My adventures in Video Games with a bit from the beginning

Since I spend way too much time (or too little) online playing games, escaping my reality for something that is addicting, I thought I should create a blog about it to make myself feel better about the lost time training my brain. The real world imposes limits on what we can do based on geography, money, social norms, and how ambitious we want to be in life. The gaming world imposes challenges of how fast you can build an army to conquer others, how to use your mind to solve complex puzzles, or how to team up with thousands or millions of others in massive online communities. The level of immersion in gaming varies but being a multibillion dollar industry every year the stakes get even bigger. My gaming started in the 80s with Nintendo, GameBoy and very basic computer games. I can remember as a kid when driving on vacation somewhere, you were lucky if you found a small electronic game that could play poker or solitaire. Today every cell phone has incredibly more advanced games, but cellphones weren't very popular,cheap or smaller than a brick back then. We do 'social gaming' connecting with others online or through gaming consoles connected to the internet which is huge. There are also a few games on Facebook that I enjoy playing and a lot of my friends play as well. At the moment I mostly play 'Sparta: War of Empires', 'Bushwhacker 2' and 'Angry Birds Friends'. There are many others that I play or have played but those are probably the most interesting to me at the moment.

Sparta is a typical castle game, where you build up your kingdom and then try to go out and raid other peoples castles. There are a lot of ways to customize your place, unit strategy and overall game play. There are also coalitions where you play on a team with other allies in a goal to be better protected and help each other out especially when attacked. The graphics in Sparta are great and I think that it has a good balance between what you can do if you play the game for free or if you are spending money to do things faster. You are not going to suddenly become like Hercules and dominate the game if you spend $10, you would really have to pay a lot to be unstoppable like him. There are different systems how you can build up your castle (Pantheon) in terms of city defense and overall civilization through signing agreements. Signing agreements allows you to either build new city buildings or train new units by signing an agreement with the people who train those particular units, and having them teach your warriors the skills that they need. Sparta is one of several cool free online games by a company called Plarium. Plarium has great a great customer service system in place and they say that they will respond within something like 24 hours but it is usually just a few hours if it is during their normal business hours, this is only an issue depending on where you live in the world. In-game Sparta rewards you by being someone who comes back everyday to play and by battle rewards from raids and fighting the Persian army. It is a game that you will build yourself up over time and the developers are adding new things to the game and also creating tournaments on occasion to add more rewards to keep you coming back. Today I leave you with a shot from one of my unit training screens, there will be much more to follow.