Video Game Appetizers No Longer Served (but please enjoy our many entrees...)

It has been sometime since we've had them, but no longer are they served. The menu has changed. Akin to a magazine, or rereading the same chapter of a book over and over, demo discs were for gamers what cassette tapes were to people in the 80's, short, limited selections that you were likely going to repeat. Repeat and enjoy. So let's all take a moment to remember something that hasn't been with us for some time now, but we probably haven't missed...yet.
Especially if you were a young adolescent in the late 90's-early 2000's, you had no income, and therefore little likelihood of any new games, Demo Discs were a treasure trove of possibility and gameplay. And we've lost something, I think, now that these samplers are an artifact of gaming's past. We play our games differently, both what we play and how, and I wonder if we've made it harder for smaller studios to get their games noticed when in this last generation of consoles, even my collection, is marked by a dearth of 2nd and 3rd party developers and case after case is marked by the title of some mega-conglomerate's flagship series. Have we really lost that much?

Seasonal Gamer: 10 Games to Play in the Colder Months

Not sure what games to play over your Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Winter break? Want to catch up on some older titles you may not have played through when they were contemporary? Do you need a very particular and abstract reason to play a game? If so, who are you and what enjoyment do you get out of video games?
I doubt I'm the only one who is apt to play more games when the cold months come around. In fact I hold a special kind of nostalgia for games during the holiday/winter months. Whether it was getting a specific title for Christmas or working through the final boss over college winter breaks, there are certain games that seem inseparable from the late fall to winter months; so much so that sometimes it just feels wrong playing them any other time of the year.
Being that it is now November, and that, for my part of the world, the landscape has turned rather brown and the morning air now threatens the first dusting of snow, I thought it might be fun to look at a list of games that seem right for the season. Let's not call them holiday games but...let's call them the Brown-White games, for the respective October to February months it would be most appropriate playing them.