Okay, just taking a short break from playing Psychonauts. I can see why that game is considered to be underappreciated.

Lately I've been leaching a few of the games available for free off the Gametap service. The way I understand it is that you pay for a subscription and then you can play any of the games available while that subscription lasts, but there are a few free games to try and entice new subscribers. It's not much of a pain. Logging in and working through the interface can take a minute or two, but that's not bad for some decent free games. Ads try to come up when I start a game, but fail for some reason, so I don't have to bother much with them.

The only thing that bugged me was an option (set by default) that downloaded enough to start playing, then downloaded the rest while you were playing. This bothered me, because I live in Australia, land of download limits, and a) it didn't show the full file size, b) I wanted to download during my off-peak download limit, and play without downloading during my peak limit. But I've sorted that out now.

So I've played a few games off Gametap so far:
Sam & Max: episode 4. I really love humerous adventure games like this, just need to find the full-season set on sale somewhere.
The cla$$ic arcade games, Metal Slug 1, 2 and X.
Second sight, A decent psychic 3rd-person action game (with a story!) that I'd never heard of before. Just think Star Wars with real guns & stealth, and you'll probably have a reasonable idea. Made by the same guys who make Timesplitters.
Mr. Robot, a 2D isometric puzzle-platformer with an RPG hacking system.
A few old fighting games, Samurai Showdown (seemed weak), and Last Blade (better, but sudden difficulty spike was a pain).
And now, Psychonauts.

In a while I'll start on Dues Ex and Hitman 1 (the sequels are available too). Tomb Raider Legends (I think) is also available, if I can spare the download. Of course, it's not all decent stuff. There's a lot of lousy-looking stuff that I'm afraid to touch.

I won't go all out with a detailed review, but I'll add a little note about Second Sight down here. They added one tiny little detail I found interesting. During one cutscene, a guard gets up from a computer, confronts the main character, and gets (unintentionally) killed. Then if you use the computer and one of the programs, you can see the guard was just having an IM conversation with his wife A happy conversation And now he's dead and since you logged on as him to see the conversation, she starts leaving more messages It's almost enough to make you feel guilty about all the killing. You could miss it easily enough, but it's such a creative little detail, I'd like to praise the developer for it.

In non-gaming related news, between my last two blogs, I bought a bunch more anime on sale and watched it, still waiting on some backorders, and also waiting for the anime I just ordered to be delivered, which was on sale, by the way, 50% for one day.

I won't go into details