GigaOM

 The holidays and Black Friday are rapidly approaching. If you’re looking for video games to give your friends and loved ones, here’s a cheat sheet of must-have titles, categorized by giftee: for the hardcore gamers you know, for your family, and of course, for your high-tech industry colleagues: Continue »

If you obsessively played Desktop Tower Defense last year (and really, who didn’t?), you’ll love this news: Paul Preece, creator of that insanely viral real-time strategy classic, has a new game site: Casual Collective launches today, backed by $1 million in seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners. It’s the brainchild of Preece (who’s CEO) and co-founder David Scott, a fellow UK game developer. (Scott’s Flash Element TD is even more popular than DTD.)

The site comes with social network elements, an upgraded version of Desktop that now boasts a seductive multiplayer mode, and several new titles, perhaps the most promising of which is Minions, a team-based tank warfare game with charming graphics and gameplay reminiscent of Command and Conquer.

Speaking to me from Casual Collective’s offices in Redding, Preece told me the startup plans to add updates and new games every two weeks, in a bid to convert visitors into members. Like most casual game sites, revenue will primarily come from advertising, but it will also experiment with microtransactions, game upgrades and enhancements users can buy for cheap.

The Lightspeed funding was put together by Jeremy Liew, who first learned about Preece the way most of us did — a Desktop Tower Defense addiction. “I spent so many fricking hours on that game,” Liew told me. He believes the Casual Collective fits some of the major trends in Web 2.0 gaming — shorter development cycles with cheaper budgets, web distribution, and widgetization, so games can live outside their portal on other sites — which should carry it through today’s shaky financial straits. “We’re taking the long-term view here,” he said.

The seed funding should last them through 2010, Scott estimates, but says he thinks money should start rolling in a lot sooner. Given the Casual Collective founders’ track record, that’s a pretty safe bet. I certainly hope so, because there’s an indirect personal connection here: When I wrote about Desktop Tower Defense last year, Preece was still a Visual Basic programmer making games in his spare time — and pulling down monthly ad revenues in the high four-figure range. So when his boss read my GigaOM post, Preece told me then, “he was not a happy chappy,” and Preece was soon out of a programming job. But then again, now he’s a CEO, so he’s got that going for him.

Image credit: www.casualcollective.com.

Say you’re looking for the perfect place to watch the election results pour in tonight, but your living room seems too lonely, your favorite blog seems too impersonal, and (depending on how the vote goes) your neighborhood bar may break out into a fight.

How about a virtual world space, where you can follow and discuss the tally live with avatars from around the globe? Here’s a handy traveler’s guide for doing just that: Continue »

The denizens of Linden Lab’s virtual world Second Life are a passionate lot, so when the San Francisco company recently announced a steep purchase and maintenance fee increase on popular regions of their virtual land, sign-waving avatars were soon gathered outside Linden’s SL office, in protest. Some even set themselves on fire.

There have been protests like this throughout the world’s five-year history, but without a competing virtual world offering all the unique features of Second Life, angry customers have largely stayed put, despite their grumblings. Now, however, there is an increasingly viable alternative: OpenSim, an open-source platform for developing virtual worlds, that was, ironically, made possible after Linden Lab released its viewer code. Though still in beta mode, OpenSim has attracted developers with IBM, Microsoft, and numerous startups, so it’s bound to rapidly improve. Continue »