On January 29-30, while everybody was sleeping in peace, another world-shaking event took place:

The latest version of operating system from Microsoft - Windows Vista came into retail.

But let's look into this fact from the point of view of casual game fans and developers.

What comes to your mind when you hear about online games? Nice, little freebies with a game play that is a bit simpler than the heavyweight stuff you're used to download and install on your computer.

Most people believe that online games are something you can quickly play and quit. However, we've surfed a bunch of websites on the net and can surely state that there are much more ways web games can come in handy when you would never expect them to do.

"Casual games are stepping into a new era" - that was the talk at Casuality: Eaurope East this autumn. Easy and small games are growing up, getting bigger and thus, more complicated. Everybody gets tired of the simple gameplays and developers are seeking new ways to pique user's interest.

So, the recipe is simple: you pick a strategy game play from some serious big-boy game, wrap it up with eye-catching casual graphics and here you are - a strategy-simulator game in the "casual" wrapping.   

Several years ago what we saw in casual - balls, bubbles, boxes, jewels..."Match 3" games captured the attention of the people who browsed their favorite game developers' sites, or portals. What do we see now, in the beginning of 2007? The industry shaped up as a couple of huge companies who do not develop but sell games, and a couple of those who develop and sell through many different portals or just from own website; on the other side of the river we have a lot of small development studios and independent teams. Pretty hard business to survive, huh?

Now that you've got everything prepared for Xmas, and there's nothing else to be bought (except perhaps a couple of things that you always forget), all you have to do is sit and wait. You can check out our holiday selection of free online Xmas games. After playing them for a while, I could not resist to a magnificent effect each of them has: it kills time and at the same time makes the precious moment linger...

Christmas will be here in about a week... But, as an old friend of mine cleverly admitted, it's time to take care of gifts before you're lined in a row at a store on December 23 and 24.

So, I guess the best thing is to start hunting for gifts right now. We decided to start it for you and now we'd like to present you 7 extraordinary gift ideas. Each of them matches the following criteria:

1. You can get it without going out to the store;     

2. It'll help you make the coming Xmas different from all the previous ones.

If you have any more ideas, please contact us and we'll publish your Xmas ideas and mention it came from you.