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holiday gift guide posts

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: Fun, Internet, Text, Web services

Give the gift of music, e-books and more


Wondering what to get your less-than-tech-savvy friends? On a tight budget and can't buy them a PS3 or even a single Blu-ray title? Worry slightly less courtesy this cheapskates' guide to gifting content from the internet. Not everything is budget-friendly, but almost everything on the list is a terrific value.

MUSIC

Lee wrote up a lovely list of 35 places to download free, legal MP3's back in August. If you're still intent on forking over cash for tunes (and I don't blame you), here are a few other ideas:

Rhapsody
Possibly one of the best music-subscription services on the planet. Featuring a gigantic catalog (over 4 million tracks) and awesome search, Rhapsody is a full-featured subscription service. You can also shop for MP3's. There is a free trial account which limits you to 25 tracks per month, but you'll probably want to gift Unlimited (all music, browser-based playback only, $12.99/mo.) or To Go (all music, including portable music players, $14.99/mo.).

Other subscription contenders: eMusic and Lala
Streaming awesomeness: AOL Radio and Pandora
Downloadable win: Amazon music, offering songs and albums cheaper than iTunes and higher-quality tracks free of DRM restrictions.

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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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