A recent trend seems to be to turn commercial games into free games 1-2 years after their release that bring in some advertisement revenue to the game publisher. We have seen game giant Ubisoft release games like Farcry, Prince of Persia, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon and Rayman Raving Rabbits this way and other companies seemed to have hopped on the bandwagon as well.

Quite interestingly one of my all time favorite games has been released that way. The game’s name is Fallout and it can be downloaded and played freely at the Gametap network which provides ad driven free games.

Other games that have been released recently are The Suffering, a morbid dark and brutal first person shooter suited only for adult players. The game can be directly downloaded from Gamers Hell and other file providers.

Another newcomer is Rise & Fall Civilizations At War, a realtime strategy game with a first person mode that I wanted to play for a long while but never managed to. It’s now free and can be downloaded from Filefront.

Lastly we got Area 51 a game sponsored by the US Air Force also available from Filefront.

A geeks dream comes true. If you are a heavy collector of old NES, SNES or Gameboy games then you might love the following auctions at eBay by Nintendo of Canada. They apparently discovered a hidden stash of old Nintendo games all sealed and in mint condition and decided to auction them off for a good cause.

The earnings will benefit the United Way. Currently 24 lots with each containing 13-26 mint games are up for auction. The auctions will be running for another five days and are already showing a lot of interest. The highest current price is $1,308.11 (that’s Canadian Dollars) for 18 NES games. Must be a collectors dream.

link to auction.