You can enjoy some free old-school gaming in the new year thanks to some surprisingly free downloads on GOG.com. Entertaining and underrated shmup Tyrian 2000 is now available for free on GOG, along with seminal cyberpunk adventure game Beneath a Steel Sky. They’re joined by slightly obscure adventure game Lure of the Temptress and extremely obscure Polish adventure game Teenagent (featuring “Jokes that will never get old” and “Nice graphics and witty dialogs”). The adventure games have been in GOG’s library for some time, but Tyrian 2000 only just became free.

Like all other GOG downloads, these games are Windows-compatible and come with free supplemental materials like instruction manuals, soundtracks, and even wallpapers. GOG also has 250 of its games on sale for 30-50% off, including Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. Not bad things to do with your spare change.

You have three days left to get the best deal of the holiday season: some of the best indie PC games available for however much you want to pay, with ample opportunity to give to charity while doing so. The Humble Indie Bundle #2 is on sale, letting you pay any amount of money for 5 great indie games. If you pay more than the average donation (currently $7.47), you’ll get the Humble Indie Bundle #1 to boot! That’s 10 total games for less than $10, if that’s how much you want to give.

There’s good reason for paying $20, or $30, or even $50 for the bundle, though. The Humble Indie Bundle was put together to raise money for charities like Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and you can choose exactly how  much of your cash goes to the charities and how much goes to the developers. If you’ve ever wanted to put money toward some good causes while directly supporting independent game developers, this is your best bet.

Highlights of the bundle include old-school adventure with gorgeous art Machinarium, critically acclaimed (and admittedly pretentious and confusing) puzzle-platformer Braid, critically acclaimed physics-based puzzle game World of Goo, aquatic Metroidvania-style platformer Aquaria, and pants-wettingly scary Amnesia precursor Penumbra Overture. Every game is DRM-free, Mac- and Linux-compatible, and integratible into Steam. What are you waiting for?

(Also, consider donating to Child’s Play through the widget on the right side of the screen. Just two donors so far will get the wonder that will be our Street Fighter Rifftrax! Come on, good readers!)

I know, gimmicky ringtones are so 90′s. Still, there’s something awesome about Warhammer 40,000, its brutally psychotic universe (and equally psychotic fanbase), and the upcoming WH40K Space Marine FPS, Dark Millennium MMO, and Retribution expansion to the Dawn of War II RTS. It was the universe that inspired Starcraft, and fans have been waiting for non-RTS games worthy of the Warhammer 40,000 name.

To promote Space Marine, THQ is offering WH40K-themed ringtones. Submit your spam-bait email address (you have one just for things like this, right?) to honorguard.spacemarine.com, tell it your network/phone model (if you have a smartphone, just select generic SMS to get a text with a URL pointing you to a downloadable MP3), and get your ridiculously nerdy ringtones. Most free ringtone promotions are ridiculously skeevy, requiring you to text in a request to some number and automatically subscribing to some service you don’t want. Don’t worry; there’s no texting to mystery numbers, and besides email spam about Space Marine, you won’t get bugged about stuff.

You can have an Ork legion screaming their battle cry “WAAAGH!,” or a Space Marine contingent screaming “For the Emperor!” Sadly, there isn’t a ringtone of Chaos Space Marines screaming “Blood for the blood god!” Yet.

After months and months of Valve teasing us mercilessly with weeks-long previews of individual class updates to Team Fortress 2, they decided to suddenly dump a ton of new content into the game. There are several new pieces of equipment for the Soldier, Pyro, Scout, Sniper, and Spy, and if you collect all of the new equipment for each class and wear them at the same time you get a bonus. That’s the good news.

If you’ve been hankering for a bit of the old ultraviolence, this weekend Steam deal will satisfy. Serious Sam Gold Edition is available for just $10, 75% off the usual price of $40. It includes Serious Sam HD First and Second Encounters, plus the original versions of the games. The deal is good through September 27. Who needs stealth and cover when you have giant guns and headless screaming guys running at you?

Amanita Design, the developers of the critically acclaimed adventure/puzzle game Machinarium, are holding a “Pirate Amnesty” sale through August 12. For the next few days, the game will be available for just $5, 75% off its previous $20 price. The thought behind this is to pull in some of the people who have already pirated the DRM-free indie game with a great deal. If you’ve already pirated the game and still don’t want to drop $20 on it, you can legitimately purchase it for $5 and be certain that you supported a great indie developer in the process.

People, this is how you deal with piracy. Instead of introducing increasingly draconian measures that barely prevent people from pirating games and either inconveniences or enrages people who legitimately buy your games (I’m looking at you, Activision, EA, and Ubisoft), focus on appealing to gamers’ better nature and try to pull pirates toward legitimately buying your game.

Piracy is an unfortunate reality of software. It’s impossible to make a game completely pirate-proof, and to claim you have done so is inviting legions of extremely skilled code crackers to prove you wrong. You can lock down more and more features and require constant registration and authentication, but for every pirate you thwart in that manner you piss off at least ten people who actually paid for the game.

PSN is selling a bunch of great PS3 and PSP games for half off as part of its “Playstation Network Summer Sale.” 15 games in total are are available for half off until August 9, with five real stand-out titles. The notable games include:

• Fat Princess (PS3) – $7.49
• PixelJunk Shooter (PS3) – $7.49
• Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (PSP) – $14.99
• Lunar Silver Star Harmony (PSP) – $14.99
• Tetris (Both, Mini) – $4.99

Gamestop is running another “check out all of these games in the bins with bright red price tags” sales. This time they’re calling it their “Power Saver Sale,” and they’re offering pretty big discounts on a ton of games that don’t suck. Highlights include Assassin’s Creed 2 for $20, Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition for $40, Bayonetta for $30, God of War 3 for $30, 3D Dot Game Heroes for $30, and Monster Hunter Tri for $40.

If double-digit prices are too rich for your blood, the sale is also chopping a bunch of older titles’ prices in half, so you can pick up a three- or four-year-old game for pocket change. If you’d prefer to drop a Hamilton or less on a game, you can pick up Assassin’s Creed (PS3) or Dark Void for $10 (or Assassin’s Creed for $6.50 on the Xbox 360), Mercenaries 2 for $7.50 (Xbox 360) to $9 (PS3), Ninja Gaiden 2 for $8.50, Gears of War for $5, or Rainbow Six: Vegas for $3.

Steam is offering some pretty good deals this week on a handful of great games. The biggest one is season one of Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People, on sale for just $5 (normally $30). It’s got everything, from Dangeresque to Stinkoman. If Sam and Max or Monkey Island aren’t quite geeky enough for you, drop the Lincoln for this sweet pack of adventure games from Telltale Games.

Other notable discounted games include cowboy-themed third-person-shooter Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Old West, available at half off for $7.50, World War II strategy game Hearts of Iron II Complete for $12.49, and non-World War II strategy game Europa Universalis III Complete for $14.99. Not a bad haul for PC gamers.

Steam’s sale might be long past, but publishers are starting to get into the spirit of chopping prices on games in their own online stores for the summer. Both THQ and EA have announced summer sales that offer deep discounts on PC games.

First, EA will be offering regular weekend specials, with price cuts on a specific game or series every weekend. This weekend it’s Crysis and Crysis Warhead, now available for 50% off at $15 and $10.

Second, THQ is offering dozens of its games for 75% off. They span the last few years of PC gaming, but highlights include Metro 2033, Saint’s Row 2, Red Faction Guerrilla, and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II (including the Chaos Rising expansion pack). These are some great deals for PC gamers.