Salute Friend

While a new video game console can bring your family entertainment for many hours, picking the wrong one due to bad information can lead to serious disappointment. When you are shopping for a new game console, you may find it difficult as there are so many different options to choose from. There is misinformation everywhere, so the information you are looking for may prove difficult to find.

First off, here are some questions that you need to ask yourself and you should keep in mind while reading:

-What are the types of games that interest you?
Do you plan on buying an HDTV anytime soon or do you already have one?

Why dont we go over your financial situation so we can figure out what your budget is for it?

Which piques your interest the most, playing games with a group or the solo playing experience?
Do you currently have any of the old game systems?

There was a period in time where one could not find a game system that cost more. Fortunately, prices are lower now than at that time. Now priced at four hundred US dollars (it all depends on the model you plan on buying)this price is more comparable. Prices change constantly so chech the latest video games console prices online.

The Playstation 3 is more than another mere game console! It has the capability to be a Blu-Ray, CD, or DVD player; as well as; it can upgrade DVDs to HD. Blu-Ray is now the leading high-definition film format; thus, if you’ve got an HDTV but no HD movie player, a PS3 might be a great means of getting both your movie and your gaming needs met in just one place. Without an HDTV display, movies in Blu-ray format don’t provide any better quality. This feature doesn’t translate well for use with a standard definition set.

While the PS2 controller is nearly identical to it, this unique controller utilizes a motion sensing technology known as Sisaxis. The controller, which can be tilted in six different directions, is able to sense which of the directions to which it has been tilted. The results vary from game to game based on well this has been incorporated. Doing it well means you’ll gain lots of experience, doing it wrong means you’ll be nothing more than a problem. You need to keep in mind that the Sixasis controller is missing the vibration feature. The DualShock 3 controller with vibration will not be included with the new PS3’s, even though it has been released, until June 12, 2008.

You will find a lot of the same games for Xbox 360 and PS3.

The year was 1985. PC games were almost non existent. The personal computer itself was in its infant stages. The amount of memory you had in a PC was about 64K. PC games? Certainly there weren’t any PC games back then even worth playing, not with that kind of memory. Well, actually there was. If you had yourself a Radio Shack TRS 80, there was a game so popular that people who owned these computers couldn’t stop playing it. The game was called “San Francisco Earthquake - 1906″.

The game was to take place around the time of the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906. But the game itself was not really about the earthquake. Oh yes, it happens during the game, which only makes things that more difficult, but the main objective is to find your wife who has been kidnapped.

Played entirely in text mode, no graphics, you awake to find a note by your bedside that your wife has been kidnapped. You then receive a phone call with a ransom demand. Suddenly there is a terrible shaking and it hits. You’re now in the middle of the worst earthquake in San Francisco history and your wife has been kidnapped. What a way to start the day.

The game is played by issuing commands to the computer such as look, get, north, south, east, west (to move around) open, close, inventory and a number of other commands. There is a very limited help function that basically gives you the list of commands that you can use. The only graphics in the game, if you can call them graphics, occur whenever the aftershocks hit. The screen shakes a bit.

The game, in spite of it being pretty bare bones, was very hard. The number of puzzles you had to solve and items you had to get were numerous to say the least. Many times you would have to backtrack to a place you had been to before to pick up an item that only appears after you got another item or another aftershock hits.

For example. There is one part of the game where you reach a pile of rubble. You search through it but don’t find anything. So you move on. Later on during the game, another aftershock hits. If you think enough to go back to the pile of rubble, you will see that it had been disturbed and if you look closely enough you will now find an item that you didn’t see before.

You had to really think outside the box to play this game. There was no instruction manual and no clue book. For those of you who are programmers, you can figure out where everything is. The game was written in a combination of BASIC and Assembler Language. By printing out the source and object files, if you can read this stuff, you can figure out exactly the order for every item you need to find and where they are found.

The game was a real challenge. And while it didn’t have all the bells and whistles of the modern day PC games, it was far from boring.

Michael Russell Your Independent guide to PC Games