Each Tuesday is game tuesday here at Ghacks and I list the most interesting games that I discovered throughout the week at my games blog Take9. I cover everything that I like which most likely means that it won’t attract a huge audience in the near future. So what you get is a good mixture of free game reviews and interesting or funny game videos.

You will find a high proportion of turn based strategy game, roleplaying game and Japanese shoot em up reviews over at the website. Oh yeah, and Gnome joined the team and is writing about things that he likes every now and then. The following four games can be played on the web directly if you have the flash plugin installed.

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I have created a new free games blog about a month ago - as you might know - and decided to post about the best articles of that website every Thursday here at Ghacks. If you want to check it out right now head over to Take 9 and make sure you subscribe to the RSS Feed if you like what you see. I write about games and related content that I personally like. This includes free browser games which make up about 60% of all posts plus freeware games that can be downloaded to the computer, game videos of upcoming interesting games and of course my two favorite video game reviewers Zero Punctuation and the Angry Video Game Nerd.

Gnome from The Random Gnome’s Lair joined today as an author which means that you will be able to enjoy his articles as well. I’m not sure what he will write about but it will definitely be cool and interesting. If you like to join as well let me know.

Please note that this is a free and fun project currently which means that no one will get paid (including me) because the site does not have advertisement at all. This might change in the future but for now it’s completely free.

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Just a day ago we have reported that Electronic Arts had plans to publish some of their upcoming PC blockbuster titles with a new Securom copy protection that would validate the game every ten days online. Failure to validate the game in that time period would have the effect that the game would not start until the user would start the game with an active Internet connection so that it could be validated.

It seems that the press coverage and outcry of the gaming community made EA change their minds. The games will now run perfectly fine after an initial online activation and additional checks will only be performed before downloading additional content for the game.

That’s definitely great news for the computer users who wanted to buy Mass Effect or Spore, the two affected titles, but could not ensure that they were able to authenticate the game every ten days to be able to continue playing it.

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How would you feel about a game that needs an active Internet connection to verify the serial number ? How about a game that would have to do that every ten days after installation to make sure the serial number was genuine ? How about a game that would stop working after another ten days if the serial number was not verified online? The latest Securom protection will be used in several of the upcoming games by publisher Electronic Arts including the games Mass Effect and Spore.

Technical Producer Derek French replied to a user thread on the Mass Effect Forum about the copy protection and activation the game would be using. I have several objections to this kind of protection although I understand that game makers and publishers want to make sure that they earn money from their games while keeping piracy to a minimum.

Users who do not have a permanent Internet connection will not be able to enjoy the game. The game has to be activated after installation giving the user nine days after installation to do so. It will stop working if it is not activated by then. A game will stop working if it cannot perform a check every ten days. If that does not happen the game will not run until the check has been made.

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No more games I said. And still, this one is just to good to pass on. I already wrote about it on my new games blog Take9 but since it’s relatively new I thought it would be ok to post about this game here at Ghacks as well. Typeracer is a game that you play in your browser. It worked surprisingly well in Firefox which is something that I have not expected.

The objective of Typeracer is to type faster than all the other players. Each race consists of a few sentences that have to be typed as fast as possible in a text field. Typing a word correctly moves your car a tad closer to the finish line. That pretty much sums the whole game up.

What I like about Typeracer is that you can start playing right away. No registration, no plugins, no downloads. That’s awesome. If you are a little bit shy you can practice at first and start a real race once you feel comfortable with the game mechanics.

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