Raid Gaza! has the semblance of a casual shoot-em-up Flash game with its Indiana Jones-cribbed logo and stylish juxtaposition of bucolic Israeli fields snuggled up against a chockablock Palestinian Gaza Strip. Then you click "Go Raid 'Em!" and realize it's impossible to lose, as you wing missiles, Merkava tanks, F15I Eagle fighters, and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters at Gaza's untidy hodgepodge of circumscribed buildings and jumbled hovels.

The good news is, no one blew up the planet. The bad news is, Ziff Davis perennial Electronic Gaming Monthly (EGM) is gone and online property 1UP is now "functioning" less 30 to 40 of its best and brightest, as a subsidiary of UGO Entertainment. UGO's parent, Hearst Corporation, owns wide ranging properties like Popular Mechanics, A&E Entertainment, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, XM Satellite Radio, and O, The Oprah Magazine.

The console game Wii aficionados literally can't live without is now unofficially the top selling video game ever. That game would be Wii Sports, a hodgepodge of Mii-infested no-frills sports games that comes with every single Wii, desired or no.

Who wants scads of commercial PC games for free? No, I don't mean the kind you download illicitly, silly. I'm talking about older but as well a few newer games, including the occasional award-winner, that publishers have made available over the years and on the house.

World of Warcraft, Tetris, and the PlayStation 2 make strange bedfellows, but they each topped Nielsen's 2008 year-end scan of popular media trends in the U.S. World of Warcraft's a no-brainer on the PC games chart. But what about Alexey Pajitnov's twenty-some-year-old Tetris for mobiles? And are people really still playing the PS2?

What is it about the Wii and video games and screaming kids that fascinates us? I'd sure love to ask the 108,911 folks who've viewed the YouTube clip below.

The words "free" and "Xbox 360" are like J.D. Salinger and a gaggle of paparazzi -- never seen together. Still, Popular Science just invoked them with this curious bit of homebrew trickery that might (and having not tested it, I stress might) save you the $100 Microsoft hoodwinks consumers to pony up for its vanilla Xbox 360 USB wireless adapter.

How about an epic PC versus console gaming smackdown, in the tradition of end-of-year numbers lists?

Time's nearly up for 2008, so what's coming exclusive to PC gamers in 2009? Sequels, prequels, and plenty of stuff you've been hearing about for ages (The Sims 3, StarCraft 2, and Diablo 3, oh my!). So how about a few you maybe haven't?

Am I the only one smiling a hair less enthusiastically along with this year's top 10 lists? Know what I'm talking about? Scan the news sites and see for yourself. The feeds are bleeding numbers. "Top 10 Games of 2008," reads one. "Top 10 Controversies," teases another. Oh look, it's Braid! And there's LittleBigPlanet, cute and clumsy as a dangling button. Fallout 3, of course, full of ballistically bloody holiday cheer. And don't forget World of Goo, a startlingly clever little time-waster you probably haven't played but should.

How did Sony's PlayStation 3 solve an astrophysics puzzler? Easy: With a pallet full of sleek sable doppelgangers crunching the interstellar math in tandem.

There's a new game in town and it's called Second Life, but it's nothing to do with Linden Lab or its virtual alternate universe. Instead, it's all about songs. Songs you once heard, but probably haven't moshed to for years. Songs like Aerosmith's "Dream On" and David Bowie's "Suffragette City," Pat Benatar's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" and KISS's "Detroit Rock City." They've all been enjoying a kind of "second life" in recent years courtesy tap-and-strum rhythm rockers like Activision's Guitar Hero and MTV's Rock Band.