Feeding Your Gaming Addiction

Gaming is great. It's fun. It can provide a challenge. It can be a social aspect of your life. It also costs money! Here are some things that I do to help expand my gaming collection.

Gamefly - This one costs money, but I find it a good way to try out games that I wouldn't want to pay retail for. But there's also something about Gamefly you might not know if you weren't a member: they sell games as well. And their used games are usually cheaper than you'll find at Gamestop. Not to mention free shipping and the rewards discounts you can earn from being a longtime member.

e-Rewards - e-Rewards is a survey site. Every once in a while they'll send you e-mails and want you to take some surveys. You get e-Rewards money for the surveys you complete. There are many different prizes at different levels of e-Rewards money. At $50 e-Rewards money you can get a $25 gift card for Gamestop. I've done this a few times. They're pretty quick to send you the card after you select it and it works at any Gamestop.

Live Search Club - This is a collection of little puzzle web games that Microsoft hosts. Most of the games have you utilize Microsoft's Live Search search engine. You can win some Xbox or PC gaming supplies through the prizes. Some of the Xbox goodies? Kameo, Halo 2, Wireless controller, and Rock Band. On the PC side? Flight Simulator X, Mouse, Keyboard, Windows Vista and Microsoft Office. They're adding new prizes all the time. Of course, the good prizes take a lot of tickets and that takes time. You can only earn 1,000 tickets a day. I personally like to play Flexicon. I picked up an Xbox 360 wireless controller from here the other day(5,500 tickets).

And I guess you could trade old games back in, but I've never done that. What do you guys do to boost your gaming collection?

The 10 Most Important Video Games of All Time

A committee of two academic researchers, two game designers and a game journalist has named the 10 most important video games of all time. This committee came from a proposal submitted to the Library of Congress in 2006

• Spacewar! (1962)
  
• Star Raiders (1979)
  
• Zork (1980)
  
• Tetris (1985)
  
• SimCity (1989)
  
• Super Mario Bros. 3 (1990)
  
• Civilization I/II (1991)
  
• Doom (1993)
  
• Warcraft series (beginning 1994)
  
• Sensible World of Soccer (1994)
  

Spacewar! and Star Raiders were before my time. And I've never heard of Sensible World of Soccer but not a bad list overall. How does one get a job on this committee?