Some Other Gaming Blogs and News Feeds

Gaming is a popular topic. So there are lots of posts on many different gaming news feeds and blogs. This blog post is going to give you a view of some of my favorite sources of information that I use to be aware of the most current news concerning playing video games. Here we go!

There are many sources of information. Sometimes I watch a YouTube video and sometimes I find something interesting from Instagram or Facebook. This text is handling only blogs and other news sources. I am going to explain what is RSS feed and what is my favorite Feed Reader. I am going to give you some names and titles but I keep straight links out of this blog post. I am giving you an advice of where to find information but I think this blog is still your number one source. Why would I want you to move from my blog to another with a direct link?

I usually find my information from Feedly. You can get to know this powerful tool too. Just type feedly dot com and you will get to the login page. You can login with Google or Facebook or you can create your own username and password for feedly. You can search for different RSS feeds. Just to the menu that is on the left and select “Follow Websites…”. You can then add your favorite blogs that you discover. There is also a web app of feedly available.

Using feedly to read all your RSS feeds is my recommendation but it isn’t the only option available. You can track and search your feeds from anywhere on the web and just copy the link to their RSS feeds and add them to any RSS feed reader. I give some good suggestions of some of the blogs I follow. Some of these are in Finnish so I only give you ideas of blogs that I follow that are in English.

Mega Visions is a nice blog and also a website of a magazine. I don’t have a subscription but it is possible to get this magazine as a digital or a paper copy. Mega Visions provides news concerning especially SEGA games. Another feed I have in my list is a site called SEGA-16. It also concentrates on SEGA games as the heading title clearly indicates. I have also an interesting feed that I follow called The Psychology of Video Games. I also follow The Video Game Critic and VG247 which are very valuable resources for a gamer that wants to keep up to date with latest information.

The list goes on. I think I have also some feeds I follow on Facebook but lets get our listing from feedly to end. I follow also blogs: VGJUNK, that has stopped writing new posts but their older posts are readable, Wired.com gaming blog and RetroCollect. From Facebook some good sources are: Nintendo Life, PC Gamer, Indie Retro News, GT Planet and Gamerant. You can find more as you explore the contents and make searches through Facebook, Google and Feedly.

So I just gave you some, but not all, my sources. I definitely follow besides these lots of magazines written also in Finnish. I think there isn’t any direct magazine or blog that would give you all the information you need. So I think you must follow many different sources and make yourself a collection of RSS feeds or maybe links that you collect to some format. It makes it easier to follows the news that are most important to you. This was the post this time. I hope you learned something and got something out of reading this blog post.

I am going to go through the most important changes that have happened inside gaming from my birthday to this day. Back in 1984 we had already NES in some gamer’s living rooms. This wasn’t the first gaming device that I ever played. That place was conquered by PC. Computer games in the 80s might have had black and white or eight color graphics. Some games might have had 16 colors from which the graphics would be presented. The resolution was much lower than what we are used to today.

For games’ sounds there was only this horrible noise that was produced by the computers own speaker. In the 90s it was possible to buy a sound card for your PC and some gaming consoles, like Mega Drive, offered a better quality of sound. We were still far from a CD quality of sound effects and background and theme music. The quality of sound progressed as more and more and better consoles became available and as the technology advanced.

Getting the input from player has progressed. From keyboards, joysticks and simple controllers to game pads like Dual Sense and Xbox Elite. We have seen the beginning of real virtual experience. If you compare the controller that is seen in the related picture to the latest Dual Shock you really can see the difference. When the NES controller has only axis buttons and four other buttons my Dual Shock 4 has way more buttons. You really cannot compare these two in the means of human engineering.

What else has progressed? Designing games has taken major steps forward. Consider for example how much games like Doom and Diablo have influenced almost all types of video games. Besides bringing more technical advancements these games brought us some improvements in pure game design. Many games today have taken influences from role playing games. These features include developing and choosing a role or abilities to develop inside the game. You can gather experience and rare items that are able to be gathered by the player.

We have also seen how social media and internet have both made an impact. Did you at some time go to LAN parties? Well, I did. Haven’t been in those kinds of happenings in a while and this is also the trend as connectivity has increased so that you can get online almost everywhere in the world. Also the size of computers, mobile phones and consoles has been getting smaller all the time.

So if you would travel back to 80s you would see a different world. I think today we are dealing with lots of devices and activities that require more and more these skills that can probably be called something like “digital skills”. These skills include using social media and even marketing and using your visibility in your own advance and in collaboration with your friends and people also that you work with. We are all connected together and there is huge amount of data moving in these networks all the time. As some of us have combined sport activities to the new digital world I think that the amount spent exercising has decreased in overall.

Time will show in what direction we are moving. It has become clear that skills with internet, mobile devices, laptop and desktop computers and different kinds of networks are required. And so are also skills in teaching and providing a decent support for the final users of this technology. Big data has already made it’s impact on games that are actually gathering all kinds of data from within the game as the player makes its moves and progresses in the game.