Internet culture is in a permanent flux. There is no linear growth, neither up nor down. The only certainty is the steady rise, both in absolute and relative numbers of users outside of the West. This is the ‘cultural turn’ most Western Internet experts have yet to come to grips with, in particular with the declining importance of the English language and the rise of ‘intranets’ for Japanese, Chinese, etc. Against nostalgic characters that portray the Net as a medium in decline ever since the rise of commercialism, and eternal optimists, who present the Internet as a holy thing, ultimately connecting all human synapses, radical pragmatists (like me) emphasize the trade-offs, misuses and the development of applications such as wikis, P2P and weblogs that reshape the new media field. The main enemy of ‘net criticism’ still is the PR sales talk and the religious nature of most theory and educational material in the new media field. 

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