[Gamasutra is teaming up with game criticism weblog Critical Distance to present Christopher Hyde’s round-up of the wealth of excellent games being produced outside the realm of ‘AAA’ titles in 2009, compiling his take on the best 99 free to download video games released this year.]This past year will go down for me personally as the year in which my spending on video games plummeted, due to personal dissatisfaction with the costs in money and time demanded by most of the AAA products out there on the shelves.To that end, I’ve since turned my eyes towards the burgeoning free games scene and to be honest what I’ve found is pretty darned spectacular. Creative talents all over the world are out there spinning out downloadable, browser, Flash and Unity games that you can while away enjoyable hours on without having it cost you one red cent.Now sure, you do need a computer as a platform, and might also sometimes have to suffer through some ads to get to the games. And you may even want to donate a few bucks to a budding game designer who has put his or her sweat equity out there for you to play at no…