Casual Monday -- Feed the World Edition

Another week has begun, tired though we are, and as you should expect by this point, we're here to offer you another free casual game for your entertainment pleasure. Our selection this week comes inspired by our Week End Podcast Roundup, directly from our sordid weekend of podcast listening and museum visiting (also that damned GTA4 piece in EGM has forced us into a solid week of obsessive Crackdown revisiting.)

Regardless! This week's game is of the text based type and it's called, "Free Rice." The concept is simple: you are given a word and you must match it with it's synonym, which is one of the four answers offered. It's a never-ending, multiple-choice, vocabulary test. But there's a catch! For every answer you get correct, www.freerice.com will donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program (a program that feeds people in some of the poorest parts of the world.) All in all, this is a good deal. Even furthermore, while you're answering questions correctly, there's a cartoon bowl of rice on the right side of the page filling up with your donations -- it's hard to deny the attraction of feeding folks who need food by playing a free game.

Is the game going to change your life? Probably not, but it may change someone elses -- and that's no joke. The totals they've achieved since launch are pretty impressive as far as changing the world goes -- they also inspire you to play this game, should you think your contribution isn't going to help that much. Now go help some people, and learn some SAT words ...in toto. Yeah, I said it.