I've heard the horror stories of people being addicted to MMORPGs where they wouldn't ever leave their computer and I've seen the the stereotype of the fat guy in a chair with a bag of cheetos and RC cola and I've lived up to just about all of that.
Ever since I dove into the Massively Multiplayer Online RPG Lord of the Rings Online I find it hard to stop playing. I've played other MMO's but just for small free trials for two weeks or so but never got too involved with them until I discovered an MMO within the Lord of the Rings universe which was very interesting and exciting for me.
Within the first two weeks of running around with my hobbit character I was instantly hooked. I soon realized some other games in my collection were getting neglected since I was so occupied with leveling up my character and questing around with friends. MMOs are so revolutionary how they are so interactive and open-ended, you can complete quests or just go exploring the world how/when you want to. The best way to describe this experience is to pretend you are playing an RPG like Final Fantasy but instead of your party members being controlled by you they are controlled by real people while you control your own character and you must all work and communicate together to take down enemies you come across or complete a simple "talk to this guy in the next town" quest. You can choose to be a solo adventurer if you want but it's always more enjoyable socializing and playing along with friends you know and help each other get through the game.
What's even more intriguing is how different each player can be so there is a large sense of uniqueness even amongst the other thousands of players. Within the specific ****your character can be (Archer, Thief, Guardian, Wizard, etc) there are also specifics traits within that you can choose to follow, for instance, a fire damage based wizard or an ice damage based wizard.
The sense of freedom, the variety of gameplay, social interaction and being able to be unique are just some features that make MMOs their own genre of video game.
As I played more and more I began to fully understand why people become so engrossed in these MMORPGs; the same reason I was: to be the best. After slaying countless Orcs and Goblins and exploring the Misty Mountains I was ready to take on bigger foes, foes that would require more than just a couple of my friends, foes that are only encountered in raids and instances that can require up to 24 people at once working together to take down a boss. The most memorable being the Balrog which if you remember from the movie it wasn't like the game. A simple, "you shall not pass" and a broken bridge didn't stop this Balrog. It was intense, it was a highly coordinated fight and luckily we could fight him again and again in later days to reap the benefits of the loot he dropped.
MMOs are always releasing more and more content for the users and are always expanding the world. Since my time playing Lord of the Rings 5 new regions were added which equalled more quests to be had and more enemies of Middle Earth to be slain.
Though I love to laugh at depictions of these "MMO addicts" for being at their computer and chowing on cheetos all day and all night I can definitely connect with them because I've been there, still doing it and still enjoying it everyday.

By classics I mean you oldies with the NES plugged in with that classic game Super Mario Bros still locked in. Ok, so you're not really an oldie if you grew up with those games but you still have a home court advantage when it comes to NES games like Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong or Duck Hunt.
At least that was my observation I had a couple weeks back when I was asked to return to some old ****games and play Mega Man 9 (new game, old flavor). Even though this game required 2 buttons to press and a four-way directional pad to control the blue bomber I found it much more difficult than any other games I have recently played that requires a whole keyboard and mouse or a controller with X,Y,R1,R2,L1,L2, Z and maybe even a C sometimes. After flailing around on the Jewel Man stage I finally gave up the controller to my older cousin that had a good 5-6 years plus of experience on these types of games over me where he almost seemlessly defeated the stage and got to the boss. Even my older brother managed to one-up me on this stage but if I was weilding an xbox controller I would bet I could beat them at Call of Duty or Gears of War. Does this extra exposure to the older ****games give the older generation that grew up with those games an advantage on the younger generation? Does playing Mega Man come natural to you while you may struggle for a bit on newer games? Do you feel at home in 2D worlds?
Given, if I had more time to practice with Mega Man I could have done a little better but with just about the same practice time I had as my brother did it seemed much easier for him to do anyway.
In the summer of '05 I had another first hand experience of this before when I went on my own journey to beat all the Legend of Zelda games in the series. After beating Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask on the Nintendo 64 I turned to my dusty (and slightly stained brown) NES to play the 2 original games of the series. To my surprise these were the most challenging of the two Zelda games to beat. Especially Legend of Zelda 2, if you've played that you can probably share my annoyance with Link's sword being just about the same size of his elvish ear.
Through my observations and own experiences I do believe the somewhat older generation that had a longer exposure to the NES will always have a slight advantage over younger generations even if they have played the NES before. Go back and play some old games and you will probably feel how the difficulty is much different to games today and you feel a lot more accomplished when you beat an old NES game as opposed to a Xbox 360 game. Plug in your NES or download them on your Nintendo Wii, (since it seems everyone in the world has one) they are releasing a lot of the classics onto WiiWare and prepare to shed some tears of frusteration.

Now that the beta for Call of Duty World at War is over and the real version is available now I thought I'd reflect on some time I spent playing in the beta and give you insight on what to expect in the multiplayer aspect of World at War.

Any fan of Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare multiplayer would probably all agree on how much they love it because you can customize your loadout of weapons, attachments, grenades and perks to make an avatar that reflects how you want to play so I was pretty stoked to see that in World at War all this has returned but in the WWII setting that we are all familiar with by now and a ton of new perks to choose from.

If you don't know, perks are different abilities you can choose for your character in multiplayer such as carring around a bazooka or satchel charges or being able to sprint longer distances or even being able to revive downed allies.  World at War has much more perks to choose from than Call of Duty 4 introduced and even has perks for vehicular combat which is also a newly added addition to World at War.

There are still the great amount of weapon attachments you can earn by completing the weapon challenges that include killing a certain amount of players with that weapon or how many headshots you can manage to make for even more experience points towards your rank.

You can rank up just as you could in Call of Duty 4 by completing challenges that unlock different perks and weapons and even more challenges you have the option to complete, so even though you may be happy with the loadout you have with your character you may need to tweak him a bit more after earning more perks, but just as in 4 you can only have three perks at a time plus one for your vehicle.

The three maps in World at War beta that were featured were very good, pretty small making for some intense close quarter battles and one map with 2 tanks, one on each side.

I don't want to judge any of the gameplay, after all it was just a beta but it played like Call of Duty 4 which is definetly not a disappointment and any fan of the series would enjoy this game especially any fan of the new customize system and a junkie for the classic WWII setting.

After playing the Left 4 Dead demo for a good week I thought I could drop some knowledge on what I think about it for anyone that's still shifty on wanting to pre-order it for the demo.

The short answer is: Get it.

Forget about any other zombie games or mods you have played because this one blows them out of the water. There's an easy-to-use server search option that you and your friends can use to easily join up and be blasting zombies in a matter of minutes. The game obviously shines when you have 3 other friends you can play with but if not friend only games soon become public games so if it was just you and one friend eventually others can hop on to help which is a lot better than having the other 2 characters AI controlled, but not to say the AI people are bad, they are very good and stick close to the group so the game never feels like an escort mission.

The demo is rather short but the difficulty can be changed for some added challenge and the new AI "Director" ensures every time you play the level something new will happen at random so the players are always in for a fresh experience each time they play. Depending on how you and your friends play the AI will adapt and items found throughout the level such as pipebombs, molotov cocktails, better weapons and health pills will always change locations. The "boss" zombies add strategy and tests you and your friends ability to work together in stressful situations, at random a smoker zombie can latch its long tongue around you or your friend and you must shoot the smoker to release your friend or maybe a rather fat zombie called "bomber" will spit on one of your allies attracting a horde of zombies to come after that person forcing you to hole up quick and help defend your friend. Everything can happen at random and I can go on and on about different scenarios I've encountered.

Although the demo is short you can play it many times without being bored and this game surely will not disappoint when fully released on November 18th.