blonde poker forum

Hi,
I am doing some research for my project that will take place in October in  London.
I wonder who does play computer games?

Are they very popular - me being complete technophobe who played a computer game on my atari 20 years ago have no idea if the computer games can be intellectually challenging?

How one measures what is cool in computer game and what is not cool.

I know there are some magazines and websites for computer game's fans but which one is the coolest and most cutting edge to visit?

I am having a big headache now as I need to talk with a potential sponsor for the event who happens to be a game producer and I need to either tell them to stuff it or give me loads of cash to put their game into my event.

Will the presence of the new game - and either a film that was made about making of the game will interest or alienate non playing public?

I went to the screening of the intro to the game and technically and visually this stuff looks just amazing, but I personally would not go and buy the game and spend 15 hours of my life to play it.

Any comments apprieciated.

I pretty much stick to the most popular game in the world. World of warcraft, who plays it?

Well the average age of someone in the game is 30+ and my guild is a 50/50 split between men/women.

I and most others I know don't care if a games cool or not tbh.

There's some popular magazines, but I'd say that online sites are by far more popular.  You get people from all over the world on them where as magazines tend to be country specific.

Some useful sites for you

http://www.jolt.co.uk/ - huge gaming community that caters for pretty much every game

www.clanbase.com - another community site but for clans/guilds that play against each other.  Clanbase is used to organise matches and holds ladders for them all. There are some amazing gamers on this site.

I like ping pong for my C64, hopefully in the next few years we will get a new machine I saw advertised in the local Kilmarnock newspaper, it is called the Sega Megadrive.  In the advertisment we were shown a blue hedgehog running around collecting hoops. Looks fun.  I imagine it will be a few years before we get anything that technically advanced up here though.

Sark, if you are interested I can get you a "prerelease" megadrive, which is really only meant to be for beta-testing. yours for a grand....

lol,  I will just wait for Woolworths to get the machine in .


Being serious Tantrum,  I like computer games a lot.  Sadly as you get older and have more commitments it becomes harder to find time to play them.  I used to love playing strategy games every day, but to really become good at those types of games requires hours of practice. It is no fun being second best. 

FYP

Hi Tantrum, the only game I play on my computer now is poker.. But, 6 months or so ago, I bought an arcade machine for my office.

It's a full size arcade cabinet thingy, and runs 4000+ arcade games from 1970 > 2000ish. Retro-tastic, it's got Space Invaders, Pac Man and all the classics on it.

My favourite games on it are Streetfighter 2 and Streetfighter 3.

I don't think I've played any game that's been released since 2000ish... Maybe a couple on the arcade or the poospee?..

LOL,  My best friends Kids beat me at computer games all the time .  I used to be good at them and now I can't understand why my brain won't tell my fingers to press the buttons on the controller fast enough  :D . It is old age I guess.  They can't beat me a car racing games just yet though, lol

Having not played computer games for ages, I gave into temptation & bought a wii and am totally addicted to it. We now have a regualr wii challenge night in the pub and all ages from 19 to 85 play 10 pin bowling and tennis on it.

No time since I discovered poker i'm afraid...

 my girlfriend wants a wii for her birthday , were moving into a new flat so i guess itll be a bit of fun.

 i got a PS3 a couple of days ago , ive only got a couple of games just now , Fight Night - boxing , The Godfather - shoot em up movie storyline , and Tiger Woods 2007 , the biggest games arent out for a couple of months yet , titles such as
  
 Grand Theft Auto 4 , Metal Gear Solid 4 , the new EA sports rang - football , rugby , basketball ,golf etc etc.

 The graphics and gameplay is unlike any other machine ive used and the machine itself is amazing.

 it is more like a multimedia workstation than a playstation.

 it has a 60 GB hard drive , to save games , photos , videos , movies , music etc etc onto.

 it is HD compatible , plays Blue Ray discs ( the new version of DVDs ) , wireless internet able or ethernet able.

 has Blue Tooth , Java , and the list goes on.

 thing is , i havent got a clue how to get into the nitty grutty with it yet , does anyone else have a PS3 ??

 how do you get the most out of your machine ?

gamespot.com is one of the biggest review/general gaming stuff sites around, might suit your purposes.

I'm just waiting for them to announce a World Series of Pro Evolution Soccer and then I'm going to clean up.

Got PS3 a few months back having had a PS2 for many years - usually only gets played on though when i'm not in the mood for playing poker or i've been to see babymonkey and dont have the time for an MTT afterwards.

May change when GTA4 comes out in a few months however :D

Counterstrike in between cash sessions. And yes i have a microphone lol  ;snoopy'sguns;

GTA4 has been delayed to next year  :'(

Cant' decide between the xbox360 and the ps3 at the moment.  A few of my mates have the xbox and it's great and I have a mate with the PS3 but he's the only one so there' won't be much online gaming going on with him.  I've never been a fan of the xbox controllers either but I just don't know.

I spend all my time playing poker anyway, don't really have time for non money making games at the moment.

Used to play a lot of Return to Castle Wolfenstien and Enemy Territory online.  Was in to the whole clan thing but since I found poker, it's all taken a back seat.

I have Xbox 360 and PS3... 

Xbox 360 wins hands down... Qty of games...  Can play online on 360 and not PS3 "yet"...

I have been playing Rainbow Six Vegas recently..  What a game.. !!  Reminds me of my holiday there in April..  I have managed to reach the level of "legend" at it, now just need to get to "Elite" to crack the game but a few months more yet...

Played an online game few yrs ago called Runescape, mainly kids play it, but also plenty of adults, lol... Anyways, managed to reach "Legend" status at that game too...

Does that qualify me for being "into" computer games??

You can also play online poker on the 360..!!!

used to be right into them, played Countersrike Mod for Half Life and Age of Empires a LOT, then I got a life, a girlfriend, then quickly went back to Counterstrike.

I used to play a lot of computer games a few years back. One in particular at that time was hugey popular which is a game called Counter Strike which still now 6 years on has a strong following.

There was a time back in that game when every team (usually involved 5 people playing together as either terrorists or counter terrorists against the another team) wanted to be rated highly in Clanbase. As time went on this site for one reason or another became uncool amongst the serious gamers. Why? Im not sure tbh, I suspect it was due to the rise in people cheating in clan base competitions.


The Jolt website Graham mentions is as he says, HUGE and I believe even years ago when I was in the scene the biggest gaming site in Europe. They just seemed to buy/absorb every major gaming forum there was. As a result of this it became so big that the community which had built up didnt feel as specialist any more and this also became a very uncool site amongst the serious gamers.
I was heavily involved in Jolt for a long time and was an admin for the game Counter Strike (basicly meant spotting and banning cheats from their public servers)

My point? No idea lol. I guess that if you are after a resource/site for finding out what current gamers consider to be cool then I would imagine the two above may not be the place to ask. The gaming communities are a very fickle bunch and moods/trends change frequently.


There is no doubt that this is a huge market, just look at Korea for whom gaming is considered a very popular spectator sport and many games have profesional players who make a good living from gaming and treat training/playing as a job. I assume that this trend will continue to expand to other countries as time goes on.

One site which used to be considered cool amongst CS players was http://www.ukcounterterrorist.com/ which a friend from one of my teams set up years ago as an April Fools joke once to take the micky out of an existing site. This was about 4 years ago and now the original site which was once considered cool is now totally dead and the new site appears to still be thriving.


World Of Warcraft (WoW) as others have said is played by over 9 million people world wide. I used to play this at a high level but the dedication and time needed became too much. 4-6 hours 5-7 days per week minumum was too much for me as the main "tank" in a top end guild they basicly could not do anything with out me because of the mechanics of the game.
People in WoW seem to be on the whole a nice bunch of people who are helpful to random strangers they encounter in their virtual world and their age being older than those who play CS means that as a possible market they would make more sense to target.  just google world of warcraft to find the home site which most players use the forum for.
For a "cool" WoW site google for "world of raids" as this used to be a good resource when I played.


In my old wow guild which had around 60 members there was a lot of them who had dabbled in one form or another in poker. if you could somehow link the two I would see it as a viable venture if you could work out a way to target the right people.

I also used to attend a "LAN party" which is basicly 1000+ geeks taking over the conference centre at Newbury race course every few months to play various games.
One of the things many people used to look forward to the most was the informal poker competitions each night. These used to attract upto 40 people I recall at one event years ago.

There is a definate relationship between gamers and online poker players.... finding it and exploiting/using it would not be easy though.

Best of luck, hope this vague info helps.


edit: damn my spelling and punctuation shows I used to play CS!

bummer thats winter 2007 ruined :( even more so when they keep releasing little tempters of information of how GTA4 is going to be different and better than previous GTA's!!

It's delayed till after 1st Feb (the start of that fiscal quarter for the publisher) but there's no new date announced yet, so may be much later.

yes, seen their official announcement of "Feb-Apr 2008" - looks like another 6 months on the poker tables it is.............

One of my company's clients is MCV which is a trade magazine for entertainment retailers.

If  you want to attract a sponsor it might be worth checking first whether MCV would be interested in doing a write  up of the event first.

I have no idea whether they would be because I don't know exactly how they work editorially - but it might be worth contacting them to see - http://www.mcvuk.com/contact (http://www.mcvuk.com/contact)

Counterstrike is like crack cocaine, I'm glad I don't have it any more.
I used to spraypaint walls in a black logo and just camp there, peeling them off with my big **** off sniper rifle. Wtf is wrong with camping? It's an art. I used smoke grenades also, but mostly at my own spawn point....

lol CS is awesome, I loved playing that, CS:Source is pretty nifty although I never really started properly in that.

If I didn't have to work, I'd be playing online games again.

Halo3 can't wait! Only thing that will get me away from WoW

I feel blessed that I never got into MMORPG, I know my life would end right there.
I did go through a large Battlefield 2 phase, the game is just magic. I still sit in a corner and snipe though........

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj8j6nYjIAg
(tikay caution: this video shows graphic footage of a train getting blown up)

please refrain from buying this game. It's like Counterstrike with a prefrontal cortex.

Yeah i'll second that, BF2 rocked, never have c4 and jeeps been put to such good use. Some great you tube vids came out of that game.

Next week sees the release of Bioshock, which according to reviews could be the greatest thing since Half-Life 2...

Looking forward to Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Portal, Team Fotress 2, Crysis and Call of Duty 4 too.

I was completely addicted to Everquest for about four years before briefly moving onto Camelot and then World of Warcraft before stumbling upon online poker.
THe massive online role-playing games are great fun and the average age of the players is a lot higher than you would initially expect.

Warhammer Online is going be absolutely massive when it's released, hopefully, early next year.

The PvP and realm interaction looks much better than WoW has to offer. Plus it has a 20 year user base in which to draw from, in the form of the Warhammer roleplaying series.

It's going to be everything Star Wars Galaxies should have been.

PS. The intro movies are some of the best 3D design available in a computer game.

PvP in WoW next year will be very much like DaOc Realm vs realm non instance fighting with siege weapons :P

still playing final fantasy 12,and dirge of cerberus,,,,,
still think that for gameplay in this series ff8 is the best

I got all excited and thought I could spend my Stars points on an Xbox 360, then I saw you need to be gold star :(

i'm still waiting for 'daley thompson's decathlon' online.

(http://www.preownedgames.co.uk/files/products-image-345.jpg)

Wow, interesting stuff.
I new somehow that posting my question on blonde would give me idea and some good resources about the whole bussiness of games.  I have checked the websites and wow, al lot of people out there who are into games.  Thanks so far for the helpful info.



I don't want to attract the sponsor, they are attracted to my event.  They product they have is The witcher - role playing game e3 or whatever.

Went to see the short film and the screener of the game and it looks pretty good.  In fact, on the big screen I was very amazed with the quality of the animation and the  SPFX
mcvuk has already printed the press release.  i wonder if i can get away in putting in my multimedia event a game and i won't come across as some weird geek, judging from the posts and other forums I can probably get away with that.

If any of you can have look at the trailers and tell me what you think about them I would be very grateful.

I use my PS3 for mainly 3 things. I play the odd round of baseball on it (MLB the Show) and Super Stardust HD (Asteroids on "roids").

The biggest use is for streaming video though. I download stuff from thepokerbay (cash games, tourneys etc) and instead of wathing it on my pc, i stream it over wireless to my PS3, and then view it on my flatscreen TV. Very hot, hehe.

I am a massive World Of Warcraft fan, i spend way more time on it than i should and it seems to have drowned my interest in poker,

I'm not into most of the games mentioned in this thread.  I play mainly sports game on my old ps2:

Pro Evo Soccer, Fight Night, Smash Court Tennis, Athens 2004, and Tiger Woods to name a few.

I got sucked into counterstrike source :/. I used to play it non stop last year lol, i still enjoy playing it a couple hours a day, i enjoy poker a lot more though ;o

I tried a few Halflife and Halflife 2 mods, including Science and Industry (ace), that weird one were you build loads of new things (Gary's mod?), but the best ever, even better than CS for me, was 'The Hidden' (http://www.hidden-source.com/)
Everyone is in one team with basic weapons, except one guy (last person to kill the Hidden), who is more or less invisible. You can hear him, see his blood when he's hit, see him splashing water, etc. When you're the hidden and trying to run around pigsticking people from behind.............pure gaming heaven.

I was ill for a while last year and out of circulatiion, introduced to runescape and was hooked, check out Briefly in the high scores and all but the latest quest completed.

Omg i used to play this game all the time, the only problem is, since its a mod its not very stable and tends to crash now and then.

i bought a ps3 last week, and got virtua tennis, motorstorm and resistance fall of man. What an awesome machine!!! jus so the ps3 didnt feel lonely i went and got a hd telly. Cant wait for pes 2008 the greatest game series known to man. And i am the king at it.  ;D

My favorite game at the moment is Civilization IV with the two expansion packs, Warlords, and Beyond The Sword. I like the way every game plays differently and that there's more than one way to win in the game.

I also like playing Rome: Total War. I like the way you really feel like you're part of an army taking on the Gaul's or however else stands in your way. The political element of the game, as you try to gain favor with the senate, and ultimately control over Rome itself, adds an interesting twist.

One game I'm really looking forward to it's release in the near furture is Spore by Maxis, who developed games such as Sim City and all it's spin offs. In spore, you start of as a single cell organism, and have to survive long enough to replicate. Eventually, if you play the game long enough, as you evolve, you develop a space faring race and can visit billions of new planets, interact with other races and experiment on other life forms.

I started playing Civilization IV two weeks ago. Haven't played online poker for 2 weeks.

Civ IV is -EV but great.

Agreed. You have the expansion packs? They make the game more balanced, especially with the improved democracy side of things.

No expansion packs and tbh having played the basic game I'd be a bit scared to buy them since I'm already wasting enough time on it!

Football Manager 2007 = No Poker for a long time

I really enjoy the long term strategy on these games.  I prefer to start with Non-League teams and see how far i can get.

Also Rome: Total War is another good longterm strategy game.
Not sure if you count this as a computer game but i used to play a lot of Magic Online as well.

Had some great times on the Commodore 64 and Amiga, couldnt believe it when I saw they were back...wow top pc!

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/4-/3436298/Commodore-G-Q6600-Gaming-PC-Black-+-Ckin-Of-Your-Choice/Product.html

I bought the civ boxset of 1-4 + expansions - was about £10 brand new from amazon.

I lost weeks to civ1, let alone the other 3...

We bought our son Harry (5) a Nintendo DS Lite for his Birthday.

Thank god for an R4DS ;)  (As games are £20!!)

Many a night I have been known to have the "odd go" on it when he is in bed. (When I say odd go, more like a few hours!!)

New Super Mario is my Fav atm.

The specs of my pc rape that lol

 ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated; ;frustrated;

Just found my old Steam password and reinstalled Counterstrike :( :( :(

Played 'Breakfloor' map, total utter genius, best map ever. Two teams, in rooms either side of a wall. Only way to get to other team is to shoot the floor blocks beneath you. Gaming heaven. Want my life back.

I have a Wii with pretty much every game. Play it now and then, whenever I want a short game of something. For serious gaming and graphics I resort to the PC. Command and conquer 3, driver, CS:source.

Wii for show, PC for in the know.

Played Quake 2/3 never made it to 4 as poker took over my pc time.
When i used to play quake 3, i used to play for at least 5/6 hours a day maybe even more.
playing in league games made Quake so good, the team play was amazing.
We took our clan from bottom div right to Div1in CCTF, where we got our asses whipped everytime but the guys at this level were awsome.
Great times!

For some reason I never find a first person shooter very immersive on a console. Maybe I'm just so used to the 'keyboard-WASD and mouse' over a handheld controller and also the screen being right in my face.

http://www.leechvideo.com/video/view2048455.html

Hopefully the PC vs Xbox 360 will be a reality soon. And I can show the xbox gamers that I am good at fps and it IS just becuase I'm not used to the controller.