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Filed under: Games, Features, Lists

Holiday Gift Guide: five awesome Steam games that make great gifts

With Halloween out of the way, it's now officially time to look towards CHRISTMAS!

Stop right there! Let me turn those groans of yours -- those Scroogeish grunts of displeasure -- into smiles and laughter! For this year, how about giving the gift of game with Valve's Steam? OK, so they might not be your smiles nor your laughter, but what feeling of joy is greater than seeing someone's face light up with happiness and the glow of a widescreen TV)?


For $10 to $20 you can give someone a game that will provide hours and hours of pleasure and fun this festive season. Think about how much your son would love you if you gave him an excuse to leave the dinner table early, to play with his new toy? Or if your wife could bus virtual tables, rather than real ones? Perhaps you just want to treat yourself to some brain-scratching, finger-contorting goodness. Any way you want it, the best Christmas presents this year will be video games.

Read on for the five best games currently available on Steam. They're all cheap. They're all fun. They're all a complete steal.

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Filed under: Games, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Open Source

Egoboo is a fun 3D Rogue-like game for Windows, Mac, and Linux

I have no idea if Egoboo's original creator named this thing, or if the name came later on after the mantle had been handed down a few times -- and I had absolutely no idea what that word meant... until I punched it into Google! Check out the definition, if you feel the need to know. If not, read on!

Egoboo is a (90 megabyte!!) 3D Rogue-like game. Rogue is a very, very old game -- the original adventure game, really -- and Egoboo builds on its legacy, throws in a little hack-and-slash... and it's even a bit of a RPG! There is loot, there are gribbly monsters that are out to eat your face, and there are plenty of pretty zones to explore (plus there's a map editor!)

To top it all off, it's fully cross-platform (Windows, Mac AND Linux) and has a thriving forum community. It's free of course. Oh, and It's quite brutal. I died several times very quickly, so I'd recommend reading the guide before you jump in.

Download Egoboo (yes, their site is so old it even uses frames! OK, iframes, but still...)

Filed under: Fun, Games, iPhone

Myst for iPhone: a handheld version of a classic game

When I was growing up, Myst was the most fantastic game imaginable. There seemed to be no object at first, but a story eventually revealed itself to patient gamers who figured out how to solve its puzzles. For the time, its graphics were amazing, and the sounds and cutscenes blew us away. Now you can recapture that experience in portable form, because Myst is available on the iPhone.

Although I haven't played through the whole thing, word is it's a complete copy of the original game we love. The point-and-click play style of Myst is perfect for the iPhone, and it's sure to give you hours of fun, even if you've beaten it before. I don't know about you, but I don't remember the answers to every puzzle. The price and the disk space are both formidable, at $5.99 and over 700 megs. Still, 6 bucks is far less than we paid for it when it first came out, and our computers couldn't run it as well as an iPhone can. Worth a look.

Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters

The Several Journeys of Reemus - Today's Time Waster

The Several Adventures of ReemusThe Several Journeys of Reemus is a Flash game that is somewhat reminiscent of the 90's Lucasarts games like Day of the Tentacle, Monkey Island, and Sam and Max. SJoR has a minimalist point-and-click interface that lacks the obvious verbs like "Use," "Look," and "Pick Up."

The plot is centered around Reemus and his cute, yet melancholy purple-bear sidekick Liam. Reemus, an insect exterminator, is summoned by the local innkeeper to rid his establishment of ants before the prince and his bride-to-be arrive. The objective is to get Reemus and Liam out of each puzzle space, and that is accomplished by interacting with the environment to find a way out.

The game is a bit brief, but the puzzles are entertaining and rather trippy. There are two endings, and original music accompanies the game.

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Web services

Track your adventures with EveryTrail

everytrailEveryTrail is a nicely designed application that you can use to map out and track your trips. Waypoints, photos, and trip notes can be easily dropped in a Google Map.

How does it all work? Start off by creating an account. After that is complete, grab a copy of the EveryTrail GPS Uploader. When your GPS device is connected to your PC, it can be synced up with your choice of which waypoints you want to upload, bringing you into the Create a Trip section. All of your notes and photos can instantly be uploaded and tied to the point you specify. Then, when it's all ready, users can share their travels with friends and family.

Check out some interface shots after the jump...

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Filed under: Fun, Games, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Freeware, Time-Wasters

Average Shoveler: 8-bit headline zen - Today's Time Waster

Average ShovelerThere's a lot of things you can do with RSS headlines, but this isn't one I had thought of: Average Shoveler is a Flash toy with old school adventure game-style graphics. You control a character who can do three things: walk around, shovel snow and talk to passers-by. The passers-by will tell give you news (scraped from Yahoo! News) and when you shovel the snow, news photos will appear. Occasionally large chunks of snow will fall and photos will fly inall directions (try not to be under those when they fall, though). There's really no object to the game, other than to shovel snow, learn about current events, and explore. Eventually, though, the snow will win.

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Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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