As contrast to the previous post that had nothing to do with gaming or nerdery, and everything to with plugging myself, here's a post that is exactly the opposite.
In May 2010, Wolfire Games released the Humble Indie Bundle. It was a bold experiment - offer gamers the chance to buy 5 indie games (i.e. games not developed by large companies), for whatever price they choose, with all of the money going directly to the game developers or to charity (with the split determined by the purchaser)1 . Everybody wins - the gamers get a (potentially) cheap and easy way to broaden their collection, support indie game development, and give to charity; the devs get great publicity and a bigger chunk of their income than if middle-men and publishers had got their claws into it; and the charities get money!
The first Humble Indie Bundle achieved over $1.25 mil in sales, with 31% of that going to charity, and later bundles have gone from strength to strength. They've done great work in spreading the word about fantastic indie games, such as World of Goo, Braid, and Crayon Physics Deluxe.
The Humble Introversion Bundle was released on November 22. This contains 4 outstanding games by Introversion - Darwinia, its multiplayer expansion Multiwinia, Uplink, and Defcon. Introversion are masters of crafting incredible immersion without resorting to fancy graphical bells and whistles - their hacking simulation, Uplink, is played almost entirely through a text interface, and yet there is an urban legend about one reviewer panickedly shutting down his internet connection because he was afraid that the game was too realistic. Darwinia is a touching tale of sentient life developing and evolving as routines within a computer mainframe, and Defcon perfectly captures the horrific detachment of those responsible for nuclear war. As a bonus, Aquaria and Crayon Physics Deluxe are also available for those who donate more than the average (at present, $3.80) - what more could you ask for!?
All these games deserved vastly more attention on their release, but sadly they passed most gamers by for lack of publicity. Here's your second chance to enjoy them. Go to www.humblebundle.com, pay what you think they're worth, and enjoy the warm feeling of giving to deserving causes while playing fantastic games. You won't regret it.
(P.s. I'm experimenting with internal links for footnotes here. Judging by the preview, Blogger doesn't seem to like them - I'll have a further fiddle once this is actually published)
1. For those who care about Freedom (speech, not beer), the games are also distributed without any DRM; essentially, the technology that prohibits you from (for instance) copying songs from iTunes. They are also platform-independent, meaning you can play them on a PC just as easily as a Mac or a Linux box. Back
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