Did you know the guy who wrote PuTTY also wrote a bunch of free puzzle games for Windows, Linux and Mac? The games, currently 27 in all, are freeware with sources available. The games include Minesweeper and Sudoku clones, as well as a few I’ve never seen before.

Whether you love puzzles, or just hate spending time productively, these games are definitely worth checking out. Try solving an enormous 30-vertex game of Untangle.

A 100m-deep hole opened up this morning in Guatemala and swallowed several houses. Let’s get a grenade in there!

Read the related Somethingawful thread here, where I think they made the same joke as me.

As if we didn’t have enough distractions already… 1up.com has complied a list of 101 freeware games. It has clones of Geometry Wars, Guitar Hero and even a Windows version of Armagedtron. Check it out!

edit: I got yelled at for playing Penumbra in class :p

If you recall, Peugeot announced their (annual?) concept car designing competition a few months ago, and accidentally let it slip that the winning entry would appear in the Project Gotham Racing 4. All mention of the then-unannounced game was quickly removed from the site, but not before we could all take that to be a pretty solid confirmation.

You can vote for your favorites at the Peugeot Design site. It makes you wonder how many concept cars will appear in PGR4, or if this one will look really out of place among a lineup of more normal-looking cars.

TechEBlog has a list of the top 5 most creative uses (yet) for the Wii remote. It’s got Youtube videos for each one. My favorite is the RC car controller, where the Wiimote is used to control a real-life excite-truck. Some clever engineers need to pick up some nunchuk attachments and some Lego Mindstorms and start making robots.

Here’s another little holiday distraction for you guys. I’ve been a fan of all the games at eyezmaze.com for a long time. This one seems a bit easier to brute-force but have a look around if you’ve never been there before.

Play-Nintendo.com has a bit of disappointing news. It seems the Wii game based on the enigmatic majesty of Bob Ross has been put on an indefinite hold. Apparently Bob Ross Inc. (did you know there was such a thing?) is still interested in pursuing video games as a medium for creeping people out with afros, but for now there’s no plan to make one on the Wii.

A lengthy article at the shamelessly-named Xbox 360 Fanboy describes how Halo 3 will hopefully fix the ages-old problem of weapon whoring. It also talks about Bungie’s clever solution to the problem of player identification in-game. My gamertag is plain english, so nobody has a problem reading it. …or on Live, should I say hopefully MOST people can read plain english?

No mention of the thing I’d most like to see changed: Let’s make map the melee to a button you can actually press while using the right thumbstick!

I saw a link to this article at GameDaily, so close to the anniversary of the 360 and on the eve of the PS3 and Wii’s releases, and I thought it would be one of those articles. You know, the type that counts down a bunch of things and then slaps you across the face with its number 1 spot. I clicked the link, ready to be outraged and see them call my beloved Xbox “lame”, but my fears were put to rest when I read it. This article pretty much hits the nail on the head. Virtual Boy, Gizmondo, and N-Gage are all present and accounted for.