Why updates have been scarce

The recent sales on Steam have left me quite a bit less broke than I might have been had I bought a couple of dozen games at their usual prices, but it has left me in complete poverty as far as free time and productivity are concerned.

As you can tell from my Steam screenshot, my preference is generally for strategy, real-time tactics, and role-playing games.  The main culprits thus far have been my favourite MMO Eve Online, and an absolute little gem of an indie platformer called Braid that has managed to make itself one of my favourite games of all time.

I was hoping to make this post a little bit longer and more interesting, but these games aren't going to play themselves, you know...

Child's Play

As you may or may not know, Child's Play is a charity founded by Mike and Jerry of the popular web-comic Penny Arcade.  The aim of Child's Play is to improve the lives and raise the spirits of sick kids by donating toys and games to children's hospitals worldwide, hopefully combating the stereotype of gamers as violent, antisocial leeches upon society.

Though the charity accepts donations year round, the annual drive runs from November until the end of December, and Child's Play 2009 is officially a go.

In this spirit, I've decided to replace some of my ads with banners linking to the official Child's Play site.  Even if you don't usually click on ads, please do follow these links and follow through by making a donation or two.  In addition to this, one hundred percent of all ad revenue my blog makes (not that it's ever much) from today until the last day of the year will be donated to Child's Play.  This isn't an incentive to click on my ads; if you feel tempted to do so purely to help out the charity, then rather go to the charity's site and make a donation directly.

If you're on Twitter, you can also keep up to speed on things by following @CPCharity.

Good Old Games

GOG.com is now officially out of private beta and available to the public.

Good Old Games is a website which allows you to download classic games ("classic" as in Fallout 2, not as in Pong) legally and completely DRM free for around six bucks a pop.

The lack of DRM means that you actually own the game once you download it, and you're free to install it on as many different machines as many times as you like, and even download the game from GOG as many times as you wish after paying only once.

The games are all guaranteed to be perfectly compatible with both Windows XP and Vista - which eliminates a huge headache when it comes to older games - and also include full technical support. Furthermore, a bunch of extra freebies are thrown in, such as wallpapers, full soundtracks, complete manuals, etc.

Earthworm Jim 1 & 2, Colin McRae Rally 2005, and the epic Freespace series are examples of titles available for six to ten dollars each.

My personal opinion is that, for the price of a nice lunch, it's a steal. Being a broke motherfucker really isn't an excuse to pirate these games anymore, and considering the service and extras you'd be missing out on, you'd just be doing yourself in.