Video Gaming Is Not A Couch Potato Sport Anymore

Nintendo 3DS ... The Nintendo 3DS was released in Japan on February 26, 2011; in Europe on March 25, 2011; in North America on March 27, 2011; and in Australia on March 31, 2011. On July 28, 2011, Nintendo announced a major price drop starting August 12...

Live Action Role-playing Game ... In 1981 the International Fantasy Gaming Society (IFGS) started, with rules influenced by Dungeons & Dragons...

Tapwave Zodiac ... The product was designed to be a "high performance mobile entertainment system” centred on games, music, images, and video, aimed at 18 to 34 year old gamers and technology enthusiasts. By running an enhanced version of the Palm Operating System (5.2T), Zodiac also provided access to Palm’s personal information management software and many other applications from the Palm developer community...

Online Text-based Role-playing Game ... Play-by-post and PBEM Play-by-post role-playing games or PBP RPGs refer to another type of text-based gaming... Such broad freedom of expression can easily be grossly abused, most often by new players unfamiliar with the mostly unwritten etiquette of the text-based gaming community... In addition to rules there is usually a universal set of mores and a terminology common to text-based role playing games, that more or less constitutes gaming etiquette...

North American Video Game Crash Of 1983 ... There were several reasons for the crash, but the main cause was supersaturation of the market with hundreds of mostly low-quality games which resulted in the loss of consumer confidence. The full effects of the industry crash would not be felt until 1984...

History Of Games ... The extinct Chinese board game liubo was immensely popular during the Han Dynasty (202 BCE-220 CE). Early Chinese records indicate that liubo was already a popular game by the Warring States Period (476 BCE – 221 BCE)...

History Of Video Game Consoles (sixth Generation) ... Dreamcast Sega's Dreamcast was the first console of the generation and introduced several innovations including Internet gaming as an optional feature through its add-on modem, and a web browser...

Handheld Electronic Game ... The initial success of Mattel and Parker Brothers' entries spawned a wave of similar handheld devices which were released through the early 1980s. Notable among these were a series of popular 2-player "head-to-head" games from Coleco...

N-Gage ... This was unsuccessful, partly because the buttons, designed for a phone, were not well-suited for gaming and when used as a phone the original N-Gage was described as resembling a "taco"... Instead of using cables, multiplayer gaming was accomplished with Bluetooth or the Internet (via the N-Gage Arena service)...

PlayStation Portable ... Several gaming websites were impressed by the handheld's computing capabilities and looked forward to the system's potential as a gaming platform...

Razer Switchblade ... They started a project, codenamed the "Switchblade", which is a portable gaming device that "would revolutionize the future of gaming"... When asked about the development of the Switchblade, Razer's CEO, Min-Liang Tan, believed that the development of the Switchblade started from a small gaming peripheral company, into a well-known corporation that would develop the first full portable PC gaming console... He said "Razer isn’t just about bringing innovation to the PC, but creating products that will change the future of gaming...

Pandora (console) ... When announcing the system, the designers of Pandora stated that it would be more powerful than any handheld video game console that had yet existed. It includes several features that no handheld game consoles have previously had, making it a cross between a handheld game console and a subnotebook...

Electronic Game ... Examples of text-based Teletype games include: The Oregon Trail (1971) - the earliest versions Trek73 (1973) Dungeon (1975) Super Star Trek (1975) Adventure (1976) - the earliest versions Zork (1977) - the earliest versions Electronic handhelds The earliest form of dedicated console, handheld electronic games are characterized by their size and portability. Used to play interactive games, handheld electronic games are often miniaturized versions of video games...

Gizmondo ... With fewer than 25,000 units sold, the Gizmondo was named by GamePro as the worst selling handheld console in history. By February 2006, the company discontinued the device and was forced into bankruptcy...

Role-playing Game Theory ... In 1994-95 Inter*Active, (later re-named Interactive Fiction) published a magazine devoted to the study of RPGs. In the first issue Robin Laws called for the creation of a critical theory for role-playing games...

Watara Supervision ... Though the machine garnered some attention at launch (mainly due to the low price point for the machine and its games, which many felt might enable it to make inroads into Nintendo's market share) it was ultimately unsuccessful in unseating the Game Boy from its position as the world's most popular handheld. Reasons commonly cited are the poor quality screen which was prone to blurring and made following the action difficult, a general lack of games and the simplistic nature of those that were released...

Atari Lynx ... The Lynx was also the first gaming console with hardware support for zooming/distortion of sprites, allowing fast pseudo-3D games with unrivaled quality at the time and a capacity for drawing filled polygons with limited CPU intervention...

Role-playing Game ... There are several forms of RPG. The original form, sometimes called the tabletop RPG, is conducted through discussion, whereas in live action role-playing games (LARP) players physically perform their characters' actions...