I'll start with a couple of interesting freeware titles...
A while ago I came across (but forgot to mention) Hidden and Dangerous which has been released as abandonware by it's commercial developers Illusion Softworks. Linux users will need Wine but other than that it's another free gift to the gaming community.
Another game to highlight is Clonk This freeware puzzle game seems full of potential. However I found the controls unintuitive and the tutorial rather unhelpful - I couldn't get past the second tutorial level! Still it was interesting and had a nice old school Amiga-ish feel to it. Again it's Windows only but should work with Wine.
I did a little article on IVAN the other day. It appears that IVAN development has stagnated but, no fear, the power of open source is here! The community created their own forum found at attnam.jconserv.net. There is an unofficial 0.60 version of IVAN as well as a fork called VLAD. Thanks to blogger user noIse for the tip on that one.
I had something else to rant about but I'll leave it until tomorrow just in case I have nothing else to talk about then. (It'll be a nice long rant!)
Music tip:
Moby - New York New York (Tocadisco NYPD Vocal)
Also it appears that the rss/atom feeds are only publishing old posts from Free Gamer. It should get fixed at some point before 2011. Thanks to Stefano Maffulli for pointing that out!