Some cherry-picked stuff from tech/games sites this week to save Slog's lazier geeks the trouble:

* Closure is the best free Flash game of the week. Hand-drawn white-on-black look with a clever gimmick—the world around you only exists if it's lit up. Try it. (ht Joystiq)

* There is a college course at UC Berkeley dedicated entirely to the art of competitive Starcraft. A student in the class is blogging about it:

40% of the final grade comes from the final project where students must attempt to make a new contribution to the StarCraft community in the form of an analysis of some part of the game. These final papers will be public and subject to peer review—no doubt incredibly merciless peer review, given the tone of most gaming communities.

See, it's not "flaming" when someone calls you an "Xbox fanboy faggot" on the Internet. It's peer review.

* The dude who made Braid recommends ten video games that you'll typically never see on a top-ten list. Some of them are free. All of them are strange (except for Ultima 4, the first RPG that actually took the words "role-playing" seriously).

If there had been a #11, I would've hoped for Bolo—arguably the first-ever network-multiplayer PC game. I attended a school whose computer lab had this thing networked for the nerds to play while they skipped lunch. Way better than sitting at the teacher table in the cafeteria.

* New-ish MMO Warhammer Online announced that it'll soon pump out big chunks of free content for the people who are still playing it. Having heard this news, I logged on—my account is apparently still active—and noticed the "massively multiplayer" portion of this game is missing. Shame. When WAR debuted, I could barely play the game thanks to graphics bugs; now that the thing runs smoothly, I have nobody to enjoy it with. Hell, I can find more players on Tabula Rasa, and that MMO's shutting down for good in three weeks.

* Generic preview videos: The February expansion to Grand Theft Auto 4, the Final Fantasy sequel coming out in 2010. Yawn.

* Better preview video: A base-jumping simulator called, no fooling, "AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!"

* And in Microsoft blunder news, the PC version of Gears of War stopped working on January 28th. Wait, what? Is 2009 a leap year, too?