After reading Steshep’s article on casual gaming, I started thinking about how I truly feel about the casual gaming market, and what I think it does for both audiences (hardcore and casual).  After looking around forums and checking out the comments left at N4G it seems that casual gaming has almost reached Red Scare status.  Granted, there hasn’t been a head figure such as McCarthy to guide and dictate, but I feel like some gamers are afraid of it.

To quote one comment “Casual gaming is the apocalypse.”  This phrase here confuses me because this reader offered nothing other than his opinion (which he is entitled to) without offering any reasoning behind it.  Granted, his viewpoint is extreme and his trolling unnecessary, but his comment works for the next sentence.   Casual gaming is not the apocalypse, on the contrary, it’s merely the by product of a growing industry, and in the long run will benefit the hardcore audience. Read more… »

I miss the days of the arcade. Whenever I was a pre-teen, and even a teenager my parents would drag me to the mall so my mother could go shopping at JC Penny’s. Obviously I didn’t care much about clothes, so I would take a few of the dollar bills I could scrounge up around the house and head off to the arcade.

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As with any day in your life, you become hungry at some point.  Commonly you’re hungry right in the morning, which you satiate with 3 ½ bowls of Lucky Charms, then again at lunch with last night’s leftovers, then again at dinner time.  However, what happens when you have a game controller gripped firmly in your hands when you feel the rumble pack in your stomach start going crazy?  This is my plea for more foods to be made with us gamers in mind. Read more… »

Video Gamers as a whole need some sort of prize when they finish a game. After slugging 50+ hours into an RPG, or spending days sweating through an FPS, you may feel that a great ending to a game is mandatory, that you deserve something great for all your hard work. Well the truth is most of the time we don’t get one. Truth be told a lot of gamers probably don’t even make it to the end of the game.

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What does a high school bully, Spider-Man, a crime boss, and an immigrant all have in common? Not very much at all. If anything, the only similarity between them is that they all appear in sandbox titles ranging from “okay” to “extremely successful”. Bully: Scholarship Edition, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, Godfather II, and Grand Theft Auto IV are the top title in their style for the past couple of years, but why only these?

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Is it just me or is it almost impossible to get time to play games once you finish university?

It used to be the case that you’d have the large majority of the hours in the day to get some gaming in. But it seems the second you grab an hour or two in front of the couch, something prevents you from enjoying. Your boss calls you, your partner wants dinner, the dog wants a walk, something interrupts. It’s not the end of the world, but as games become more involved, and your life becomes more complicated, it’s just really difficult to boot up a console.

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I remember receiving wasted pieces of paper when I was a child in elementary school. Teachers handing out lists and lists of books they felt should be read and understood (without any professional guidance) to prepare us for the literary challenges of the upcoming year. Yeah right, like I’m going to spend my only quarter of freedom reading, of all thing. To be fair, now that I’m an adult, I love to read and do it as often as I can. Read more… »

There has been a ton of negative talk in the gaming industry in reaction to Nintendo’s “casual” marketing strategy. Titles like Wii Fit vastly appeal to the “common man”, and left hardcore gamers feeling like they were in the dust. Casual gaming rose from the ashes of freeware PC games (we all remember those long nights of Jezzball). With a target audience of “everyone”, how can you go wrong? Read more… »

I can admit that Grand Theft Auto IV did a variety of things well, but for a game that got such critical praise and so many perfect scores it baffles me how many elements or mechanics within the game are just plain bad, and how we as a gaming community are so quick to overlook them.
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Veteran gamers will remember a time in the distant past when there was no such thing as downloadable content. There were a few exceptions to the rule of course, with games like Total Annihilation supporting the ability to add extra playable units which were freely available for download from the developer’s website. Bearing in mind this was the year 1997, and internet-enabled consoles were probably a fanciful idea in some developer’s mind.

As PC gaming, and gaming in general became more mainstream, the concept of value-add slowly started to take root in the minds of games developers. Games like Unreal Tournament, released in 1998, were supported post-release by the developers, Epic Games, with downloadable content in the form of new maps and mutators. This free post-sales support business model proved quite successful for Epic, as they went on to create many more successful titles in the Unreal series, each receiving the same after-sales support treatment, resulting in sales enjoying increased longevity.

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In the sports and hobbies that everyone takes part in (gaming, football, movies), there are certain moments that define that activity for its participants.  Perhaps it’s watching Fight club for the first time, or watching Daigo pull off a full parry against Justin Wong for a last second victory (Seriously, watch it), whether the audience is watching, or playing, makes no difference. Their favorite activity is solidified by that single moment, making it theirs.

I know that you readers out there have experienced something like this, or close to it, and I wanted to share mine with you, and hopefully you will share yours with me, and the rest of the community here at Gamer Limit. Read more… »

For those of us outside the US, and some even still in, there’s always been a bane to our existence. That thorn in our side is otherwise known as Region Coding.

Arguably, one of the most aggravating forms of copy protection that has ever been introduced. Developed originally to prevent people from trying to use incompatible software with incompatible hardware, it evolved into simply a form of price discrimination. Publishers argued that people would be able to purchase software cheaply overseas, so developers and hardware makers decided to simply prevent their own customers from buying something they wanted. Read more… »