So what’s the frugal gamer to do? In this article I want to briefly point out a few great ways to feed your hobby on a small scale budget.

All of the major consoles have services that allow for alternatives to $50+retail titles: Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, and Wii Ware. With prices ranging from $8 – $15 the selection is quite vast and as of late the quality of these games has really picked up. Usually you expect only a few hours of entertainment from an arcade title but multiplayer games like Battlefield 1943 can provide literally endless hours of gaming. In this post I’m going to list a few of the games I got for next to no money.

Not only has the variety and replayability improved, the quality of graphics and story telling has also been taken up a notch. Shadow Complex is a great example of an entertaining, great looking, and just plain fun game that is already being considered for Game of the Year awards, despite its low price tag.

Perhaps one of the greatest advantages of these arcade titles is the fact that you purchase them online and download the game directly to your console. Not only does it save time and allow for lower prices, there’s also a hidden benefit to this: contests and giveaways.

You see, it’s a lot easier and requires less effort for a developer to hand out redeemable codes to fansites, via Twitter, or other contests. A lot less hassle is involved when all you’re doing is emailing someone a 20 letter code instead of mailing them a DVD case. As a result there’s usually an abundance of giveaways going on at any given time. I myself have won two arcade games purely by watching my Twitter account at the right time (Duke Nukem 3D, and Turtles In Time RS). On the flipside, we’ve given away quite a few redeemable codes for Battlefield 1943 over at TuxMedia.

Recently Microsoft even added Indie Games to its marketplace for an even greater variety and even lower prices (we’re talking a cup of good coffee here).

PC gamers aren’t left in the cold either as Steam has emerged as the premier service for easily accessible, affordable, high quality games. I haven’t had much experience with it but have heard only good things. Please comment if you would like to share your experiences with Steam.

In summary, if your budget is low, one solution is to purchase arcade games, or if you are truly frugal and don’t mind doing some searching, with a little luck on your side you can get quite a bit of gaming for free.

I felt a little bad because it took me until yesterday to buy it myself but I’ve finally got it! I’ve only played one game so far, won the game 2-0 and also won 2 fights

So far it looks awesome and I can’t wait to start a club in EA’s online league and get some good gaming in! I’m just hoping now that I can get a one year Xbox Live Gold membership for Heekwon. I owe the guy!

NHL 09 Box Art

“Police said the victim had confronted the armed suspects and was shot. He was treated at the scene and transported to the University of Massachusetts Medical Center across the state line.”

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Got this in the mail the other day, brand new zBoard keyboards. Hooray!

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Spore is, at first glance, an evolution game: the player molds and guides a single-celled species across many generations, until it becomes intelligent, at which point the player begins molding and guiding a society into a spacefaring civilization. Spore’s main innovation, the basis of its scope and open-endedness, is that Wright has returned to procedural generation.

I personally can’t wait for this because it seems like it would be so different from every game I’ve played so far. Below is a 1 hour presentation from Will Wright that explains a lot about the game. Also check out the related links below.

Spore at Wikipedia
Spore Homepage

In the booming world of online poker, anyone can win. Especially with an autoplaying robot ace in the hole. Are you in, human?

It’s late one Wednesday afternoon, and CptPokr is logged on to PartyPoker.com and ready to play. Onscreen, the captain exudes a certain brash charisma – broad shoulders, immaculate brown hair, restless animatronic eyes. He looks like he should be playing synth in Kraftwerk. Instead, he is seated at a virtual table with nine other avatars, wagering on limit Texas hold ‘em.

There’s plenty at stake. An estimated 1.8 million gamblers around the world ante up for online poker every month. Last year, poker sites raked in an estimated $1.4 billion, an amount expected to double in 2005.

Ever since the aptly named accountant Chris Moneymaker parlayed a $40 Internet tournament buy-in into a $2.5 million championship at the World Series of Poker in 2003, card shark wannabes have been chasing their fantasies onto the Net. Some even quit their day jobs and try to make a living at online poker. And why not? This shadowy world is driven by no less a force than the great American dream. As the tournament’s motto goes, “Anyone can win.” There’s one problem, though, as CptPokr is about to demonstrate: The rules of the game are different online.

CptPokr is a robot. Unlike the other icons at the table, there is no human placing his bets and playing his cards. He is controlled by WinHoldEm, the first commercially available autoplaying poker software. Seat him at the table and he will apply strategy gleaned from decades of research. While carbon-based players munch Ding Dongs, yawn, guzzle beer, reply to email, take phone calls, and chat on IM, CptPokr (a pseudonym) is running the numbers so it will know, statistically, when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.