Ensemble Studios holds a special place in my gamer’s heart.
The creators of the sterling Age of Empires series, Ensemble was renowned for the care and detail that they put into their games. Designer Bruce Shelley’s meticulous design made the terrific real-time strategy series possible, pitting great cultures from history against one another in a highly-playable […]

Musings for a Wednesday afternoon…

I’ve finally crashed full-throttle into Fable 2 over the last few weeks. I bought when it came out, but I waited for it to be patched - and for the Knothole Island expansion to be released - before taking the plunge. I now find myself almost obsessively trying to find every […]

Over the last month and a half, the videogame industry - and more to the point, its workers - have suffered blow after remarkable blow as thousands of employees at Sony, Microsoft, Electronic Arts and so many others have endured high-profile layoffs thanks to a foundering economy.
What this means for the quality of gaming titles […]

The PlayStation 3 has seemingly been stuck in neutral since its launch. While the console sold well enough, it has been something of a disappointment to the electronics giant and to the industry itself. How much a role its price plays in its slow adoption is unclear, but it’s clearly a problem.
The Wii is the […]

At 47 years old, Barack Obama will become the 44th President of the United States on Tuesday, bringing with him a very new - for politicians - perspective on pop culture.
Obama, who has admitted to collecting comic books (”Spider-Man” and “Conan the Barbarian”, among others) as a youth and claimed, “I grew up on ‘Star […]

With the global economy in tatters, game companies are shedding costs - and personnel - left and right.
As stockholders continue to batten down the hatches, publishers are forced to keep their sales numbers as high as possible. While that’s always been Priority One, rarely has the very existence of the industry’s giants depended upon nothing […]

At one point, not so long ago, the license for “The Lord of the Rings” seemed as golden as its titular jewelry, but like Frodo himself, Electronic Arts seems hell-bent on tossing it into the fires of Mount Doom.
While Turbine’s PC role-playing adventure, The Lord of the Rings Online, is thriving due to its less-is-more […]

Once again this season, I’ll be writing some NBA content for EASports.com, specifically their NBA Game of the Week preview.
I’m not compensated in any way for it, save that some new readers might be exposed to 5WGaming - but I do love talking basketball, and with the success of last year’s weekly column, EA and […]

After re-inventing the skateboarding genre, the original Skate was successful enough - in both sales and critical acclaim - to knock the venerable Tony Hawk series right off the map. Hawk has gone back to the drawing board entirely, all but vanishing from gamers’ consciousness and hoping to rise, like a phoenix from the ashes, […]

5WGaming is proud to present the following article by Guest Writer Andrew Begley of Newcastle, Australia, who serves as webmaster and forum administrator of the NBA Live Series Center, a long-running site dedicated to improving basketball gaming.
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Of all the developments in the world of video games in the twenty-first century to get excited about and […]