Gamasutra is teaming up with game criticism weblog Critical Distance to present Christopher Hyde's round-up of the wealth of excellent games being produced outside the realm of 'AAA' titles in 2009, compiling his take on the best 99 free to download video games released this year.

This past year will go down for me personally as the year in which my spending on video games plummeted, due to personal dissatisfaction with the costs in money and time demanded by most of the AAA products out there on the shelves.

To that end, I’ve since turned my eyes towards the burgeoning free games scene and to be honest what I’ve found is pretty darned spectacular. Creative talents all over the world are out there spinning out downloadable, browser, Flash and Unity games that you can while away enjoyable hours on without having it cost you one red cent.

Now sure, you do need a computer as a platform, and might also sometimes have to suffer through some ads to get to the games. And you may even want

Here’s a better model for year-end link lists: Only chose one link! I asked 18 of my favorite professionals to do just this, leaving the subject matter completely at their discretion. The format doesn’t solve the inevitable difference of taste issues between readers and linkers — one person’s trash is another person’s Titian – but it at least eliminates the impossible chore of having to rate 20 unrelated items. It also creates a list in which each link is special to someone. For me, that creates a year-end list worth reflection.

Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers...

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

Avatar imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent. In the film, a group of soldiers and scientists have set up shop...

Holly Pester is a performance poet currently working on a project with the Barry Museum in Manchester. I, raven, the is about the relationship between words and sound, and the title itself inevitably brings to mind Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, in which the refrain “Never More” reads increasingly, as the poem progresses, as less like words and more like sounds.

Pester’s poem attempts to capture the “shape of words” and as she reads, her mouth contorts into shapes. The result is a series of sounds from everyday life that seem disconnected from the actual meaning of the words. “The sound is a square” is a constant refrain, and Pester duly shapes her mouth like a square, producing a churned-up sound. Words rhyming or related in sound to square (such as war) are similarly chewed over and mangled. Pester says of the poem’s protagonist that he “is concerned with the physical world ”, while the sounds of the physical world invade the piece, with growls and pips emerging from Pester’s mouth th