The ability to rent video games from home without leaving the house has always been a true dream of mine. Not only does renting video games online keep you busy, but it can be very satisfying knowing you can rent as many titles as you want at anytime and generally receive them within a day or two.

Here are some Video Game Rental Statistics you might find interesting: •”U.S. consumers spent $633.6 million renting video games in 2001, and a record-breaking $6 billion buying video game software (including PC software).”

But why are people renting video games instead of buying? I guess I can’t say gamers are not buying video games. “The U.S. computer and video game software sales grew four percent in 2004 to $7.3 billion — a more than doubling of industry software.”

But why rent games? I would estimate that people rent for 4 primary reasons. 1.The convenience 2.Its cheaper 3.Able to test games 4.Time sensitive

Convenience is truly a luxury worth having these days. People are looking for ways to save time and effort. Everything these days has to be fast and easy. Online video game rental companies provide that and much more. First of all and most important they deliver the game right to your front door. No more wasting your gas going to your favorite rental store, only to find out that the game you wanted is no longer available and won’t be available until you make that drive again. Gas is too expensive these day, who wants to spend all that money driving to a video store when you can easily accomplish the same task on your home computer?

Second of all it’s simple alot cheaper. The average video store charges from $4.00 to $6.00 dollars per video game rental. That could get expensive, specially if you’re renting numerous titles per week. Most of the well known game rental clubs like GameFly, Gottaplay, Intelliflix and RentZero only charge $12.95 to $19.95 per month for unlimited video game rental. So let’s say you rent 2 titles per week at the local video store. That equal around $30.00 dollars per month compared to $12 to $13 dollars per month with the online alternative. This is a large savings at the end of the month.

Now here is the greatest part. Have you ever purchased a video game and just hated it. You can’t just return the game, you’re stuck or you have to exchange it in for store credit. So you just have to **** it up and move on to the next game, which might not live up to your standards. Renting video games online gives you the chance to test the game first before you purchase. The companies will even allow you to purchase the games at discount rates and just keep the game if you enjoy it that much.

You can keep the games as long at you like just pay the monthly fee. If you want to play 6 to 7 games a month or more you can just pay the one time monthly fee and be done with it. You don’t even have to pay for postage. That’s a deal that I can get use to.

How to Start Video Game Collecting

You have played video games since you were a kid and now you want to start collecting some of those games you remember so fondly. How do you start collecting video games? Where do you look to find the best deals? And how do you know how much your collection is worth? This article will answer these questions for you and you will be ready to start your very own video game collection.

It doesn’t take very much at all to start collecting video games, you probably already have some games around your house. Those are the first additions to your collection. Congratulations. I’m sure you will want to expand it to other games too so you have to decide what you want to collect. Many gamers decide they want to start with their favorite video game system when they were younger, maybe the NES or Super Nintendo or even Atari 2600. Others focus on the more obscure consoles with lots of rare games like the Sega Saturn or Atari Jaguar. It doesn’t even have to be one console. Maybe you want to collect role playing video games or some other genre. There are tens of thousands of video games to choose from though, so it is important to have some direction when you first start off.

Now you have chosen what types of video games you want to collect. So you will need to know where to find them. One of the best places to get specific video games is eBay. They have a very wide selection of video games available so if you know specific games you are looking for it is a great place to start. Many people don’t like the bidding process though so you can also use Amazon or Half to buy online.

Physical locations might be the best shopping for your video game collection though. Garage sales, pawn shops. swap meets, flea markets, rental stores, and clearance racks all have some video games available. The prices will usually be much better than online because the sellers don’t realize they have a diamond in the rough. Look through the selections to see if they have anything available that you want. You will have to be patient to get results sometimes, but that one rare game for $3 at a garage sale makes it all worth while.

How do you know you have found a good deal though and how do you know how much your video games are worth? One of the easiest ways is to use an online video game price site like VideoGamePriceCharts.com or even Amazon can be used to find the price other people are selling the game for. You can look up the game you want online and if the store is selling it for less than the online listing, you probably found a good deal. After you have started a video game collection these sites are helpful in knowing how much everything is worth too.

You should have a pretty good idea how to start your video game collection, where to find the games, and how to price your video games too. Now go out and start your collecting. Good luck!

Remember the good old days of video games? Where cute, harmless and completely unbelievable and mythical characters would tackle zany adventure in make-believe worlds far away from our own? Those days are long gone, now. Because a great amount of video games now use real world places, events and people as their storylines and settings. Whereas before, video games were a tool used to escape reality through diversion, they are now extensions of the reality in which we live in. And depending on the game and the person playing it, that can be a good thing, or a very bad thing.

Take a look at one of the most popular video game franchises in history: Super Mario Bros. A plumber falls through a pipe and enters a world where he must rescue a princess, defeat and evil monster and navigate a world full of mushrooms, blocks, question marks and goombas. No matter how imaginative one’s imagination could be, there is simply no way that such an occurrence could happen in this world, like, for real. So, the illusion of the game remains intact.

Now, if you look at today’s video games for popular systems like the Microsoft Xbox 360 or the Sony Playstation Portable, you can clearly see that video games are now using real world issues as their premise. Of course, there are also a plethora of fantasy based video games and characters. But, more and more games are using Iraq as their setting rather than a mushroom kingdom. Now, if you look at video games through the past, and place yourself at the dawn of the home video game explosion – the early 1980s – it would be hard to imagine a video game dealing with, say for example, the Iran hostage crisis or the invasion of the Falkland Islands. But, today, there are many video games using current events as a fantasy gaming world.

There are many theories as to the dearth of reality-based video games. The improvement of video game graphics can makes it easier to make real world wars, conflicts and issues appear that much, more, real, on the screen. It could be that developing a video game based on the battle in Afghanistan is easier to develop than starting a game from scratch with new characters, settings, storylines, etc. Perhaps it’s a calculated effort to hone in on frustrated individuals who can’t really join the fight: battle those terrorist creeps that you **** so much from the comfort of your own home. In the latter instance, at least, it can make for a quick way to make a quick dollar.

Before, video games used to be an easily defined line between escape and realism. On one side, was life and the real world with all its problems and ailments, most of which you can’t control. On the other side was the gaming universe, where you are the ultimate master and are in total control. Idea: why not combine the two, and give a video game player the complete control that video games provide into a real world situation in which otherwise, they feel powerless?

It seems that today, a gamer can watch the news, get upset and then do something about it in the real world that exists inside their Playstation or Xbox. Now, whether or not that contributes anything of substance at all is a subject for another debate altogether.

If you think your kids are spending too much time playing video games on their Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, Xbox 360, PC or PSP or Playstation Portable consoles then you may have a reason to be concerned, but not worried. Before you tell your child to put down the game remote and pick up a text book you should consider one fact and that is that there is a professional video game circuit out there with professional gamers who earn thousands, even millions of dollars.

South Korea has a genuine passion for playing video games. This is a video game obsessed nation. The electronic gaming events in this country can draw up to 100,000 spectators at a single event. Their cyber athletes make hundreds of thousands of dollars playing in tournaments that are televised nationwide. Some of them are so popular they cannot go out in public without body guards to shield them from adoring fans. They even date movie stars and get their faces on the covers of newspapers and magazines.

Recently there was an electronic gaming tournament held in Seoul, South Korea at Jamsil Indoor Stadium. This event was the equivalent of our Superbowl. The game of choice for this event was StarCraft, which is a web game that is played on PCs. This event was nationally televised and broadcast on the Internet. The audience of 1.78 million who viewed it on television and online were glued to their seats as they watched the daylong event unfold. They came to watch the most popular gamer in their country strut his stuff.

His name is Lim Yo Hwan, he is 27 years old and he is the Mick Jagger of e-sports in South Korea. This young man has made quite a name for himself playing StarCraft, the only game that matters on the video game circuit in this country. His fans wanted to see him put on a show, and he did, winning the event easily with a take home prize of $20,000. Lim Yo Hwan has won many of these events in recent years and this has put his income in the six figure category. Not bad for playing video games.

The United States has some Superstar cyber athletes too who make a very good living on the electronic gaming circuit. The brightest star in this country is a 26 year old man named Johnathan Wendel, otherwise known to his fans as Fatal1ty, which is his screen name. He lives in Kansas City, Missouri but his reputation lives all over the world.

Johnathan became a professional gamer at the age of 19, and in the past seven years he has won 41 major eSports video game tournaments. He has won more electronic gaming competitions than anyone else in America. Johnathan has also done very well financially, winning over $450,000 in prize money.

Johnathan Wendel has traveled all over the world playing in video game tournaments. To date he has played on every continent except Antarctica. These tournaments have been held at some very interesting, unique and famous places including the Great Wall Of China and Red Square in Moscow, so the idea of holding one in Antarctica some day may be not be so far fetched.

Everywhere Johnathan goes he is swarmed by fans who just love the way he plays video games. All of his expenses are paid when he travels and he lives like a rock star. With world championships in five different video games, Johnathan is considered by most in his sport to be the best in the world. No other gamer has even come close to matching his accomplishments.

In November of 2006 Johnathan Wendel defeated his biggest nemesis and won the world championship for his fifth video game, PainKiller, and in doing so he took home a prize check for $150,000. He defeated the reigning world champion for that game, a 20 year old man from Holland that goes by the screen name Vo0.

Johnathan is becoming more and more popular every day as he continues to shine as a Superstar in the world of professional gamers. He is a force to be reckoned with in the Cyberathlete Professional League. He has recently launched a line of Fatal1ty products that include such things as mouse pads, headsets and keyboards that are made specifically for playing video games. He has a marketing Guru named Mark Walden working with him and both expect to make millions of dollars selling these products to gamers worldwide.

The video gaming industry is expected to make $30 billion dollars this year selling video games and consoles for products like Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, Xbox 360 and PSP. This is an enormous amount of money that is more than twice the yearly grosses of the NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball combined. With this kind of money involved and hundreds of millions of people playing video games all over the world the sport of professional video gaming is starting to attract major advertising sponsors and merchandising companies.

Professional video gamers are no longer just kids who are wasting their time spending endless hours playing video games. Many of them have managed to transform a hobby into a lucrative career. There are hundred of thousands, and even millions of dollars being made these days by gamers who travel the world all expenses paid and live like rock stars.

So the next time you think your child is spending too much time playing Nintendo Wii, Playstation 3, Xbox 360, PC or PSP games you should not worry too much. If they show more than the average amount of interest in the sport of electronic gaming, try not to discourage them from playing video games. It is important for you to realize that they may not just be playing games when they sit down in front of their television or computer, they could also be training to be a world famous cyber athlete millionaire.