Category: News & Trends

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Outspark’s Fiesta User Game Review

Fiesta is the game sweeping kids around the globe by storm. I interviewed a player to see what all the commotion was about. It seems she couldn’t pick just one feature about the game to be her favorite, but here are some she mentioned. First was that she liked to use it for chat and the second was because she feels it has good graphics. I must say as a gamer, graphics are a big part of liking a game; it’s all about how it looks.

 I asked her why she liked the game for chatting because there are plenty of ways to chat without a game being involved. She said none of her friends liked using AIM or other chat windows. Also her mother doesn’t want her to use them.

Next, I asked her, why do you buy enhancements that last under 30 days? (Mind you she spends real money on this) she answered 30 days is a long time to me and its only $5. Also I asked about marriage because I thought it was funny that characters would want to get married on a game. She said she doesn’t want to get married now, and didn’t say why others did it. All she said was that you have to pay for the marriage as well and the dress costs around $15 real dollars.

I then asked about hair coupons and what they do. She said the coupons are only $5 and they alloy you to change everything about your character’s face and you can even switch sexes. To close it up, I asked if a lot of people curse and what happens when they do, since this is a child’s game. She said there is cursing, but it is all blocked out and she doesn’t see it happen very often.

I hope you find this player review useful and can help you make a decision on whether to let your kids play the game.

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Left 4 Dead Game Review

Left 4 Dead is a fairly recent game that I have played and found to be a lot of fun. First off, the story line is that some disease has broken out and has infected everyone in the city, except for the four people that are being played by you and your friends. It is just like any other recent zombie movie, they aren’t dead they are infected. If you have see 28 Days Later, or Dawn of the Dead you know what I’m talking about.

Well anyway, you start out in a specified point with your pals and you are walking through the city trying to get to the extraction point. Along the way you encounter large hordes of zombies and sometimes you run into things like little bosses. They all do different things, for example, you have this giant fat character that has growths all over his body and his job is to throw up on you. This makes your life miserable and makes all the other zombies come after you. Along the way you find new guns and ammo, as well as improve your health. If you die, your friends can find you in locked rooms and can save you almost like saving someone that was stranded.

Don’’t fret, story mode isn’t the only thing you have to do, also there is a form of verses. This is composed of two teams infected and regular people ‘er rather victims. As a person, you have the same job as in the rest of the game, to survive and make it to the check point and finally to extraction. The job of the other team (the infected one) is to kill you, the regular people. When you are on the zombie team you are one of the boss characters.  And at certain point in the level you are on, you have the chance to be a tank which is the biggest baddest zombie -like an Arnold Schwarzenegger zombie.

I find the game to be great fun and it is not in the least bit scary because you know when the zombies are coming. I would say 14 and up could play this game and have a lot of fun with it. So check out Left 4 Dead.

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Teaching Your Kids About Piracy

I just found out this weekend that two of my kids had just started to download named star’s music from YouTube.com. They had found music videos and had used YouTube MP3 converter software, which they had downloaded free, to strip the music file from the video; essentially getting music for free. Yikes! Not only is downloading anything from the YouTube.com website a direct violation of YouTube’s terms of service, but it is plain and simple stealing song revenue from the artist.

I took immediate action and removed the software and removed the songs from their music players and computers. As I had a talk about piracy with all four of my kids and the reality of what could happen, some topics came up which I thought I would share as you consider if you should have this same talk with your kids.

1. They all said they did not know this was a violation on YouTube.com. I took time to show all four kids where to find the terms of use in the footer and encouraged them to always take time to read this before they assumed that they could do anything they wanted with the content.

2. One child asked “if is is illegal, why did the software maker create a program that allows people to do something illegal?” Well, that actually is a very good question, and truthfully I don’t know why YouTube and other sites don’t make a real effort to squash this type of free software. My question back to my kids was “just because you can, doesn’t make it right does it?”

I made a deal with my kids that I would help them buy music in a legitimate way and that music piracy keeps our favorite artist from making more music that we will love when we steal music from them. That’s what piracy is, it is stealing and our kids need to know that. For us music piracy simply does not match our family values.

Do you know how your kids are getting their music? If you haven’t asked, it’s time that you did. You may be as surprised as I was to find out that they thought what they were doing was okay.

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MySpace Vs Facebook

MySpace is a favorite for most high school kids. I was there once but now that I am in college I seem to use MySpace less and less and spend most of my time on Facebook. I used to like MySpace because you could have a fancy background and put your favorite songs on your page.

As I have come to see, it is MySpace that’s struggling to keep up with Facebook, especially in the games and application department. Facebook has always had games and cool features, but when I first made an account on Facebook back in the 11th grade I found it to be more complicated and confusing and stuck with Myspace. But I could only notice that less and less of my friends were using MySpace and had all moved to Facebook. So I made the move as well.

Once I got used to Facebook I noticed all the great features that MySpace was lacking such as, the easy to use chat window and the ability to tag photos of friends. MySpace has tagging photos available now, but it doesn’t matter I never use MySpace.

Also Facebook had entertaining little games you could play like Mob Wars and Speed Racing. When I made the move to Facebook I found so many more people I knew because they were older and didn’t use MySpace. All the kids I knew that went off to college were on there. Adults like family members were on Facebook as well.

I think my favorite tool on Facebook is the networking tool I used it to join my college network and it helps me find people I know that also attend my school. And now you can put your favorite songs on Facebook just like MySpace, so it is all around better in my eyes.