Blog Posts by Mike Smith

Piggy banks: empty

The holiday season is but a memory -- and while it might be easy to take down the tree, the lights, and the stockings, tackling the credit card bill for all those goodies is likely to be a different story. What's a cash-strapped gamer to do in the meantime? Here's a few ways you can get your game on without further damaging your bank account.

Free online role-playing games

World of Warcraft might be hogging the headlines, but you don't need to fork
out its monthly fees for your dose of online gaming. Faced with
Warcraft's dominance of the market, many top online games have abandoned
their monthly fees, turning to microtransactions or graduated account
systems that'll let you pay whatever

Hello? McFly?

It's been a long time coming -- some two decades or more, in fact -- but Back to the Future is finally getting the video game treatment it deserves.

In truth, the Back to the Future movies all had their video games,
released roughly concurrently with the flicks back in the NES and
Genesis eras. But it's been almost twenty years since the last one, and
the movies, riding a wave of combined geek-chic and '80s nostalgia, are
hot property again.

So what better time to take gamers back to the century-hopping world of
Marty McFly, Doctor Emmett Brown, and the iconic, flux-capacitor-packing
Delorean that's become as recognizable as any of the film's human
stars?

In production at adventure

FishVille
Once upon a time, nearly all games were social.

With the exception of solo card games like Patience, for the vast majority of human history, if you wanted to play a game you'd need to sit down with a few like-minded comrades. All that changed with the coming of the
video game, and for a few decades gaming became more associated with
solitary fun.

But log on to Facebook, as around half of all Americans have, and you'll
realize the pendulum is swinging back the other way. Gaming's going
social all over again, led by a string of huge hits from top social game
developer Zynga. Although you might think these social-network
timewasters couldn't be more different from conventional gaming hits

Path of Go

Think chess is a bit of a challenge?

According to researchers at Microsoft, you ought to give Go a try.

Played with nothing more than a 19-by-19 grid and a set of black and white
stones, Go originated in East Asia well over two thousand years ago, and remains extremely popular today. Although the rules are very simple (it's similar to a Western game called Reversi or Othello), its
deceptive complexity has made creating a computer-controlled opponent a
major challenge.

Researchers at Microsoft, though, are convinced they've made a major breakthrough
with the release last month of Path of Go, an Xbox 360 version of the
game that offers an unprecedented challenge for novices and experts.

"It

DS: king

It's no secret that Nintendo's DS is something of a hit with consumers, but at the end of last year it crossed its biggest milestone yet.

Figures released today indicate over 47 million DS consoles have sold in the U.S. since its November 2004 debut, which -- according to Nintendo -- is good enough to make it the country's best-selling video game system of all time. The last sales numbers we saw on Sony's Playstation 2, the former record-holder, put it at 50 million units across all of North
America in 2009.

Nintendo also managed to find a positive spin on its declining Wii sales: the
console posted its third consecutive year of sales in excess of 7
million, a feat Nintendo says has been

CityVille: you're probably playing this, right now

Hang up your straw hat: city planning is the new farming. Or it is on Facebook, anyway.

Launched just a couple of months ago, Facebook smash CityVille is not just the
biggest game on the social networking platform, it's the biggest Facebook game ever.

CityVille averaged over 84 million monthly users this past weekend, which means
it's bigger than previous record-holder and Zynga stablemate FarmVille
ever was: the latter's high-water mark was 83.76 million users, a number
it recorded last March.

Though the games are superficially similar, sharing a common crop-tending
mechanic, CityVille's fields and barns are a literal and figurative
background to its central theme: building a bustling

The future is...a blurry Xbox pad

It's been a record-breaking year for the video game industry, but 2011 is lining up to be even bigger. But what games will be making headlines? Which consoles are set for success, and which are ready for replacement?
What'll we all be playing this time next year? We peered into our Yahoo!-issue standard crystal ball (purple, naturally), and here's what
we think the New Year will hold for game fans.

No new home consoles

The PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 are both still selling, and although the
Wii's slowed down, it still managed to post record numbers over the
Black Friday weekend. The typical five-year lifespan of a gaming console
is a thing of the past, and we're expecting Microsoft and

Achievement unlocked

While noble goals like losing weight, getting out of debt, and quitting smoking are popular New Year's resolutions, they're not much fun. Do
yourself a favor this year, and make a resolution that'll improve your enjoyment of your gaming time -- and be easy to keep, to boot.

Go achievement cold-turkey

Wait, what? Turn off those neat Xbox popups that give you that nice warm
feeling when you accomplish something in a game? How else are you going
to find out whether you or XMasterChiefX771 is better at Halo? Here's
the thing, see: it doesn't matter. Although the Xbox's achievement
system took the gaming world by storm when it launched, and has since
been imitated on every platform under the