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Parents & Young Adults Guide to Gaming Careers – eSports Professionals (Pros)

April 12, 2021 Guides

When we consider the power of gaming one of the things we don’t consider often is its ability to be extremely inclusive and allow for a wide swath of people from the full spectrum of socioeconomic statuses to enter into a video gaming career. Due to the nonstandard approach and ease of entry into the streaming space and just playing, becoming a professional eSports player is “easier” than ever. “Easier” of course being in quotations because it’s not “easy” as in you can just start day one and begin as a professional eSports player. No, the “easy” part is the materials for getting started. The rest of it is up to the skills of a player. You, your child or your young adult may be interested in being an eSports professional. Wearing a jersey, being on stage in front of a large crowd (or viewers at home) and basking in…

SMITE How to Win at Arena Guide 2022

January 1, 2022 Guides

The SMITE Arena is the 5 v 5 single lane brawl, except unlike most ARAM modes you can pick any hero and build any team. It’s a ton of fun because it removes the jungle, multiple lanes and other mechanics and brings it down to an all out brawl of the gods in an arena with the only other mechanic being buffs. This guide will explain how the mode works and how you can play smart to pull ahead and win. Titan Forged Studios (Hi-Rez) have a good tutorial video that explains the basics (above) but we go a bit more in detail. Check out our SMITE Tier List to help pick the best gods to win. How The Game Mode Works So each side picks five heroes. The game will generally suggest a mix of tanks and magic/physical damage, but you can configure your team however you want. Once…

Max all Confidants in Persona 5 / P5 Royal Without a Walkthrough and Work Towards 100%ing the Game Without Spoilers

March 24, 2023 Guides

Persona 5 / Persona 5 Royal (the updated “golden” version of P5) is an amazingly fun game and unlike Persona 3/4, it’s so much more forgiving in a lot of areas. If you want to play without a walkthrough, which makes the game boring and tedious to get through each day checking and if you mess up anywhere you’re off the boat, then this guide is for you. The problem is that it’s hard to play the game without a walkthrough, because the game is so large and there is so much to do. Here’s the deal – to be time efficient you should spoil the trophies / achievements to know how to get them, but that’s on your second playthrough. You have to have two playthroughs to 100% the game. Therefore you can play your first playthrough however you want to and if you don’t get everything that’s fine.…

Let’s Talk GameStop’s Impending Doom

January 18, 2020 Editorials

GameStop is the last vestige of brick and mortar electronic gaming stores. It is a business of acquisitions, claiming most other large competitors and merging them into the fold and is on every YouTube and blog’s “Top 10 Companies Soon to Pull a Blockbuster” for the last six months to a year or so. Are they right? Is GameStop about to go under? I honestly am not some kind of market wizard, I can’t say if their current plans will save them or not, but we can talk about what’s gotten them to this point, in context of video game sales (not the whole who bought who what when and where, lots of that is already out there). So this chart pretty much tells a very, very interesting story. The company went public in 2002 at around $10 USD a share. In 2002, we were still in the world of…

Community is the Reward in an MMO and We’ve Forgotten That

January 10, 2020 Editorials

The year was circa 2002. Ragnarok Online was getting long in the tooth and I was invited into a mystical world that existed only until 2005, which was Dark Age of Camelot. The entire game itself was I would argue harder than Dark Souls. Soloing anything was next to near impossible and leveling required a group and lots of patience. FFXI, while not my cup of tea, was in many ways similar and players have similar opinions. The point of the game, the success, came from community. Building community with like minded players who wanted to sit and chat and play a video game together was your reward. It wasn’t power. It wasn’t fame. It wasn’t prize money. It was friendship, something we’ve long long lost in online gaming. To level, you would have to have a stereotypical archetype group of a tank, healer and DPS. The tank could only…

I Miss Technology Cable Television like TechTV

December 14, 2019 Editorials

When I had cable as a young lad I would rush home and get to the television, a small heap of plastic, glass and clunky noises that was a combination VHS and TV. It was programmed to record DragonBall Z, Sailor Moon and ReBoot so that I wouldn’t have to worry about missing them when I got home from school. Both DBZ and ReBoot would often be on hiatus, meaning that there was nothing to watch and even when finished, there was still a lot of boring TV on at the time, yet there was sort of a nifty solution: TechTV Starting in 1998 I had a chance to watch something really neat – ZDTV, which would evolve later into TechTV. TechTV was a dedicated channel to everything the Internet, gaming and technology. It was like a tech magazine turned into a real life TV show. It’s where you could…

Monetization is Destroying Gaming YouTube and Gaming Video in General

December 7, 2019 Editorials

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have. Socrates Greed can ruin the nicest of things. We’re going to take a deep dive today in the history of YouTube and video sharing online and how monetization has completely ruined what was once an innocent form of expression and turned motivation away from passion and into greed. There was once a time when watching video on the Internet was difficult and nearly pointless to do, especially around the year 2000. The popular media format was “Real Media” which was a very high compression format that was “dial-up friendly.” You could fit a lot of video in a small file size in a very small resolution. Which, to be fair, 800×600 was the common high resolution display in those days, so a 320×240 video was nearly half the resolution of…

The Best Black Friday Deals are the Things You Would Buy Anyway

November 24, 2019 Editorials

Retailers manipulate us and that’s just something that we’ve grown accustomed to. From the primary staples being located in strategic isles in the grocery store to force you to walk past tempting deals all the way to manufactured sales pricing where items perpetually stay at some percent off to give the expectation of a “deal.” Black Friday is no different and it’s a song and dance that retailers use to get us to buy things that we shouldn’t. Here’s an example. I use a projector in my bedroom to watch television because I love the aesthetic. I use a rather low quality projector to add in some “fuzziness” to movies and video and makes it more “old school.” I have a 4K OLED TV in my living room and switching between it and the projector makes me appreciate the TV more and watching kung-fu movies at 720p is just really…

Youtubers Life Review

November 6, 2019 Reviews

The Movies, a business simulator, launched in November 8, 2005 and is still, today, played by an ongoing community who loves not only the fun of building your own movie studio but also the fun things you can do with the movie creation tools. YouTubers Life OMG! is, in so many ways, a modern streamlined version of The Movies, just without the animated movies built in. YouTubers Life takes you into the life of a burgeoning online video star who starts their career with a potato for a PC, mic, webcam and general setup while living with their parents and follows their career house to house as they expand their video making empire. Each video you produce allows you to choose cards to decide outcomes that impact the videos script, acting, editing and sound level. You then go in and edit the video, working in post-production to match scenes together…

Games Journalism is Evolving Back to the Community

October 31, 2019 Editorials

This is a difficult topic for me because I believe that games journalism is just such a weird thing to begin with. I’ve been writing in this industry now for over 15 years professionally, as in paid to write and it’s still hard for me to even consider myself a journalist. I’ve sourced stories, been featured on TV shows as someone who predicted World of Warcraft going free-to-play and in general have spent most of my time honestly just writing guides and covering games I liked. Here’s the thing, people look at the folks writing about games who do present themselves as journalists and pass some interesting judgements good and bad about their content, but these days it’s actually really hard as a text based site to matter to the marketing companies that are hired by developers and publishers unless you’re the mainstream media. It started back when video was…