FreeCiv, an Open Source 4X game based on the original Sid Meier’s Civilization, is now playable inside of HTML5-compatible browsers (such as Safari). In the game, you start with a single village and are charged with building it into a world-dominating nation through war, diplomacy, resource management and technological research.

If Adobe’s move to Creative Cloud only software rentals has you seeking alternatives to Photoshop, you can get some of that functionality back with BatchPhoto v3.7. This all-in-one photo manipulation tool from Bits&Coffee allows users to edit, resize, convert, watermark, and rename every image in the group with a single operation.

While some might question spending $50.00 (substantially cheaper than that from Amazon) on a user manual for a free software application, remember that sum represents just one month’s Adobe Creative Cloud subscription fee, so another way to look at it is that you’ve saved yourself hundreds of dollars a year by opting for the GIMP instead of Photoshop.

These aren’t old games updated for new devices, mind you. They’re Mac OS Classic games updated for OS X in their original pixelated glory. You don’t just play them, you celebrate them! For these are the games that kept the Macintosh alive during the dark, dark ’90s, games about defending castles, blowing up marching bands, and looking for love in all the wrong places.

Telltale Games (Back to the Future, The Walking Dead) has just announced The Wolf Among Us, based on the comic book Fables by Bill Willingham. Set before the start of the series, it casts the player as Bigby “The Big Bad” Wolf, one of many characters from fairy tales who have escaped into the modern world and live secretly in New York.

Adobe Creative Cloud membership will be US$49.99 per month. Sorry, but I won’t be signing up. I don’t rent software, at least not if I can help it. Pixelmator sells on the App Store for 20 bucks. If you need more power than that, the GIMP is free, and you can put up with a lot of learning curve climbing to save fifty bucks a month in rental fees. Forever. Or, at least I can.

It should be simple to be an evil overlord in retirement; you’re not bothering the general public (any more), so no one should bother you, right? Wrong. Your hordes of presumably ill-gotten gold have attracted legions of adventurers, and now you have to summon your minions to protect it in the forthcoming game Evilot by Syrenaica.

After almost 10 years of beta testing, Quicksilver finally announced “final” 1.0 status a few weeks back. Quicksilver is a launcher utility app (and a whole lot more, if you want it to be) for Mac OS X that gives you the ability to perform common, everyday tasks rapidly and efficiently.

First, to stave off disappointment, it seems Daedalic Entertainment’s The Night of the Rabbit isn’t, in fact, a video game version of Night of the Lepus. Instead of answering the question, “What happened that night science made its gravest mistake?” The Night of the Rabbit is an adventure game for Mac and PC that asks “What if magic truly did exist?”

This June will mark the third time I’ve attended E3 on behalf of AppleTell. The first time was E3 2011, when I mostly went to assist GamerTell with their Nintendo coverage, and to dig up whatever OS X or iOS material I could find. This year, I may have to pull some of the GamerTell staff over to help me out.