Wolfire is running a charity-driven pay-what-you-want deal for a bundle of awesome Indie Games. I have previously played two of the games in the bundle (World of Goo & Penumbra), and both of them are professional quality and easily worth $20 each. In fact, Penumbra is one of my all time favorite survival horror games. I highly recommend taking advantage of this awesome deal. Act soon though, it ends on May 11th.

The games, which support PC, Mac, & Linux are: World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, & Penumbra: Overture.

The Humble Indie Bundle is a unique kind of bundle that we are trying out.

Pay what you want. If you bought these five games separately, it would cost around $80 but we’re letting you set the price!

All of the games work great on Mac, Windows, and Linux. We didn’t want to leave anyone out.

There is no middle-man. You can rest assured that 100% of your purchase goes directly to the developers and non-profits as you specify (minus credit card fees).

We don’t use DRM. When you buy these games, they are yours. Feel free to play them without an internet connection, back them up, and install them on all of your Macs and PCs freely.

Your contribution supports the amazing Child’s Play charity and Electronic Frontier Foundation. By default, the amount is split equally between the seven participants (including Child’s Play and EFF), but you can tweak the split any way you’d like.

Buy the bundle at http://www.wolfire.com/humble

At last Blizzard has committed to a date! Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty will be hitting retail shelves on July 27th. Want to buy the game directly from Blizzard’s website? You will have to wait “shortly after retail launch” to buy directly from them. Pre-order now from Amazon or Gamestop and get a beta key (while supplies last).

“We’ve been looking forward to revisiting the StarCraft universe for many years, and we’re excited that the time for that is almost here,” said Mike Morhaime, CEO and cofounder of Blizzard Entertainment. “Thanks to our beta testers, we’re making great progress on the final stages of development, and we’ll be ready to welcome players all over the world to StarCraft II and the new Battle.net(R) in just a few months.”

It looks like I have some time to work on my skills (or lack thereof).

You can start your downloads now, but expect to wait a while for it to download. If anyone remembers the Halo 3 Beta, downloads were extremely slow due to everyone trying to download it at once. So go ahead and start those downloads now, and then come back here to watch Aisha Tyler get you primed and ready to play the beta.

What do you get when you pay $199 for an NES game?

Ubuntu has just released the newest version of its Linux distribution, 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”.  Lots of new features this time around. Some highlights include:

• A new “Me Menu” that directly incorporates Facebook, Twitter, Digg, and other services into the user interface
• New music player with Ubuntu One Music Store integrated.
• Ubuntu Software Centre 2.0 – a library for browsing, downloading and installing software
• GNOME 2.30 desktop system
• Uses Linux 2.6.32 kernel
• More features here.

Overall this is one of the biggest changes in Ubuntu in years. I have been using it for a few days and so far its great. Absolutely worth upgrading.