Funny thing is that I thought this July was going to be a slow, boring month. Always nice to be proven wrong every now and then. :)
Monkey Island resurrected in an awesome way
LucasArts waking up after a decade-long slumber, starts releasing their backlog
GOG.com continues to rock with titles I never expected
A new Mechwarrior is announced
Mechwarrior 4 becomes freeware
Makes me wonder what in the world could happen next? :D

MEchwarrior 4 now freeware? Where'd you hear this?f
edit - nm, shoulda looked at the previous page :p

A few posts ago:

And then there was much rejoicing.

love me some mechwarrior... i still have mechwarrior 2 disks, including clan ghost bear expansion (loooove the intro's on those two). I remember the original game, if this is a reboot of that, that's incredible as i loved the fact you could travel around the universe and take on missions you wanted, or follow a plot/mission.
MW4 was ok, a little arcadey for me, but I'll still give it a second run if its coming out free. Very stoked for this game.

No chance of MechWarrior 2 or 3 being freeware then?
Here's hoping GOG can get in on the action.

My memory isn't what it used to be. Was MW2 considered the best?
However I do remember StarSiege and getting hours of fun from that game (I still have a mouse mat somewhere that came free with it).

Mechwarrior 4 as freeware? Hallelujah! And yes I hope the other MWs end up on GOG as well. In fact, I don't know if anyone else here has heard this yet, but Catalyst obtained the rights to use the "Unseen" mechs again, so MW1 might even be able to turn up here!

I think it depends who you ask. Each game tweaked the gameplay in different ways, so it comes down to whether a person liked a particular set of changes or not. I prefer MW2, but that's where I entered the series.

Mechwarrior 3: Mercenaries is pretty high up for me. Generally though I just like stompy robots.

Evening Andy!
This is how bad my memory is... MW2 had a blue'ish box, MW3 had a red'ish box.
Don't expect anymore from me, I need a lie down now.

Hard to imagine any new sim-type games coming out anymore, but add this to the Descent games and it becomes reason to buy a good quality joystick and throttle again.
I can only imagine how out of stock on controllers every place is going to be when this game comes out, though, unless it's a total dud. Most places don't even carry more than one or two, usually cheap, and usually for consoles.

Mech 2 had a Mercenaries expansion, as did Mech 4. Both of the expansions had different characters than the original games. Mech 3's expansion was called Pirate's Moon or something, and kept the same cast of characters: the Damocles commandos (Connor Sinclair, Alan Matilla, Dominic Paine and Epona Rhi.)
I got into the series with the second game, and have played pretty much all of the ones that were released for PC since then. I think 3 is my favorite simply because I enjoyed blasting legs off all my enemies and then taking the intact torsos for salvage.
But Mech 4 Mercs is probably my second favorite. I know a lot of people say the Mech 4 engine was dumbed down, and I guess it kinda was. It was definitely a lot more of an action game as opposed to a sim, but I still found it a lot of fun, especially with all the Solaris matches.

The only thing that felt dumbed down to me, from MW3 to MW4, was the loss of the ability to control exactly where your arms were aimed with the mouse, while the torso could be bound to Q and E for twisting. Otherwise, the "simplified" mechlab felt more realistic to me. No more storage of hundreds of missiles in the thin legs of a Mad Dog; The restricted slots really fleshed out the individual mechs.
And as for this news: Heat level critical, shutdown aborted.