Steve Anderson : End Game
Steve Anderson
The Video Store Guy
| The video game industry has gone from a mole hill to a mountain in no time flat, Chris DiMarco is your Sherpa as you endeavor to scale Mount “Everquest”

Longview IoT Boosts Energy and Wireless Efficiency

Some of the biggest challenges slowing down the adoption of IoT are security, efficient battery usage and optimized wireless communications.One company has...

Full Story »

Hallmark's Simple, Inexpensive Way to Boost Customer Satisfaction

In an effort to boost margins, companies often push more users to automated solutions such as FAQs, chatbots, voice bots and anything...

Full Story »

Huawei Places the World's First 5G VoNR Video Call

Huawei recently completed the world's first voice over NR (VoNR) call. The voice and video call service was made using two Huawei...

Full Story »

IGEL Advances Future of Work

IGEL is a provider of a next-gen edge OS for cloud workspaces. The company’s software products include IGEL OS, IGEL UD Pocket (UDP) and Universal...

Full Story »

Tata Communications and Cisco Collaborate on SD-WAN

Tata Communications and Cisco have extended their partnership to enable enterprises to transform their legacy network to a customized and secure multi-cloud...

Full Story »

How to Win the 50-Year-Old China Trade War

Today and this week in-fact is historic - the left and right in the U.S. agree that we have a major trade...

Full Story »

Extreme Elements Enables The Autonomous Enterprise

Extreme Networks just announced Extreme Elements which in-turn enables the autonomous network and subsequently the autonomous enterprise. In a dynamic webinar, Dan...

Full Story »

Will Steam's Big Picture Make PC Gaming The Next Big Console?

September 10, 2012

I admit, I was once a PC gamer. At the risk of dating myself, I was a PC gamer back in the days when knowing your way around a config.sys file wasn't just a smart idea, in many cases, it was a necessity. That's what really got me into console gaming; it was nice to know that you could just slap a game into the console and start it up and it would run. Red Ring of Death notwithstanding, that was the case.

Games Are King On Kickstarter

September 6, 2012

Kickstarter today revealed that, when it comes to things getting funded on their site, the absolute best category to be in if you want a completed project is video gaming. On average, more projects go from launched to funded in the video game category than any other, and that has some unexpected implications.

Kickstarter games have earned, between August 31 and the eight months preceding it have brought in $50 million across the category. By comparison, Film earned $42 million, and Design pulled in $40 million. But oddest of all, only last year, Kickstarter's video games category pulled in a comparatively meager $3.6 million.

The Future Of Gaming: Mobile Games, Fewer Gamers?

September 5, 2012

A new and unsettling survey was released from the NPD Group, and it's a survey that has some very disturbing implications for the gaming community in general. In that survey, the clear direction in gaming was going mobile...and there were fewer gamers out there in general.

The newest report from NPD Group suggests that there are 211.5 million gamers in the United States. Sounds great when you consider there may be about 300-odd million people total in the United States, but there's a problem. Turns out that number is down almost five percent from last year.

Is Skyrim's Hearthfire Just Another Horse Armor?

September 4, 2012

Today was the big release day for the new Skyrim expansion pack, Hearthfire, and not surprisingly, a lot of questions followed this one. Perhaps the biggest one, expressed as both wary trepidation and jaded cynicism was, it's not another Horse Armor, is it? So I took to Xbox Live with that thought in mind, dropped my 400 Xbox Live points and snagged a copy of Hearthfire with an eye toward answering the question.

Horse Armor, for those who don't remember the reference, refers to one of the first pieces of DLC for Oblivion, which was exactly what it sounds like: armor for a horse. It looked pretty, sure, but it didn't do much for the character, and the resulting outcry taught Bethesda a thing or two about doing DLC right.

Will Continuing Updates Break Gaming As We Know It?

September 3, 2012

While it would be easy to think that Labor Day would leave things kind of slack as far as news went, one item about the major upcoming release of Assassin's Creed III slipped out that may well make the whole gaming landscape a much, much different place to be in the future. The item in question was about new content, and the surprising rapidity with which it would arrive.

See, Ubisoft made the announcement about a new focus on multiplayer, saying that it would be somewhat different from the ordinary in both support from Ubisoft proper as well as in terms of its impact on the universe as a whole. While that sounds good, if vague, there's a more solid measure involved; Ubisoft is planning to release new challenges--and new content--every month for Assassin's Creed III.

That's a lot of content, make no mistake, but it also raises some questions about the nature of gaming as a whole. With the advent of downloadable content, indeed, we all liked the thought of getting in new content for our favorite games well after the fact.



Ever Want To Run Your Own Arcade?

August 30, 2012

The arcade, ladies and gentlemen, has seen better days. The rise of home consoles, of widespread network gaming, of significantly superior technology necessarily driving the prices up on full-size machinery to the point where huge prices have to be charged just to recoup the investment in any length of time...all of these have driven the arcade out of its former prominence. But now, it's looking to make a comeback thanks to the upcoming release of Arcadecraft.

Arcadecraft looks to show users the history of the arcade experience through a series of management decisions, as if the user him-, or her-, self were running an early 80s video arcade. You'll see the rise of the arcade, the disaster of the mid-eighties with the Nintendo Entertainment System first arrived, and then the resurgence in the early 90s.

How Much Does The Iranian Blizzard Disconnect Have To Do With Iran?

August 29, 2012

Normally, when reports start landing about a game being banned in some entire countries, the eyes of outraged gamers start looking at the government of that country in question. Sure, they usually swing back around to their own government as if in warning, but then they start looking at the country in question again. In the case of the recent discovery that battle.net, including World of Warcraft and Diablo 3, is inaccessible in Iran, the question may not be so much "What did Iran do?" so much as it is "What did the United States do?"

While some reports out of Iran suggested that Iran did the blocking, citing things like "mythology", "violence", and "revealing clothing"--those who wonder about the hypocrisy of forbidding violent video games in Iran are not at all alone--new reports from Blizzard itself suggest that Iran's bizarre cultural peccadilloes were really rather moot anyway, as the United States government forbade their doing business in those countries thanks to government sanctions.

Blizzard has even gone so far as to say that it cannot issue credits, or refunds, to those players who have already paid in, but will "happily lift these restrictions as soon as US law allows".

The issue, at least from the outside looking in, looks like nothing so much as a "you can't fire me; I quit!" exchange, with Iran insisting that it's dumping Blizzard over principle and Blizzard insisting it's all a legal matter. Meanwhile, right in the middle of the whole mess, are the consumers who want to get in and crank up a raid in their off hours, but are forbidden from doing so by a pair of dueling governments.





Xbox 360 Launches Election Hub--Makes Perfect Sense

August 28, 2012

It may come as a surprise to at least a few gamers out there, but the launch of the Xbox 360 Election Hub is now up and active. But will anyone be paying attention? There are actually good reasons to do so.

The Xbox 360 Election Hub will contain a wide variety of content, including interviews from the convention floor, information about voter registration for those who already haven't thanks to Rock the Vote, election news, daily polls from YouGov and more besides. As is commonly the case with Xbox 360, some of the content will be available to regular users, while large portions of it will be behind the Xbox Live paywall.

While many gamers may not think too much about their political leanings--and the content certainly isn't a help, the poll for today revolved around movies coming out this weekend and whether Lawless or The Possession was slated for a user's individual viewing this weekend, it's in their best interest to do so.



Can Guild Wars 2 Compete Against World of Warcraft?

August 27, 2012

Most any time a new MMO comes out, one of the first questions that's inevitably asked is, "Can it play against World of Warcraft?". The reason that question is as inevitable as it is, of course, is because pretty much every MMO that's come out in the last, oh, five years or so has been quickly outmatched by the wunderkind Blizzard rolled out. As for the answer, from the way the early going looks, it's a safe bet to say "it's got a chance."

How can we tell? While admittedly, there's only so much to go on--the game is technically just now active--the early indications suggest that something very big is going on in the land of Guild Wars 2.

First Ads In Games, Now Games In Ads

August 23, 2012

We discovered, not so long ago, that adding a few billboards to a racing game, or having a character break open a Coke machine to snag a few hit points, represented some big money for game companies. But what may well represent even bigger money is the converse: we've seen ads in games, and now Sony has just issued a patent to take advertising and turn it into a big game.

The basic concept goes like this: Sony has developed technology to use its hardware--the PS Eye, the Move, the Durashock, and the microphone--to interact with advertisements in such a way that the ads present what amount to mini-games. While the ad is running, users can play a game within the ad itself. One such example provided in the patent itself was using a Move controller to select a large button labeled "Buy" to order a pizza, and a second required a user to say the word "McDonalds" to end a McDonald's commercial.

For those trained in marketing, as I once was, opportunities start popping up in this particular concept like weeds after rain.



Featured Events