Ghostbusters:The Video Game Review

I was five years old during the summer of 1984 when Ghostbusters the movie was released. To a five year old, the Ghostbusters were the coolest guys in the world. I remember going on a family vacation that summer and begging my dad to turn up the radio anytime the theme song came on the radio. When the movie was released on VHS, my brothers and I watched the tape so many times we could repeat every line in the movie from beginning to end. When I first heard that a Ghostbusters game was in production and the story was being written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, that five [Read More]

Fallout 3 Director: Five Is Enough

Fallout 3’s downloadable content has been very successful. Each package has kept the spotlight pointed in Bethesdas direction well after the launch of the game in 2008. Keeping gamers focus on a single title for all these months is a big accomplishment, so why are they stopping at five?

Social Gaming: Network Cable Required

The idea of video games becoming a social experience has been a major staple of the current generation of consoles. Games like Rock Band and Wii Sports have broken the barriers of traditional gaming audiences and have friends and family of all ages lining up across couches everywhere to play games together. The integration of social networking tools into game consoles combined with the growing broadband adoption rate means that playing with friends is as easy as turning on your console. The majority of games released these days include some type of online multiplayer and co-op modes. The real question is, outside of the causal games, has all this massive multiplayer online madness really brought people together or is it pulling us further apart?

Netflix Streaming Video: Uncovering the Hidden Gems

The service offers hundreds of older movies but new releases are not usually available through the streaming video. Older movies are not a bad thing but most of the time when I think about renting a movie its because it just came out on DVD. Once I went through the list of movies I had never gotten around to renting the service lost its shine. I started considering scaling back my membership and writing off the Watch Instantly portion of Netflix as a wash. Then I got a gift that helped me find the hidden treasures the on demand library contained. My younger brother gave me a book titled “501 Must-See Movies”.

Achievements: Good or Bad?

When the Xbox360 launched back in 2005 it changed the way I play games. The console itself didn’t really change things, it was the introduction of achievement points. For anyone who has been under a rock for the last four years, achievements are points that players receive for completing game-specific challenges. These challenges range from finishing a level to winning a certain number of matches against other players on Xbox Live. Every retail Xbox360 game has 1,000 available points and every Xbox Live Arcade game has 200 possible points. When points are awarded for completing challenges they are added to a players Gamerscore. A Gamerscore is an accumulative number that represents all points that have been unlocked in every game that has been played by that person. I have to hand it to Microsoft, the way they incorporated this score was ingenious, a players Gamerscore is displayed underneath their name on their Gamercard. If you don’t know, Gamercards are name tags that represent each player on Xbox Live. Every person that someone plays with during a Xbox Live match is able to see this card. In a way, the score is like bragging about how many games someone has played or how good they are at games without having to say anything. If a player looks at another players score they are able to see what achievements that player has unlocked and it shows them every game that person has played. It sounds harmless but if you dig in a little deeper there is a dark side to achievements. That brings me back to how these meaningless digital trophies have changed the way I play games.