The Magic: The Gathering collectible card game has been around a long time — more than 15 years, in fact. If you’ve never played it, now’s your chance to jump in — head here and enter your name, address and some other information, and Wizards of the Coast will send you a free deck of cards. The game is flexible and fun, and worth checking out (and of course, if you already play, you’ll likely have no objection to a stack of freebies).

The offer ends April 3.

The Watchmen movie is coming out in just a couple weeks, and of course there’s a full-fledged episodic tie-in game in the works for it.

But here’s something that fits in a little better with the movie’s 1980s setting: an old-style arcade brawler. Yes, you can choose from two of the old-school Minutemen, Nite Owl and Silk Spectre, and take to the means streets of Manhattan to bust some heads, fisticuffs-style. It’s not great, but it’s free!

Last week, “Battlestar Galactica” finally returned after a long hiatus that followed a gut-wrenching cliffhanger — and the premiere, if anything, was even more bleak.

For anyone unfamiliar with the series, it has taken the basic premise of the cheesy 1970s TV series — that the last scraps of humanity are on the run after being nearly wiped out by a race of robots — and turned it into one of the darkest, most compelling science fiction epics ever put to screen.

Not everyone likes it, or at least admits to liking it (my friend Danny made all manner of harrumphs and sniffing noises at the show even as he plowed through three seasons on DVD in the space of a month). Some are put off by the occasional spiritual angle the show takes, or its thinly veiled (but multifaceted) political statements. But fans of the show (like me) are anxiously awaiting the answers to a number of questions.

Some were answered in last week’s episode — the lingering mysetery of who the final humanoid Cylon model would be was cleared (and it wasn’t who most people expected, I think).  But even more were raised — how is it possible that some of the Cylons are who they are? Where is the fleet going to go now that they’ve found Earth to be a radioactive wasteland? What’s the deal with the planet’s inhabitants, who turned out to be something no one expected? And what the frak is up with Starbuck, anyway?

If all this seems a bit cryptic, it’s only because I don’t want to spoil too much for anyone who hasn’t followed the series. We’re in the home stretch, and there aren’t many episodes left. The first three and a half seasons are out on DVD, and  recent episodes are available online at SciFi.com — if the show sounds like it might be up your alley, I urge you to check it out.

The next episode airs Friday at 10 p.m. on the Sci Fi Channel. Please consider this post’s comments section a place to discuss the series (show newcomers beware of spoilers!).

(Image  from Movieweb.com.)

There’s a sale going on right now on Valve Software’s Steam service — 10 percent to 75 percent off all games. You can get gems like “BioShock” for $5, or just knock $10 off the price of “Fallout 3.”

The sale ends today.

PopCap Games’ fantastically addictive “Peggle Extreme” is now available for free through Valve Software’s Steam download service.

Originally released as a bonus with the PC version of Valve’s “The Orange Box” last year, this shortened edition of the game has a few visual elements that bump the original game’s kid-friendly rating up to Teen. But the gameplay is still the same — you fire balls from the top of the screen, trying to hit all the orange pegs in the playing field before your supply of balls runs out — do so and you move on to the next level.

(Image courtesy Valve)

So yeah, I’m way late on this. But what’re you gonna do? Read on down past the photo, I hope.

A few years ago there was an interesting experiment called “Savage: Battle for Newerth,” which mixed an online team-based first-person shooter with real-time strategy elements.

Most players on a given team select a warrior class and a weapon and would run around shooting each other, while one player on each team has an overall view of the battlefield and the ability to issue orders to the other players — help build this structure, attack this target, defend this location. This overseer can’t directly enforce their rule over the team, but they can deny a loose cannon the powerful weapon upgrades and higher-level classes that are the fruits of a team’s labor.

A while ago the developer, S2 Games, made it available for free. A while after that, they released a sequel, “Savage 2: A Tortured Soul.” And now, that game is free as well.

I haven’t played the second one, but the first one was pretty cool. And it can hardly get cheaper than free, can it? Both games are rated for Teens.

(Image from S2games.com)

Nine out of 10 times, anyway. According to a BBC article linked on GamePolitics.com, of the people who have sought treatment at the Smith & Jones Center for video game addiction in Amsterdam — a facility set up specifically to treat such addictions — around 90 percent were not addicted at all.

That figure comes from the center’s founder and head, Keith Bakker. GamePolitics quotes Bakker as per the article:

“These kids come in showing some kind of symptoms that are similar to other addictions and chemical dependencies.  But the more we work with these kids the less I believe we can call this addiction. What many of these kids need is their parents and their school teachers — this is a social problem. …

“Eighty per cent of the young people we see have been bullied at school and feel isolated. Many of the symptoms they have can be solved by going back to good old fashioned communication. …

“If I continue to call gaming an addiction it takes away the element of choice these people have.  It’s a complete shift in my thinking and also a shift in the thinking of my clinic and the way it treats these people.”

The full piece goes into greater detail. It’s interesting reading, whether you’re someone who believes game addiction is a real problem, or someone who doesn’t.

Some madman hacked Mario from the original “Super Mario Bros.” into a stage from “Mega Man 2,” and a player beat the stage and recorded the result for all to see. Check it out; it’s a bizarre sight.

With “Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3″ out now, this week’s free game seems only fitting.

Title: Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Developed by: Westwood Studios
Published by: Electronic Arts
For: Windows
ESRB rating: Teen

As Electronic Arts did with the original “C&C” when “Tiberium Wars” came out, so has it done with the original “Red Alert.”

This “C&C” sub-series is a campy alternate-history counterpoint to the campy sci-fi of the main series. The game opens with Albert Einstein going back in time to erase Adolf Hitler from history, thus preventing World War II as we know it, but opening the door for an even more devastating conflict between the Allies and the USSR.

You can play as the Allies or the Soviets, each side with its own self-contained story line and set of missions. the controls are simple (point and click with the mouse) the graphics are effective, if dated, and the game is still a lot of fun. And that’s to say nothing of the deliciously cheesy between-mission video sequences. Anyone who has played a real-time strategy game on PC should be familiar with how “Red Alert” works — players build bases and throw a variety of units against the defenses of an enemy base, in general, though some levels put you in control of a small force with an important objective.

“Red Alert 2″ got even weirder with its introduction of the crazy psychic Yuri, and the new third installment has the Soviets play turnabout by going back in time themselves to eliminate Einstein before he could build his machine. But this is where the bizarre sub-series got its start.

(Image from Mobygames.com)