We are in that time of year which traditionally gives gamers a break. A break from the seemingly endless stream of high-profile, triple-A titles from the industry’s biggest publishers. Many use this time to catch up on their backlogs, like our friends over at SideQuesting. Others, whom I can only guess are younger gamers with a lot of free time on their hands, don’t really know what to play during this slow period. Maybe they use this time to get even better at [insert popular FPS here]?

It has given me a chance to take a step back and reflect on my habits as a gamer and how they relate to the industry as a whole. Video games have become increasingly disposable as entertainment. As soon as you finish one title (or more often than not, before you even get a chance to really dig into the game you just purchased), there are ten more waiting on the shelves vying for your hard earned cash.

Media coverage is all around us as citizens of the internet. The big gaming blogs generally can’t linger on any one title because they work in a medium that is only rewarded when things are kept fresh on their home page. That isn’t a dig at what they do, it is just the nature of the beast. Core gamers are more than happy to jump from game to game every week. I find this odd considering the cost of new games has been in the $35 to $60 range this entire console generation, and those price points are driven even higher with special editions.

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These 11 athletes are the best of the best. The pinnacle. The creme de la creme.

If there were such a thing as a video game athlete hall of fame, these guys would be the first ballot inductees. These are the athletes that are so good that when you face them, you throw your controller and call your little brother a cheater.

So with a minimum of further ado here they are the top 11 Video Game Athletes.

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What makes a gamer hardcore? What is the difference between a casual gamer and a hardcore gamer? These are the kind of questions that keep me up at night when I am not busy envisioning a T-Rex with Sharks for arms.

Ignoring my penchant for cryptozoology for a moment, it does seem like there is a lot of talk lately about the casual, core, and hardcore market. It seems as though every publisher and developer is worried about how to best appeal to each market. There are literally billions of dollars at stake.

But why would the rest of us care whether someone is a hardcore or a casual gamer? Shouldn’t we leave it to market researchers and corporate executives to worry about that kind of thing? If we are really gamers shouldn’t we be too busy playing games to worry about it? (more…)

To better understand and appreciate the significance of this landmark achievement I need to give you a little history.

Dad has owned every single Madden since the original Super Nintendo. The only year he didn’t get Madden was the year they didn’t release it for Playstation 1 (so he bought NFL Gameday). That is over 15 years of video game football. Every year we play, and every year his superior running game and knowledge of actual football is enough to grind me into a very fine powder.

15 years of him dominating and crushing my feeble football skills.

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The Sega Dreamcast was the greatest system that never really had a chance. When most systems die after a year and a half, it is because they are terrible systems with horrendous game libraries (see 32x, Atari Jaguar). The Dreamcast had arguably the greatest first 18 months of any console in history. The unfortunate thing is those 18 months were all we got.

Why did the Dreamcast die?

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