Chi Kong Lui's blog

Amidst the sea of near indistinguishable first- and third-person shooters, MMOs and MMO shooters at PAX East, I found it somewhat ironic that two particular titles that stood out to me where both remakes of classic games: XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Double Dragon Neon.

Being a 3DS and Kinect owner as well as a fan of Japanese robots/mechs, two neighboring games on the main exhibition hall of PAX East immediately caught my attention: Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor for the Xbox 360 and Spirit Camera: The Cursed Memoir for the 3DS. Both games are updates to game franchises that were once considered innovative back when they were first released.

So you wanna host a podcast?

At the end of episode 67, the announcement was made that after more than three years and what will be 70 amazing episodes, the GameCritics Podcast is losing our inspirational host and guiding light, Timothy J. Spaeth

While he will live on in our hearts (and live on in general) he will be missed.

However, the show isn't over. As is often said, the end of one thing marks the beginning of the next, and that holds true here as well.

GameCritics.com is now in search of a new host to take up the reins and lead our established cast of Mike, Chi, Richard and Brad in a new direction.

As a video game collector who's constantly on the lookout for the best deals, sometimes I'll come across some cool video game related novelties and paraphernalia. On a recent trip to Kohl's, I found a board game based on Tetris, Tetris Link that I couldn't pass up.

Playing video games can be a very expensive hobby and even more so for those of us who consider ourselves not only gamers, but also video game collectors who maintain a library of artistically interesting and historically noteworthy games. With limited disposable income, the average gamer can only purchase so many titles at full price per year. So with that in mind, this is a blog feature devoted to finding the best deals on gaming essentials for would be collectors and anyone looking to play a good game at an affordable price.

Early Columbus Day morning, I awoke and found my son in the living room playing his favorite free-to-play mobile game on my smartphone, Tap Fish. This wasn't anything out of the ordinary except that he immediately started to brag about how many coins and Fishbucks he had accumulated. Upon hearing this, I became extremely nervous and a quick check of my credit card confirmed my worst fear: my son had spent over $400 on in-game transactions.

A couple of years ago, through a combination of Rock Band, Guitar Hero and Lips, I was able to use my Xbox 360 as an somewhat limited karaoke system and relive the karaoke bar hoping days on my youth while entertaining friends and family at the same time! It was never an ideal solution trying to organize all of the music tracks across the various titles and having to swaps discs was a pain in the ass, but old karaoke standards like "Right Here Waiting" by Richard Marx on Lips made it worth the hassles.

We are starting a new "GC Reader of the Week" feature at GameCritics. Each week, we want to spotlight you, our awesome readers, by having you submit a photograph of yourself and answer the following questions:

1. Who are you?
2. Where are you?
3. Where are you from?
4. What do you do for a living?
5. What kind of gamer are you?
6. What games made you into a gamer?
7. Why do you game?
8. Who is your video game character soul mate?
9. Why are video games art?
10. What do you love outside of video games?

Please send in your photograph and answers to chi [at] gamecritics [dot] com and each week, we'll publish a new spotlight. We look forward to reading your responses!

Several months ago, I thought it would be fun for our online community if we were able to sell GameCritics branded t-shirts featuring memorable taglines that our dedicated readers/listeners would get and identify with. I asked our staff and fans for ideas and I was excited about what the end results would look like.

As a long-time Palm device loyalist dating back to the original PalmPilot in 1997, I was rather disappointed that the Palm Pre wasn’t able to restore the company to its former glory in the crowded smartphone marketplace now dominated by iPhone and Andriod devices. For 3 years, I stood idly by Palm with the Centro, hoping they would finally release a true iPhone killer, but it never happened and the company was later bought out by HP in April of 2010. When that happened, I knew I was done waiting and it was time to move on.