Weekend Reading - August 4th

Posting these a little late tonight - I spent most of the day playing around with Linux Mint on my laptop while watching the Olympics. On to the links:

• Gamasutra: Steam sales: How deep discounts really affect your games
  Good read for those wondering how all of those $2 Steam games affect the greater gaming economy.
• Tom's Hardware: Soulja Boy Designs a Tablet: Superman Dat iPad?
  There are no words.
• Tom's Hardware: FreedomPop Gives Your iPod Touch Free 4G Data, Calling
  I don't have an iPod Touch (I use my phone now, and before that I had a crappy little Shuffle), but it's an interesting idea that at first glance would seem impossible.
• Nostalgic Gamer: Video Game Music
  Listen to some epic video game music.

The rest of the links can be found after the jump.

• Ars Technica: Good riddance: the death of online gaming's monthly subscription model
  A discussion on subscription-based games in the wake of SWTOR going F2P. I'm still a little leery about the free-to-play, pay-to-win system in a lot of games out there.
• Reddit: Ultimate SNES Gaming Machine
  Guy on Reddit builds a custom PC housed inside an old SNES console and turns it into the ultimate classic emulation machine.
• Reddit: A TL;DR version of steams rules
  A cliffs notes breakdown of the new Steam Subscriber Agreement from this past week. Ars Technica also did their own writeup, which you can find here.
• Penny Arcade Report: Tryst walks and talks like a knock-off, but the PC RTS still delivers fast-paced fun
  I loved SC2 (and really need to play it more), so this immediately looked interesting. The review makes it sound a lot better than the trailer would indicate, so I'm on the fence, but it might be worth a download.
• The Verge/Polygon: In 2012, men preserve the game of 1864
  A Polygon feature in their new "Open World" section covering non-video games. I'm a huge baseball fan, so this look at a historical-rules league was pretty interesting.

That's it for this week's links. If you've found something interesting this week, let me know in the comments and I might include it next week.