Freebie Alert: Card Hunter is everything you never knew you wanted.

As a tween, I would bound into my local “Scholars” collectibles store, owned by a guy who I’m pretty sure was Sonny Bono, and ponder the tabletop RPGs. It was daunting in the coolest way. Crazy elaborate terrain setups, paint kits, and magnifying lenses, all for a board game. I would marvel at the pewter Ogres and Dwarves and Warriors, wondering what sort of life I could inject into their little tin hearts. But it was not for me. There were video games to play, you see, and somehow fifty dollars for a game I could play by myself felt better than fifty dollars for tiny creatures I’d need a cohort to enjoy. But still, I wondered.

So upon discovering “Card Hunter” on Youtube personality Alzorath's channel, I kind of fell in love. My precious creatures, sight-lines, and complicated terrains had come to life, little pewter hearts transformed to digital paper stand-ups that had me wondering why my tween self never thought of that. Sure, I had played tactical RPGs before but “Card Hunter” wasn’t just a tactical RPG, it was a Tabletop Tactical RPG with a mainline to my childhood that was free to boot.

Freebie Alert: Pixel People Pleases Passively

Pixel People

What happens when you combine the city building of “Sim City”, the art-style of “Pocket Planes” and the pointless, but still somehow fascinating Commodore 64 game, “Little Computer People”? Well, despite a fairly hard-bitten premise involving the destruction of the world as we know it, and the daunting task of rebuilding it via cloning and splicing of human genetics, you get “Pixel People,” a new free-to-play city-building iOS game that’s adorable as it is compelling.

Freebie: Galaxy on Fire 2 HD for iPhone and iPads

I’m a Trekkie, tried and true. While not as obsessed as some, I enjoy the sciencey bits, the theoretical discussions between space and time, and the way “Star Trek: The Next Generation” employs real scientific consultants to fact check all sorts of data and concepts that were subtly inserted into the show. So as a kid I was always a Jean-Luc Picard kind of guy in a Han Solo world. 

Of course, it became a tough choice as time went on. Classic space games like “Elite 2” and “X3: Reunion” with almost-limitless-as-space depth whisked past my peripheral vision - too obtuse to truly dive into.


Which brings us to the completely free “Galaxy On Fire 2”, the first game in the space pirate/trader genre that I’ve truly sunk my teeth into since the Sega Genesis’s “WarpSpeed”, and I’ve enjoyed it quite a great deal. 

Freebie: You Don't Know Jack (Mobile / Facebook)

In this world, there are few places for B-type personalities to massage their egos. You can write a 13,000 word diatribe defending the “Star Wars” Prequels, get a PHD, get a writing gig, kick-start that graphic novel you’ve been kicking around, but the ability to have an honest-to-goodness pissing contest is the privilege of the macho. So we play trivia. 

But once people know you’re good at it, they don’t want to play with you any more.

Until...you meet a pretty girl. Well, pretty is a disservice. Imagine if you took Rolf the Muppet’s personality and curly hair and put it into a sexy possibly Latina chick. I wooed her with a trip to the giant Dave & Buster’s trivia machine, the sly maneuver of giving my prize tickets away to a kid (after getting her an adorable stuffed penguin - Gerald), and not much else. Trivia came up again, and I mentioned owning “You Don’t Know Jack”. Her eyes lit up, and I was suddenly inviting a girl back to my place to play video games. She was serious about this too. That competitive spirit that had eluded all my friends and most of my acquaintances, was present in this angel of a woman. I needed to win, and she did too and that was freaking sexy.

This is why I fondly refer to the 'old' You Don't Know Jack as the game that got me laid.

Games With Gold Impressions: Dust: An Elysian Tail (is so God Darn Pretty).

If you have an Xbox 360, Xbox Live Gold, and anything resembling a noggin' in your head, stop reading this and go download Dust: An Elysian Tail right now. For the next 11 days it's free, and it's worth every penny. 

Functionally, Dust is a hack-n-slash platformer with light RPG elements, telling a surprisingly well-acted story about a mythical sword, a nebulous mystery, and a group of heroes that are possibly trying to save the world.

And on paper that all seems nice, but we've all been here before, right? Metroid, Castlevania, and countless (and I do mean countless) games have come and gone that delivered an iteration of a formula without really transcending it. Of course they said that about 'Avatar' on paper, too. 

Like Avatar you need to experience  'Dust: An Elysian Tail' to 'get' it. What is there to get? Only the best 2D animation in the history of gaming. 

Really. 

Yes, even better than Dragon Quest.