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I've been saying for a week now that I'd write something about my thoughts as a new Mac user. But in all honesty, that would mostly involve pointing you to this Lifehacker post on the best free Mac downloads and saying "holy shit, Growl is the best thing ever."

And if you're a Mac user yourself, you probably already have those apps and knew that Growl rocked. And if you're not a Mac user, you're probably bitter and surly and muttering accusations of "fanboi" under your breath. (It's okay. I understand.)

Honestly, one of the greatest thing about getting a new computer isn't being able to be on one side or another of the epic Apple-versus-PC battle. It's that I can actually play video games again. (My old laptop's notion of "game" was my seeing if I could actually run two programs simultaneously.)

And while I purchased the Humble Indie Bundle a couple of months ago, I now actually have a chance to play the games that came with it.

A recap: The Humble Indie Bundle was the project of a group of indie game developers. A pay-what-you-want campaign, donations for the Humble Indie Bundle netted you the download of five video games (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) with the option of earmarking part of your donation to Child's Play or EFF. The games included 2D Boy's World of Goo, Frictional's Penumbra Overture, bit-Blot's Aquaria, Wolfire's Lugaru HD, Machinarium's Samarost 2 and Cryptic Sea's Gish. The "Humble Indie Bundle" was wildly successful, with almost 140,000 contributors shelling out over $1.2 million, over 30% of which was allocated to the charities. And in an act of "giving back," the developers of Penunbra Overture, Aquaria, Lugaru and Gish pledged to go open source.

Some praise: The guys from Wolfire Games are great. I chatted with co-founder Jeffrey Rosen back in May about opportunities for open source indie game startups (woohoo!).

And in my line of work, I'm a huge fan of the well-run-company-blog, and I must say, Wolfire Games blog is a must-read for anyone interested in gaming. As befitting the open source project, the blog is completely transparent about a lot of the programming decisions that are made (such as "Adding a health bar to Lugaru"). But the blog also provides great analysis of gaming in general (with arguably the best write-up of the new OnLive cloud-based gaming platform, for what it's worth).

Some reviews: Am I a fan of Wolfire? Well yes, for the sake of good blog writing and open source gaming, I sure am. But now, thanks to the beauty of my new Macbook, I can actually review Wolflire's, ya know, games. So I'm off to go play a ittle Lugaru (armed bunnies FTW). And I plan to review all the games from the Humble Indie Bundle this week here -- that's my excuse, at least, for spending my evenings gaming.

Audrey Watters


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Audrey Watters

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