch and do your job well and you may soon evolve into a Basilisk, Marauder, or Tyrant. The game ends when all players on a team have been killed and all of their buildings have been destroyed.

Tremulous is a free, open source project that is available for Linux, Mac, and Windows. With a large support community and an active forum, there is a lot of interest in this exciting, award-winning game.

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Neverball is a fun game with an odd name. Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Neverball can be enjoyed by Mac, Windows, and Linux users alike. This is a game truly trying to build bridges within the gaming community.

At its most basic, Neverball is a game where you roll a ball around obstacles by tilting the floor around it. The game is controlled by either your keyboard or mouse. More than that, though, it's a game of stunning and unusual graphics, as the game seems to take place in some three dimensional alternate universe. The colors are bright, full of reflection and movement. As you try to move your ball around obstacles, you'll encounter coins that you need to collect in order to progress to the next level. There are 75 levels total, so you might be playing this game for the next few years. If you do a web search, you'll find a few sites which keep track of high scores and maintain "The Neverball Hall of Fame".

The Neverball download includes another program called Neverputt, where you use the same principles from Neverball to play miniature golf.

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So you like DOS, do you? You really miss all the crackpot memory issues with UMB’s and expanded memory and extended memory and TSR programs? Well, here you go: DOSBox is a DOS/x86 emulator which has been ported to all sorts of systems: Windows, BeOS, Linux, Mac. It also runs 286 or 386 emulation, both in real and protected modes. It includes support for all manner of sound and video cards, such as Tandy and Hercules. Truly the past revisited! It’s true that when we upgrade from one system to the next we likely lose things that worked well and that we’d really like to keep; DOSBox is a solution to those losses, although it was primarily developed so that old games could be executed under more advanced operating systems.

DOSBox was written by four Scandinavian programmers. There is a lively user community hosted on Very Old Games on New Systems and the on-line support is extensive and complete. It’s totally free and is Open Source software.

Really, you’ll either be tickled or turned off by the whole idea of DOSBox. But in defense of those who do like it – there’s no shame in working with what works!

Get DOSBOX

I've written about StepMania, the very fun, free Dance Dance Revolution clone, here before. Dance games are fun and are great exercise. Kids love them, and I know adults who have cancelled their gym memberships to play 20 minutes of StepMania each day instead.

To play StepMania the way it was meant to be played, you need a dance pad. It turns out that Kraft is giving away dance pads for free: you just pay $6 for shipping. The pad is intended to be used with the four free games that you can download from Kraft's Active Gaming web site — there's a dance game, a soccer game, a "whack-a-mole"-type game, and a martial arts game. All four of the games are pretty good (for Windows only.)

But the cool part is that the $6 dance pad works perfectly with StepMania — and not just on Windows, but on MacOS X, too. (I haven't tried it with StepMania for Linux, but have no reason do doubt that the pad will work fine with that version too.) The pad has a standard USB connector — just plug it in and it works. All I had to do was configure the pad one time in StepMania's options page.

I received my dance pad about a week after I ordered it. (And although Kraft says there's only one pad per household, I've just ordered a second one, because StepMania has a two-player mode.)