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    … of the Month: PlayStation 2 Headset

    First off, let me clear up any confusion there may be over what exactly a headset is. It is not, despite popular belief, a set of heads. It does bring several heads together, though, in a way. It is a handy little device that sits on your skull and lets you communicate with people without the aid of a keyboard.

  • You Learn Something New Every Play: Sports Games

    This month, we take a look at sports games.  Just recently, I learned the more technical rules of football from Madden 2004.  I learned more about volleyball from Summer Heat: Beach Volleyball.  Bu

  • Games for the Casual Gamer: Tetris

    This month I will be shedding light upon what is quite possibly THE quintessential game for a casual gamer: Tetris.  Armed with my trusty Game Boy Advance (color: glacier blue), a serious case of sen

  • Versus Mode: SimCity vs. The Sims

    It's a shame, really. I'm willing to put money on that most folks who play The Sims don't have any idea what Sim City is. In fact, if you said the words "Sim City" to them, they'd probably be like "... eh? Is that a new expansion pack or something?". No way, dude. It's not an expansion pack. It's the game that started it all.

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    The Gates of Life: Episode 10 – Go Fusion Kitty!

    Rivers: I actually hit them! I hit her and even that little cat!! I don't believe it!

  • Preserving the Plastic: Connecting Multiple Systems

    If you are like me or many of the other hardcore gamers and collectors out there, you'll probably have more than one console, and want to play them without the hassle of changing cords.  Fortunately,

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    Dear Readers: My Game Collection

    As I have made clear many times within this virtual realm of GameCola, I am absolutely terrible at video games. This has been confirmed again recently when I combed through the list of games I own, and created a new list of games I own and beaten, and games I own and have not beaten. The results are shocking (to someone who would expect the Editor-in-Chief if a video game webazine to actually be good at video games, anyway). Out of the 331 unique games in my collection, 267 remain unbeaten, meaning I have completed a completely unimpressive 19% of my video games. This is sad. Granted, some of the games are for systems I don't even own, and some of the games I got nearly to the end but was then distracted by something newer and shinier; but the vast majority of games I own I have not completed just because I got stuck at some point and called it quits. So this, my readers, leads me to my latest life goal: to have more games in my collection beaten than I have not beaten. Send all letters of encouragement, sympathy, and bemusement to pfranzen@gamecola.net.

  • … of the Month: The Super Mario Advance Series

    The first thing one must do when examining four games that have been ported from one console to another is to ask one's self the following question: "What has been changed?" Well, there's good news and there's bad news concerning the answer to that question. The good news is that not much has changed in any of them. The bad news is that the things they did change were in no way needing to be changed, and are quite awful now that they are different. Let's start with the first of these games, shall we?

  • Games for the Casual Gamer: The Sims: Bustin’ Out

    Everybody's heard of The Sims, right?  Ever since the game was introduced for the PC, numerous expansion packs have been released, each expanding the Sim universe a little more.  It only makes sense

  • Versus Mode: Super Mario RPG vs. Kingdom Hearts

    When I first heard about Kingdom Hearts, one of the initial things that came to my mind was a comparison of this game to Super Mario RPG. With KH being a collaboration between Squaresoft and Disney, and Super Mario RPG being a collaboration between Squaresoft and Nintendo, it seemed only natural that similarities might be conjured up between the two. To me, anyway. If you don't agree -- tough cookies. This is my first shot at writing Versus Mode, and this is the topic I wanna discuss. So sit on it, disbelieving headwire.