Part Twitter, part Steam community, and part Facebook, Raptr is a social network that gives gamers a place to connect with one another over the games they frequently play. In addition to providing gamers a platform to meet one another and connect with others who play the same games they enjoy, Raptr also gives you a way to see the games you most commonly play and enjoy. The service allows you to notify your friends when you start up a game, message your friends in and outside of game, discover new games your friends are playing, and review the games you already own.  Raptr has been around for a while and has grown significantly since its inception. In its early days, the site only allowed you to track the games you were playing and share them with other Raptr members. The service has since branched out and now tracks more games on more platforms and allows you to share the games you play on Twitter and Facebook.

If your friends aren’t Raptr members but are your friends on another social network, you can still share your status with them. You can even alert them when you make big hardware changes to your system, so Raptr can make sure your gamer friends are envious of the new video card you just installed. Best of all, Raptr will share your in-game achievements automatically with your friends, whether you unlocked a weapon in Team Fortress 2 or earned a medal in Gears of War 2.

In order to use Raptr, you’ll need to do two things: sign up for an account and download the Raptr plug-in for your PC. Raptr uses the plug-in on your PC to pull together information on the PC games you play like Steam-based games, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, and more, including Flash games that you play through your browser. On the console side, Raptr supports Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, and more, as long as your game play habits are available online.

When you customize your profile, you can provide your Steam ID, your XBox Live gamertag, your Wii friend code, your PlayStation Network ID, your Xfire ID, and even your World of Warcraft and Warhammer Online character names. The more services you add, the more information Raptr can pull together to share with your friends. Once you’ve customized your profile and downloaded the Raptr client, the service goes to work pulling together information about your gaming habits as you play.

While that goes on in the background, you can get busy customizing your profile. Add some information about you to make yourself easy to find, and Raptr will do the rest. As you play, the service will update your friends and post on your other social networks when you start playing a supported game. It will also notify your Raptr friends when you unlock achievements or earn titles.

The service even tracks how often you play, what games you play most often, and how long you play. All of that information is posted to your profile so your friends can see if you’re into action games, strategy games, or RPGs, what your favorite games are, and what you’ve been playing recently.

In addition to the social features, Raptr allows members to rate the games they play. You can add them to a list of games they own and love, and even find related games that they may enjoy based on the ones they and their friends already play.

Raptr has evolved to become a social network that’s well worth the sign up and customization time. If you’re a gamer looking to meet other people who enjoy the games that you do, or if you’re already part of a gaming community and looking to share more about the games you enjoy this site is ideal. The fact that Raptr is a compliment to services like Steam and connects with your existing social networks like Facebook and Twitter make it a perfect network for gamers looking to meet new friends and show off to their current ones.

story source

By MATT RICHTEL; Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF

Published: May 15, 2009

Video game sales in the United States totaled $1 billion for April, 17 percent lower than in April 2008, according to NPD, the market research firm. This is the second consecutive month in which sales have fallen sharply compared with a year ago, suggesting that the industry is not as recession-proof as it had hoped. Software sales fell 23 percent, while sales of consoles and handheld players dropped 8 percent. In a news release Anita Frazier, an analyst at NPD, said, “This year’s performance still represents the second-best performance for the industry in the month of April.” But it also represents a sharp drop-off, as sales of major consoles have been falling month after month. In February Nintendo sold 753,000 Wii machines but sold only 601,000 in March and 340,000 in April. Microsoft sold 391,000 Xbox 360s in February, 330,000 in March and 175,000 in April.  story source

Nintendo sold 331,627 units of the Wii in the four weeks to February 24, compared with 89,131 units of the PS3, Enterbrain said on Thursday.

The Wii’s lead on the PS3 appears to be widening: In January, Nintendo’s game console outsold Sony’s by almost 3-to-1.

Nintendo’s own “Super Smash Bros. Brawl” for the Wii became the best-selling software for the month in Japan, with 1.33 million units sold, followed by the “Wii Fit” home fitness game, which sold 309,311 units in the four weeks, Enterbrain said.

The Wii has been leading the three-way game console battle with the PS3 and Microsoft Corp’s (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Xbox 360 as its strategy of offering easy-to-play and innovative games to expand the overall game population has proved a big success.

Microsoft, whose videogame business is struggling in Japan, home to both Sony and Nintendo, sold 14,079 Xbox 360 units.

Shares of Nintendo closed down 1.4 percent at 56,300 yen, while Sony fell 1.9 percent to 5,220 yen, underperforming the Nikkei average .N225, which was down 0.8 percent.

Nothing passes time like playing a board game or watching a movie. Then again, who has time these days? Leave it to Hollywood to come up with a solution. From Variety:

Universal Pictures has announced a six-year partnership with Hasbro to produce at least four feature films based on branded properties.

The properties include “Monopoly,” “Candy Land,” “Clue,” “Ouija,” “Battleship,” “Magic, The Gathering” and “Stretch Armstrong.”

Everyone knows and loves the first five games mentioned, but whether they will be loved as movies is another question entirely.

Movies based on board games, after all, are following in some much-criticized footsteps. “Like the board game on which it is based, the movie ‘Clue’ is most fun in its early stages,” Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times in 1985. Ten years later, she wrote that “Jumanji” had “the invasive weirdness of ‘Gremlins’ but none of the charm.”

Even the prodigious listmakers at About.com struggled to build a top-eight list, with the guide complaining at the outset: “Not enough movies use board games as a central part of the plot.” (Chess and checkers excepted, of course.)

When Hasbro signed up an agent to shop for deals about a year ago, a movie buff posted a journal to Rotten Tomatoes conceding that there was at least some potential:

OK, fine, “Candy Land” could probably make for a half-decent kids’ movie, and I suppose you could maybe make a real estate comedy called “Monopoly” — but “Clue” has already been done, and so has the Ouija Board (done to death, one might say). And a movie version of “Trivial Pursuit” would be just that: a trivial pursuit.

As you consider all of the above, don’t forget that three movies based on a theme-park ride are currently in the top 30 grossing movies in American history. And pass the dice, please.