Video Games Information Center

World of Warcraft used to be my favorite past time until I started power leveling for some good money. Because of that and my past experience playing the game for 5 years, I was able to level quickly enough to keep customers rolling.

So you’re probably here wondering, “Okay, what can I do to power level my alliance character fast?”.

There’s a couple of important things you need to be able to power level fast but I’ve got a secret you can use incase you don’t have any of the qualities.

1 – Experience. I played the game ever since it’s open beta back in ‘04. I know each and every single quest for both the Alliance and the Horde. Because of that I was able to jump from quest to quest without alt tabbing or asking in the general chat for some help on where Mankrik’s Wife is.

2 – Pathing. What I call pathing is taking quests done in a specific pattern that allows you to optimize your time leveled. An addon called Quest Helper and others try to do this but they fail. Quest Helper gives you a route and pattern to take depending on the distance between the first quest, the completion point, and the next quest. Unfortunately that’s all wrong.

3 – Knowledge. Knowing which quests to do and quests not to do. If you’re the type of person who feels the need to do every single quest that comes your way then you’re out of luck. There are just some quests that are not worth doing when it comes to leveling extremely fast in WoW. I would consistently out level my friends and guild mates because they felt they leveled faster if they grinded. Quests with low drop rates are not worth doing.

So what can you do if you don’t meet the criteria above?

4 – Get an Addon Before I completely mastered power leveling on my own I used one addon that allowed me to make a living off lazy people or people who didn’t know how to level.

When choosing airline simulators for download, you need to be informed before you make the decision. here are some tips to help you make that informed decision.

* Consider the various aspects of your requirements. Before downloading, consider the availability of space for the total display, including the window display.
* Navigation displays and maps that are required for the flying.
* Are there going to be too many maps, displays and instruments to deal with, especially if you are a beginner? This will only frustrate the pilot and will not allow for the thrilling experience that you thought you were going to get from the flight simulator.
* Is there an updated weather system incorporated and a good view of your surroundings and where you want to be flying?
* Make sure that any flight manuals for airline simulators are detailed and comprehensive so that if you have any problems or questions about the download, you will be able to resolve them quickly and confidently.

Once you have actually downloaded a simulator, run the download list, recheck it for any faults and move step by step per the instructions in the manual. Every once in a while, you will find that it does not work. If this happens, please take the advice of a professional who will be able to walk you through the problems that you are having.

Possibly the best way to resolve any problems is to get involved in a flight simulator forum, where there are hundreds of experienced flight sim players. Also, there are numerous airline simulators addons, and you need to research each of these as well to get the most enjoyable experience possible.

Cooking Mama is the first game in a series that now consists of 3 cooking games and 1 gardening game. There are 76 recipes in this game, and the goal is to get a perfect grade on them all.

Mama is the chef that judges your performances and assigns your grades. Each recipe consists of several steps that are judged by Mama.

A perfect job on each step earns a grade of 100 and a gold medal. You also get bonus points for finishing a task before the timer reaches the halfway point. Do badly and Mama’s eyes burn like fire, but she helps you continue to the next task. A truly horrible performance results in no score at all.

Game Play

Your stylus becomes the perfect cooking tool. It slices meat, dices onion, spreads sauce, grates cheese, cracks eggs, and basically becomes the most useful kitchen tool in the world.

Each time you’re ready to complete a task you tap, scribble, or swipe using the stylus. Some recipes also ask you to blow into the microphone. This is fun and easy unless your Nintendo DSLite has seen better days.

For a truly horrible gaming experience, play this game on a console with a faulty touch screen or broken microphone. You’ll run screaming into the night. Before you get into this game, make sure your DS is up for the job.

The Good and the Bad

Cooking Mama is fun. I enjoy playing it alone or with my 4-year old niece. However, the game goes by pretty fast. There’s not much else to do after you’ve mastered all 76 recipes. On the other hand it takes awhile to master all of the recipes. I’ve had this game for awhile, and haven’t been able to score a perfect 100 on every recipe.

I play the game often because I want perfect 100s across the board. But if you don’t care about getting high grades, this game will present little replay value. Some players only care about unlocking all of the recipes. Once they’ve unlocked them all, they lose interest in the game.

It’s also worth noting that this game isn’t a multiplayer game. You can’t compete against friends to see who makes the best recipe. All you can do is send a demo to a friend’s DS so they can download and play it.

Looking Good

The game is colorful and fun to watch. The cartoon style graphics look good and go well with the mood of the game. Mama’s funny faces are amusing as well. She also speaks words of encouragement. When you do well she says “even better than mama”. She’s even a good sport when you fail by saying “don’t worry, mama will fix it”.

Pros

* Easy to complete recipes
* Fun good looking graphics
* 76 recipes in all
* Appropriate for all ages
* Takes time to perfect all recipes

Cons

* Low replay value after all recipes are perfected
* A few recipes contain too many tasks
* Some recipes are too repetitive

Over the years, video games have developed into a multi-billion dollar industry. Today’s games involve millions of hours of work and take years to produce. The music contained in these games, as well as older games, is an equal work of art that is often overlooked. Whereas movie soundtracks have been praised for years, until 2005 video game music was largely a curiosity outside Japan. It is only recently that concerts consisting solely of video game music, such as Play! A Video Game Symphony and Distant Worlds: Music From Final Fantasy, have sold thousands of tickets around the world.

Some games today are even marketed on the strength of their soundtracks’ primary composers. For example, the 2008 Xbox 360 game Lost Odyssey advertised in its pre-release commercials that its music was composed by legendary composer Nobuo Uematsu. Unfortunately, however, many game music composers and artists remain underappreciated compared to those involved with movie soundtracks.

With the increasing popularity of the Internet in the late 1990s, an online video game music community began to form. One of the first sites, VGMusic, offered and continues to offer strict MIDI sequences, largely of older (NES and SNES) consoles. Contributors to VGMusic sequence songs and then submit them for the world to listen.

By 1998, the community consisted largely of independent sites offering MIDI and Impulse Tracker (*.it) files. Some of these songs, which began to move towards “remixing” as it is known today, were mashups of 20 minutes of music from an entire game’s soundtrack. Searching for songs was a tedious task, because there were no one-stop sources for such remixes.

In 1999, OverClocked ReMix, a site that limited its postings through strict juding, was formed. Still popular today, the site has received contributions from hobbyists, aspiring artists, and professional composers such as Jeremy Soule. A panel of judges evaluates and votes on each submitted song, and at the time of this writing, fewer than 5% of submissions are posted.

Compos, or online competitions that challenge participants to produce the best songs, started to appear around 2000, but took a hit when the heavily vaunted Ultima Eternity competition folded. Later, live instrument recordings became popular, leading to the creation of Dwelling of Duels, a competition where at least one live instrument is required in a song. Each month, competitors are required to interpret a piece from a specific game or series, and members of the popular game music forum The Shizz vote for the winners.

Also popular early in the decade was VGMix, which was perhaps the first site that allowed composers to post music without judging. VGMix lived through three different iterations, but much of its music has been lost as a result of security violations. As of this writing, the site is currently in a state of disrepair, with many of its features broken and registration disabled.

One major contributor that helped bring a great deal of attention to game music was the Mid Atlantic Gamers’ Festival, or MAGFest. While MAGFest also involves thousands of people playing games with each other in a huge LAN party, as well as events geared towards game development and appreciation, game music has taken an increasingly larger role in the festival lately. Professional composers have attended, and OverClocked ReMix judges have convened a panel to discuss the site and its community.

The online game music remixing community has grown so large and has such a long history that participants have written hundreds of songs, moved from middle school to graduate school, and obtained jobs in the music industry. There is at least one instance where two remixers met through the Internet and later married.

As the game music community moves forward, several programmers and composers have teamed up to create a new resource, remixSite, which allows anyone to post video game originals or remixes for feedback. Because songs on remixSite are versioned, contributors can track their submissions across versions and help each other improve their musical abilities. This process of incremental improvement is hoped to move the game music community to even greater popularity and visibility.

As more and more companies use live instruments in their recordings and spend more production resources on games’ soundtracks, the future looks bright for game music. Anyone who has even a passing interest in gaming would be well-served to browse through what the game music community has to offer.

A recent study in a major neurology scientific journal noted that 10% of all video gamers are indeed addicted to playing these games. This obviously didn’t surprise many parents or teachers, and it hardly sent even a ripple of a shock wave into the video gaming software industry, as they are well aware of who their ideal consumers and clients are and have been aware of this for decades now. Still, one has to ask; If the average video gamer is addicted to playing, then what is the number associated with those who are actually part of online video gaming communities?

After all, those who are fully into playing are also discussing tactics, strategies, and even cheats with their friends online. And if you go and check out some of the forums of the gaming communities you will see players posts 100s if not 1000s of posts in discussing various games. It’s absolutely amazing.

Many of these folks are teens and young adults, but you’d be blown away by how many 40+ video gamers there are in these online groups. Many of the discussions are quite detailed and complex, and the strategies are nothing short of military scholars in discussing battle tactics of the civil war, WWII or modern day net-centric warfare exploits.

In viewing all this and thinking about it at length and dropping into random various online gamer communities, I’d say the addiction rates of these participants is probably nearly 75%. Of course, we will have to wait for empirical and research to back that up. Please consider all this.