This week Chris Remo joins us to talk games, news and his strong, principled stance against piracy, Gamefaqs and murder. We also have a special hands-on look at the new Dungeons & Dragons Online free to play system and announce our GoG contest winners. You people are spoiled. Spoiled! If you want to submit a question or comment call in to our voicemail line at (612) 284-4563.

Shambling, directionless, single-minded creatures whose potency is measured not in individual quality but sheer population, zombies just never get old. I suppose we are all children of George Romero, and while cinema-buffs will talk about the racial overtones and subversive themes of Night of the Living Dead, what resonates with me is the apocalyptic isolation of rag-tag survivors against a world that wants to eat their brains.

In a way, I think that’s what video games are all about.

With the possible exception of Nazis, I have a tough time thinking of a more desirable antagonist for the imaginary violence I recreationally reap. I have said it before and I’ll say it again, as long as I have ammunition and artillery, I will fire my weapon straight and true into the zombie horde, and I will do so with maleficent glee. If I were forced to commit to a single vote on the topic of favorite gaming bad guys, zombies would be asked to slouch toward the podium to accept their award and then try to eat its metal brains.

While I'm not entirely sure what Canadians celebrate on Canada Day, I'm pretty sure America's Independence Day is about escaping from the machinations of an abusive king. Guess what. I've got a game about precisely that.

Queens is a painfully difficult but blissfully short platformer, in which you play as a queen thrown into a killing machine by her abusive king. As you attempt to escape, the king follows along, watching your struggles to escape a nearly inevitable death. You can die in all the standard platformer ways, and all of them send you right back to the beginning as the king's next bride, complete with a new appearance and name. It's both a cycle of abuse and a somewhat abusive mechanic. No ludo-narrative dissonance here!

Why You Should Check This Out: Because if you don't struggle to escape the king, you're going to end up like one of those lame commonwealth corpses, and the South Park guys will never make an over-the-top marionette movie about how awesome you are.

"But wait!" you scream at your monitor, "I'm a citizen of one of those commonwealth nations!"

Well then let me congratulate you on backing a country that took the somewhat more peaceful route. You guys were once part of a pretty swell empire too, so well done there. Perhaps you'd like to celebrate just how strangely disjointed the former British Empire has just about always been, but in a slightly more aloof manner? Well, luckily the BBC commissioned 1066 for just that (or somewhat similar) purpose!

1066 is a turn-based strategy game built in Flash, and playable either alone or against an opponent. Armies comprised of various medieval units face off in a combination of vulgarity and artistic flourish. Beyond movement, actions such as archer fire, charges, melee and taunting are built around mini-game mechanics that determine your action's efficacy.

Why You Should Check This Out: Not only is 1066 a fun, well-produced and challenging game, but it's also unabashedly educational in a way that doesn't skimp on the Flash-animated gore. You also get the bonus of never really being a true "bad guy," since all three factions ended up interbreeding to create what today we see as the modern Englishman. You can make your own calls as to which sport's hooligans are more like which original culture.

The forlorn bookworm to your left should be recognizable. That iconic mug belongs to Burgess Meredith playing the role of Henry Bemis, an antisocial sop who would rather live in the dominion of the printed word than interact with friends and family. In true Twilight Zone fashion, this fragile little man was driven to ruin through the very thing he prized most: quiet, uninterrupted solitude. His lust for a little slice of quiet and an endless stack of books left him the most lonely man on earth.

It’s not so much that Bemis was a terrible man as much as he was terribly busy. Skidding through the demands of work and home, juggling the twin weights of wife and boss, it’s a wonder anyone has time enough for the simple comforts that make the fabric of life so rewarding. There is hardly time enough in a day to work and comfortably fit in a few fleeting moments of relaxation. And really, what good is life without its occasional indulgences?

Like Bemis, I stand before a gulf of hedonism, a vibrant immediate future that is comprised entirely of glittering self-interest.

It is summer at last.

School is out and I have so many games to play.

I wish I could say I discovered Majesty nine years ago when it was released on the Mac and the PC. A mix of Dungeon Keeper and Age of Empires, it takes the standard fantasy RPG trappings and mixes them in with the interface and controls of an RTS. The end result is a blend of real-time base building on an overland map combined with heroes you recruit who level up, buy potions and learn new skills -- all without ever taking a direct order from you. A departure from the god-like power we expect from RTS games, these heroes are completely autonomous. The best you can do is place a bounty on a wandering Medusa and hope someone can be bothered to head over and deal with it.

Rather than micromanage your way to victory, you play the role of gardener trying to create the right conditions for your units to thrive. Drop a library so your mages can learn to spells, a market so your heroes can buy potions and even a blacksmith for them to buy better equipment if they have the coin. You have your own goals going into a given scenario, but often the biggest hurdle is just fighting off the hordes of enemies long enough to give your heroes the time and space they need to gain experience and buy new gear.

The primary joy in playing comes from watching as a given hero ventures out into the world and spends his first few battles running away before finally coming into his own. If you really want to foster some advancement, you can cast spells (with the right research and buildings) like lightening bolts and invisibility to increase their survivability. Of course, casting spells costs money, so building your kingdom and giving your tax collectors plenty to do is essential. Finding the right ecological blend of complimentary units also makes a difference as a cultist hero walks the lands planting poison plants that your rogues can use to make their weapons more deadly.

Majesty holds up surprisingly well considering its age. I’ve been playing on Windows XP and aside from a couple crashes and editing the registry to reduce the scroll speed, it’s been great. The interface is a bit large but it’s intuitive enough and even gives you a small window for tracking heroes while you build your kingdom. The original never got a ton of attention back in the day, but clearly there was enough interest in the brand as 1C Company is working on a sequel scheduled to come out later this year. You can grab the original Majesty along with the expansion from GamersGate for $9.99. Read on for more screenshots!

It's not a big tournament. By the standards of Magic's peak in 1999, it's average: The Sheraton Cambridge. A small ballroom. A banner for "Your Move Games," the hosting store from Sommerville, MA.

I'm embarrassingly old to be in the room -- over 30 -- and yet I sit stock still, sunglasses and baseball cap firmly planted, a flesh-slack face birthed from losing too much poker. We're drafting Urza Block -- a recent but complete expansion for Magic: The Gathering which relies heavily on artifacts. It's the most depraved expedition into my Magic addiction, leaving a pregnant wife at home to spend two days surrounded by fetid black T-Shirts. But it's exciting.

I lose miserably in the first round. But weeks later, the avatar of our local card shop, one Darwim Castle, will go on to draft a better deck based on the same ideas and win the Washington Pro Tour. As geek memories go, it's up there.

"OK Daddy, I'm playing this card."

Reverie snapped, the 1999 Sheraton Cambridge dissolves in a David Lynch soft-cut to my 2009 kitchen table. The card in question is "Giant Growth." It's a trick. My daughter has blocked my attacker with a pathetic Llanowar Elf, who is now hopped up on Hulk Juice, and will kill my sad little goblin without a thought. I mentally hit the fast forward button. I look up. Her hands, still unable to effectively manage a good fan, mangle the cards of the 9th Edition Starter Deck. A few inches above the pasteboard, her face is split by the grin reserved for triumphant children.

"Good game kiddo," I say, reaching across the table with an obligatory losers handshake. She tosses her cards to the table and leaps up, entering a sing-song choreographed victory "I won, Oh Yeah, Beat my dad, Oh yeah" dance straight from the tragic pages of an iCarly episode.

This is what Magic is supposed to be.

Little Red Riding Hood is a tale that's been buried beneath saccharine layers of denial over time, but the original fairy tale was dark and grisly. At it's core it's a story about a little girl who gets eaten by a wolf. If you'd forgotten about the brutality and despair of the tale, don't worry. The Path reminds you in short order.

It's a beautiful, innocent game with suffocating fear lurking underneath every surface. Screenshots and descriptions do not do this game justice; you really have to see it in motion to appreciate the atmosphere the artistic style brings to the table. Screen filters cover the game screen with mysterious markings like an old photograph that's cracked and aged with time. Running along the path to Grandma's house is serene, but disturbing. The innocent and haunting music keeps you constantly on edge, but off the path, it gets even worse. Of course, you're not supposed to stray from The Path …

The game amazingly subverts gameplay traditions, twisting the typical staples to keep you afraid of what's in the woods, yet insanely curious. To say anything more would cheapen it. It's not the most complicated and bulletpoint-featured game out there, but its mysterious nature makes it one hell of an experience.

If you're at all curious by now, just play it. It's $10 on Steam. Skip the McDonalds a couple of times and treat yourself to a gem. Just don't expect to get a good night's sleep afterwards.

Why You Should Check This Out: Mysterious, brutal and beautiful, this game tells a childhood story so dark it truly delivers the original spirit of the fairy tales, in all its grisly glory. It's a wonderful experience, full of the thrill of the unknown and the fear of the dark recesses that exist off the beaten path. If David Lynch made videogames, he'd start with something like The Path.

Demigod is basically dead to me. Along with it, Left 4 Dead, Halo 3 and basically every real time strategy game conceived by the hands of mortal men. It’s not that there is anything fundamentally wrong with these fine games nor their presentation of apocalyptically dysfunctional worlds, but that there exists a class of citizenry who have since taken control, and their tyranny seems immutable. They wield terrible and magical skills based on what I assume to be a contractual obligation with dark forces. I am no video game revolutionary, and I cede these multiverses to the superiority of their existing warring factions.

I realize that I could perhaps make a seven course meal of sour grapes — sour grapes crab puffs, followed by sour grape salad with a lovely balsamic vinaigrette dressing and then sour grape infused foie gras soaked in a lovely duck jus, etc — but despite my best efforts to be a better person, I remain stubbornly jealous and petulant when people are better at things than I am. This inferiority complex is compounded when people act in the ways that they tend to while online, which is to say like ill-cultured children.

As a less than elevated human being, the strongest factor in game abandonment for me is how far I’ve fallen behind the talent curve.

The recent release of Overlord II reminds me how fundamentally I enjoy playing the mirthful villain. A role I can never really take on in a game like KOTOR or Fallout where villainous actions tend to be sadistic or cruel in very concrete terms, the more whimsical and candy-coated my trip to the dark side, the happier I am.

This approach is defined by Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper, a classic PC game by any definition. I would have words with anyone who suggests that malevolence with comedic overtones has ever been quite so well explored. Pistols at dawn, I would say, and then in a very Dungeon Keeper fashion I would shoot them in the back, cackeling with glee as I waited for cavorting imps to drag their carcass to the graveyard. Casting the player in the role of an evil disembodied hand taked with creating an impervious and trap laden dungeon was, frankly, a stroke of genius. If I were to chart Peter Molyneaux’s career on graph paper, here is the mountain peak.

What helped to define and separate DK was that it did not put the player into the role of construction worker so much as architect. While creatures were not exactly autonomous, they would carry about their own mischief outside of direct intervention, even at times to the detriment of the player. The strategy of laying out an imposing and sophisticated dungeon became a critical foundation of the game, and one had to make sure that it was appropriately devised to serve many needs. At any moment, one had to manage their finances, make sure enemies were blocked out of sensitive areas, keep fighting minions separated and create easy access to key services. I suppose when you write it out like that, it can be hard to understand precisely why this is fun, but a dungeon shouldn't just be a big haphazard cavern. It should be a home; an evil home.

Embracing the pleasure of evil, and sometimes just taking a minute to slap an imp around for just no good reason at all, was a new and devilishly welcome exploration of gameplay. Though Bullfrog was folded a few years later and much of its staff sent to the pits to work on Harry Potter games (true) before the completion of DK 3, the original still stands apart, and is my Classic Game of the Week.

A first and casual glance at this week's release list might make it seem rather difficult to get particularly excited about anything. This first impression is wrong, and it is in fact very easy to get excited. I speak not of a Harry Potter game which will quiety generate a hojillion dollars of revenue, nor of whatever the hell BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger is. No, I speak of Trine, one of those wonderful games that comes out of nowhere to demand your attention.

I direct you to the Trine demo and I think there within you will find an adequate and comprehensive explanation of why this game is rightfully buzzworthy. I could perhaps unload a full cargo plane of adjectives and adverbs to describe its fine demo, but I will simply say that it is a beautiful exploration of a world I look forward to playing in for hours. It is part RPG, part puzzle game, part platformer, part physics-based interactive world, part side scroller and part action title. And it is instantly charming.

Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood could be worth a rental for interested parties, and I have no solid foundation for knowing what FUEL is but with so few racing games on the PC it's hard to begrudge any even half-hearted attempt. For me, however, it's all about the digital distribution of Trine to scratch that hard to reach action, puzzle, platformer, RPG hybrid itch.