Remember the good old days when you wanted to wear a t-shirt with Samus on it, you’d have to print out the image backwards on transfer paper from your printer and then ask your mom to iron it on a plain shirt? Unless you were one of the lucky kids who got video game apparel from Japan, seeing a gaming shirt was a rarity. One kid would come to school with a Nintendo shirt and was considered a god not only between gamers but to the rest of the school yard.

Nowadays you can visit a mall anywhere and see at least five different people wearing gamer apparel, from the greased up old man to the emo kid sitting in the corner to the young teen girl in a short skirt. It’s no secret that acquiring clothing for your favorite game is easy; gaming is more mainstream and where there’s mainstream, there’s big money. Large video game companies like Bungie and Steam have high quality merchandise readily available for its fan base due to a demand. You can do a simple search on Ebay and come across thousands of gaming merchandise.

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“Photoshop CS3 attacks. You shield block. You have slain Photoshop CS3! Your Holy Shock crits Photoshop CS3 for 1300. Photoshop CS3 dies.”

In short, I pulled an all-nighter designing and coding this because I’m embarrassingly bad. I also upgraded our RSS feed to one at FeedBurner. Resubscribe to it if you would and it will be much fluffier and cooler than our current WordPress one.

I hope you enjoy Girls Don’t Game version 2.0! Feel free to leave feedback here, and watch for any errors in the upcoming week–I’ll be quick to fix them, I promise.

He’s a nerd who plays bad video games from his childhood and swears like a sailor while doing so. And he’s amassed a huge following in the past two years by video taping them and then showing them to the public. Being the fan that I am, I recently tracked down James Rolfe, the man responsible for the Angry Video Game Nerd, and got a Girls Don’t Game exclusive interview.

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Unless you have been locked in a small dark room with nothing but a last-gen console and supply of gamer fuel to sustain you, you will know that there has been a lot of talk lately about social media, the way we consume games, and the way casual gaming and the internet has impacted the industry.

The idea of social media and casual gaming has both upsides and downsides, detractors and idealists. “They’re ruining our games!” screams the hardcore gamer on one hand, frothing insanely over the lack of difficulty in his latest purchase. “There’s so much more choice” burbles the starry-eyed wii player, having finally introduced their family to the hobby they have nurtured all those years. “I’m old and tired and just want something mature,” sighs the grey-haired gamer who knows nothing will compare to the Magnavox Odyssey.

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While home for break I find myself becoming a lot closer with my Nintendo DS since my consoles are a hundred miles away and locked in a closet. Since it’s been out since 2004, I’ll assume most people reading this have likely played a DS once or twice. If you haven’t, the selling point of the device is the fact that it has two screens. The bottom screen is a touch pad. That’s the most basic of basic explanations, but I find the best way to learn about a gaming system is to actually try it out yourself.

The touch screen makes for some interesting game ideas. But how much is too much? When does innovation turn into, ’stop, just stop, seriously’? After sitting down and thinking about the DS games I’ve played over the last few years, I was able to piece together what I think about the DS and some of its games.

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