#Best 360 photo booths near me

[video360boothuk]

Enhance Your Event with the Best 360 Photo Booth Rentals in the UK

Looking to elevate your event experience? Rent a 360 photo booth from Video360Booth.co.uk and create unforgettable memories! Our cutting-edge 360 photo booths are perfect for weddings, corporate events, parties, and more. Capture every angle of your special moments with seamless video effects that wow your guests.

We offer customizable options, easy setup, and affordable packages designed to fit your event needs. Whether you're hosting a small gathering or a large celebration, our 360 photo booth rentals add a fun and interactive element that will leave your guests talking for weeks.

Our professional team ensures hassle-free service, from delivery to operation, so you can focus on enjoying the moment. Book now to make your event stand out!

[photoboothcity12]

Reasons Why You Need to Opt for a 360 Photo Booth over Traditional Options

A 360 photo booth is an interactive and modern twist on traditional photo booths, allowing guests at events to have their photos or videos taken in a dynamic, full-circle manner. Instead of a static camera capturing images from one angle, a 360 photo booth involves a rotating camera that moves around the subject, capturing a 360-degree view. This creates engaging, immersive videos or images that can be shared on social media platforms.

The static images that we got used to often look dull and don’t catch up with our memories very effectively. In a sharp contrast, the entire set up looked so vibrant and inviting when I visited a photo booth for sale near me. A 360 photo booth offers several exciting utilities, especially at events or promotional activities. These utilities would justify every specification that is in demand be it a feature or a theme having its unique impact on the event.

Top Ten Utilities of a 360 Photo Booth:

Enhanced Guest Experience: The 360 photo booth provides an engaging and immersive experience for guests. They can interact with the camera while it captures every angle, resulting in dynamic videos or images. This interactive element adds a “wow” factor to events like weddings, parties, and corporate events.

Social Media Sharing: The high-quality, fun videos or images created by the 360 photo booth are designed for easy sharing on social media platforms. This makes it ideal for creating buzz and encouraging attendees to share their experience online, which helps promote the event or brand.

Brand Promotion and Customization: For corporate events, trade shows, or product launches, the booth can be customized with branding elements like logos, filters, and overlays. The videos or images captured can carry the brand message while offering a unique way to promote products or services in a memorable way.

Versatility for Various Event Types: The best 360 photo booth for sale should cater to a variety of events, from weddings and birthday parties to corporate gatherings and promotional events. Its ability to be customized and branded makes it adaptable to different themes, audiences, and event types.

Memorable Keepsakes: Guests or attendees get to take home high-quality videos or images that capture their experience in a unique way. These digital keepsakes, which are often shareable on social media or downloadable, ensure lasting memories of the event.

Adaptability for Various Themes: Whether it’s a corporate event, wedding, or festival, the booth can be adapted to suit different event themes, adding flexibility and creative possibilities. I had an opportunity to check several features out while paying a visit to mirror photo booth for sale.

Memorable Group Experiences: Unlike traditional photo booths, the 360 booth can capture group interactions, dance moves, and fun moments, making it ideal for capturing special occasions with multiple guests in one shot.

Increased Foot Traffic: The 360 booth’s eye-catching setup attracts attention at events, exhibitions, and trade shows, encouraging more visitors to engage with the booth and other event activities.

Customizable Effects and Editing: Special effects, filters, and background music can be added to the videos, enhancing the visual appeal and creating a polished final product that guests are excited to share.

Unique Content Creation: The rotating camera creates dynamic, slow-motion, or real-time videos that are visually striking and unlike traditional photo booth images, providing guests with fun, shareable content.

Photobooths are a great means to generate business wing to their capacity to serve masses unlike the traditional booths in your locality. You must keep these factors in mind while checking out any photobooth for sale in your neighbourhood.

A 360 photo booth is an interactive and modern twist on traditional photo booths, allowing guests at events to have their photos or videos taken in a dynamic, full-circle manner. Instead of a static camera capturing images from one angle, a 360 photo booth involves a rotating camera that moves around the subject, capturing a 360-degree view. This creates engaging, immersive videos or images that can be shared on social media platforms.

The static images that we got used to often look dull and don’t catch up with our memories very effectively. In a sharp contrast, the entire set up looked so vibrant and inviting when I visited a photo booth for sale near me. A 360 photo booth offers several exciting utilities, especially at events or promotional activities. These utilities would justify every specification that is in demand be it a feature or a theme having its unique impact on the event.

Top Ten Utilities of a 360 Photo Booth:

Enhanced Guest Experience: The 360 photo booth provides an engaging and immersive experience for guests. They can interact with the camera while it captures every angle, resulting in dynamic videos or images. This interactive element adds a “wow” factor to events like weddings, parties, and corporate events.

Social Media Sharing: The high-quality, fun videos or images created by the 360 photo booth are designed for easy sharing on social media platforms. This makes it ideal for creating buzz and encouraging attendees to share their experience online, which helps promote the event or brand.

Brand Promotion and Customization: For corporate events, trade shows, or product launches, the booth can be customized with branding elements like logos, filters, and overlays. The videos or images captured can carry the brand message while offering a unique way to promote products or services in a memorable way.

Versatility for Various Event Types: The best 360 photo booth for sale should cater to a variety of events, from weddings and birthday parties to corporate gatherings and promotional events. Its ability to be customized and branded makes it adaptable to different themes, audiences, and event types.

Memorable Keepsakes: Guests or attendees get to take home high-quality videos or images that capture their experience in a unique way. These digital keepsakes, which are often shareable on social media or downloadable, ensure lasting memories of the event.

Adaptability for Various Themes: Whether it’s a corporate event, wedding, or festival, the booth can be adapted to suit different event themes, adding flexibility and creative possibilities. I had an opportunity to check several features out while paying a visit to mirror photo booth for sale.

Memorable Group Experiences: Unlike traditional photo booths, the 360 booth can capture group interactions, dance moves, and fun moments, making it ideal for capturing special occasions with multiple guests in one shot.

Increased Foot Traffic: The 360 booth’s eye-catching setup attracts attention at events, exhibitions, and trade shows, encouraging more visitors to engage with the booth and other event activities.

Customizable Effects and Editing: Special effects, filters, and background music can be added to the videos, enhancing the visual appeal and creating a polished final product that guests are excited to share.

Unique Content Creation: The rotating camera creates dynamic, slow-motion, or real-time videos that are visually striking and unlike traditional photo booth images, providing guests with fun, shareable content.

Photobooths are a great means to generate business wing to their capacity to serve masses unlike the traditional booths in your locality. You must keep these factors in mind while checking out any photobooth for sale in your neighbourhood.

[magicsmiles]

Get Everything You Need to Hire a 360-Degree Photo Booth in Your Area

Immersive and unique experiences are becoming more and more necessary in the ever evolving profession of photography. One trendy trend that has taken the event business by storm is the hiring of 360-degree picture booths. If you're searching for the newest and finest in capturing moments from every angle, your search for the perfect 360 photo booth rental near me is done.

Take a 360-degree picture in your neighborhood: Analyzing the Immersive Trend

Rather than merely viewing a static image, envision yourself being able to feel the joy of your first dance, the excitement of a big birthday, or the camaraderie of a business meeting. You can achieve this and ensure that no moment is missed by taking a complete view of the surroundings with the aid of 360-degree photo booths. The best part? These cutting-edge booths are simple to locate; you can probably rent a 360-degree photo booth in your neighborhood with only a click or phone call.

These booths offer a panoramic image that goes beyond the limitations of traditional photography in an effort to capture every aspect. Multiple strategically placed cameras are used by the technology powering 360-degree photo booths to capture the entire area. Thus, every participant, every joke, and every dancing move are preserved in a fantastic interactive image that can be seen and shared for years to come.

The increasing popularity of 360-degree photo booths makes it easy to find one locally. Whether you live in a bustling metropolis or a sleepy little hamlet, there's certainly a local vendor ready to bring the magic of 360-degree photography to your next social gathering.

NYC Photo Booth Rental: The Meeting Point of Tradition and Trend

There is more to finding a 360-degree photo booth rental in New York City than meets the eye. An experience with a photo booth ought to capture the uniqueness and energy of the city that never sleeps. Enter the realm of "Photo Booth Rental NYC," where creativity and flair coexist.

There are plenty of options in the city center to suit a variety of preferences and events. Whether you're planning a chic Manhattan wedding or a thrilling business event in Brooklyn, the best photo booths in NYC are prepared to add even more magic to your party. These booths beyond the standard with dynamic features like virtual props, customizable backgrounds, and instant social network sharing.

When looking through the "Best Photo Booths NYC," be sure to find ones that expertly blend design and technology. The alternatives are as diverse as the city itself, ranging from sleek, modern setups to booths that pay homage to the past. Whether you're seeking a pop of stunning technicolor brilliance or a classic black-and-white style, NYC's photo booth scene has something to suit every taste.

Best Photo Booths in NYC: An Area to Showcase Ingenuity

New York City is frequently linked to innovation, and the photo booth scene is no exception. The most inventive photo booths in NYC deftly blend state-of-the-art technology with a hint of the artistic energy that characterizes the city. Beyond the usual snapshots, these booths offer an experience that is as vibrant and dynamic as the city itself.

You can hire the best photo booths in NYC for a variety of occasions, from a sophisticated product launch in Brooklyn to an extravagant gala in Manhattan. These booths are evidence of the city's varied taste, ranging from stylish and modern arrangements to quirky and artistic creations. With features like augmented reality, customizable backdrops, and quick social media sharing, these booths ensure that your event stands out in New York's busy social scene.

The best photo booths in NYC aren't just technologically sophisticated, though; they're also aesthetically pleasing. It's about the moments they help to create, the happiness, the serendipitous moments, and the laughter captured in each photo. While you peruse the alternatives for photo booth rental NYC has to offer, keep in mind that the best photo booths not only generate great images but also provide an experience that you and your guests will never forget.

In this boundary-pushing city, renting 360-degree picture booths has become commonplace for parties that demand the extraordinary. Thus, consider incorporating the immersive magic of a 360 photo booth into your event if you're planning a chic party in Manhattan or a trendy get-together in Brooklyn. The best photo booths in NYC are ready to record your moments and provide mementos from every angle, guaranteeing that your event will be nothing short of spectacular.

[daleisgreat]

15 Years of Xbox 360: Flashback Special!

I am usually timely with these, but the holidays has resulted in this 15th Anniversary of the North American launch of the Xbox 360 Flashback Special to be about a month late. The 360 was one of the first major consoles to have a near simultaneous global launch in the three major market territories. With the United States and Canada launching first on November 22, 2005, followed by Europe on December 2nd and finally Japan on December 10th with most other smaller markets over the following year. The 360 had an extraordinarily long life cycle, with it being eight years until Microsoft launched its successor, the Xbox One. I had major highs and lows with the 360 so get ready to take in my journey with the system. Like with past system specials here, I recorded podcasts based on RPG games and comic book games that released on the 360, PS3 and Wii and have embedded them at the bottom of this entry for supplementary material if you crave even more 360 games to learn about. Be forewarned, this is my lengthiest Flashback Special yet, so I have implemented bookmarks for ease of navigation you can click or press on below! With that out of the way, the last special I did here was on the PS2, and I want to begin the 360 Flashback Special the same way by expanding upon its unavoidable….. CHAPTERS Part 1 – The Hype Part 2 – The Launch Part 3 - Reinventing Dashboards with Blades & Achievements Part 4 - Revolutionizing Downloadable Games on Consoles Part 5 - An Awesome Debut Year of Games Part 6 - Upgrade to HD Part 7 - Three Red Lights Part 8 - Kinect + Avatars = Wii’s Userbase Part 9 - Backwards Compatibility & Indie Games…..not those Indie Games Part 10 - For the Love of Online Co-op Part 11 - Bringing on J-RPGs and Doubling Down on Western RPGs Part 12 - Becoming a Pinball Wizard Part 13 - Racing Away to One of the Best Eras for the Genre Part 14 - The Fad that was Plastic Instruments Part 15 - Non-Kinect Casual/Family Game Hits and the Failure that was NXE Part 16 - Wanna Wrassle? Part 17 - Sports-ball Forever! Part 18 - No Russian, No Cauldron Part 19 – Dubious Honors Part 20 - Lightning Round Quick Hits Part 21 - ”It’s an Ocean” (THE END!!!) Part 22 – You’re Still Here!? Well then…. (STINGER!!!) The Hype Microsoft garnered a lot of attention by pulling the plug on its original Xbox early because of the PS2 being an unstoppable global force, and was determined to launch its system a year before the PS3. The Dreamcast had huge success in North America for its first year by launching ahead of the PS2 a year early, so I could see where they were coming from. I covered E3 2005 for the long defunct gaming site, VGpub. I recall getting a closed door tour with a few other gaming press members for the Xbox 360 and was shuffled around to a few isolated booths that showed off the 360’s “blade” dashboard interface and went over some of the functions of the system. I recall being shown Kameo running side-by-side an unreleased build on the original Xbox to demonstrate the 360’s horsepower. 360 had a couple games playable on the show floor that year with Top Spin 2 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted. From my brief time with those two games what I took away the most was the much-improved controller being lighter, slightly more ergonomic, and the much appreciated inclusion of the shoulderbumper buttons to replace the peculiar white and black buttons from its predecessor. Of the several games I was shown and/or played from E3 2005, the one that impressed me the most was Saints Row. I walked out of that demonstration thinking it looked like the first viable open world contender to Grand Theft Auto after countless watered down GTA-clones were flooding the market. Sure enough, Saints Row did not disappoint the following year and would have three more successful sequels over the years.

Back when cable TV mattered before the dawn of streaming, this MTV reveal event delivered on building anticipation for the 360.

Microsoft’s E3 press conference, which happened in tandem with a much publicized MTV reveal event of the 360 filled with all kinds of celebrities made it impossible to avoid the 360 launch hype building up to its November launch. Then there was Microsoft’s truly extraordinary “Zero Hour” launch event in the Mojave desert to give people the opportunity to travel all the way there just to buy an Xbox. Then there was the Mountain Dew contest where they were giving away 360s every so minutes and you increased your chances to win by entering more codes on their website, and yes, I must have entered at least a 100 codes from weeks of gathering bottle caps from co-workers to no avail. All this blitz of marketing engagement made it impossible to not pay attention to the 360’s launch. I was a huge fan of the original Perfect Dark on N64, and thus was eagerly stoked for the prequel, Perfect Dark Zero which made it a day one buy for me. Amped 3 wound up as the second game I pre-ordered for launch day, and it was a solid snowboarding game, which got a significant boost from its irreverent narrative that pushed me through playing it. The Launch With my pair of launch games pre-ordered I went on to count down the days until the 360’s launch. I thought I had my launch system guaranteed on November 22nd, but last second shenanigans prevented me from buying it at the final hour, yet I was able to procure dibs on the first batch of second wave systems that hit retail three weeks later. Launch window systems came with a couple limited pack-ins in the form of a DVD remote control (yay?) and the downloadable XBLA puzzler game, Hexic HD. Hexic HD was a perfectly fine hexagonal based puzzler from Alexey Pajitnov, the same designer who invented Tetris, but I mostly played Perfect Dark Zero in those opening months of the 360. I only got about halfway through the campaign, but I played a ton of deathmatch with friends and/or solo against bots. Like the previous game, PDZ had a plethora of multiplayer options and maps and tided me by splendidly during the first months of the 360’s lifecycle.

Perfect Dark Zero and Amped 3 were my first two 360 games and both held me over nicely during those initial launch window months! Over the next few weeks I played a fair amount of launch games my friends brought over and picked up/rented a couple more. Top Spin 2 I played far more than I thought I would and wound up finishing its lengthy career mode. Call of Duty 2 was a local multiplayer hit that friends repeatedly brought over. A few years later I eventually picked up Need for Speed: Most Wanted and got immersed working my way through its “blacklist” of rival racers to vanquish. Launch title Condemned: Criminal Origins I did not start playing until recent years, and I am kicking myself for not starting it sooner as it is a trip of a suspense/thriller first person game consisting of intense hand-to-hand and melee weapon combat over traditional firearms FPS weaponry. The game is still fun to this day and I have made it a ritual to play it on Halloween for the past three or four years. Reinventing Dashboards with Blades & Achievements

Also worth highlighting here during the launch was familiarizing myself with the much-loved “blade” dashboard in the launch window. The four blades were filled with many options to separate game, videos, photos and music media. I made heavy use of custom soundtracks on the original Xbox, and loved how the 360 had support for it built into the user interface so they could be dropped into any game. Dashboard and online features on the original Xbox like friends list, voice chat, game invites and more carried over on the 360 and later evolved into so much more through system updates that introduced must-have features like Party Chat that made it so several users can voice chat together regardless of what game any of them are playing. It made catching up with family and friends on weekend game nights more manageable. The biggest hit of the UI during that launch window was Microsoft debuting achievements that were mandatory for all games. These became an instant sensation among any ardent game player when accomplishing the criteria for an achievement and hearing the endorphin-rush of a sound effect and accompanying on screen graphic that indicated you unlocked another achievement. Most of the launch window games had straightforward achievements like finishing campaign missions or getting X amount of wins in sports and racing games, but they eventually evolved and encouraged users to play games in new ways I never thought of (Crackdown was a great early example of this with its achievement design). Also the way the Blades made it easy and irresistible to compare what achievements you accomplished in a game against other people on your friends list that it only upped the friendly competition between friends to see who could unlock more achievements. It is gratifying to see Microsoft allowed each Gamertag’s linked Gamerscore to carryover from 360 to Xbox One and now Series S|X. While achievements are still around today, and I occasionally dive into going out of my way to unlock some if I am enjoying my time with a game, they do not compare to the early years of the 360 where achievement-mania was running wild. Revolutionizing Downloadable Games on Consoles

This was also the first time a major console had an online digital store implemented at launch. The original Xbox had a scaled-down store they experimented with late in its lifecycle with about a dozen smaller classic arcade hits and smaller sized web browser-esque “flash” games of its era that could be purchased, and the 360 expanded on this bigtime. Initially, the 360 digital game marketplace known as “Xbox Live Arcade” launched with games maxing out at 50meg download limits so the game could fit on a memory card, so all of the first year or so worth of XBLA games were mostly re-releases of smaller-sized arcade classics like Smash TV, Contra and Gauntlet along with similar simple browser-based flash game of its era like Bankshot Billiards 2. Over the 360’s lifecycle though they kept increasing the game size limits to the point where disc-based games were coming out digitally and were multiple gigs in size as memory card and hard drive storage options increased. During the first few months of the 360 after launch developers were not flocking to releasing XBLA games because they were unsure if they were going to take off like digital games were slowly starting to on PC at that point. The launch dozen or so XBLA games were met with success, but developers were not anticipating it so in those early months only one or two new XBLA games hit a month. The big breakout XBLA success was a straightforward adaptation of the card game, Uno that launched in May 2006. I can attest for many sessions of simple, pick up and play rounds of Uno while catching up with friends over voice chat online. Microsoft eventually patched in support for the 360’s first webcam, the “Vision” camera, which lead to some peculiar matchups with strangers online who wanted to make sure to demonstrate all their adult substances they were consuming that evening. Later throughout 2006 and 2007 XBLA grew to releasing a game every Tuesday, and Microsoft enforced every XBLA game have a demo/trial so it was an eager experience to see what game would be hitting that Tuesday, because most of the time Microsoft did not announce the game until maybe a day before at that time.

It took over 20 years, but it was worth it to relive the iconic X-Men arcade game with online co-op, and EA did a bang-up job bringing back NFL Blitz for two of my most played XBLA titles! There are so many success stories of XBLA games to go on about, but I want to highlight a few of my favorites. Seeing the re-release of many classic arcade, 8 and 16-bit titles with enhanced graphics and online support was a big win for XBLA in this department. I remember interviews with the XBLA executives from this time answering fans demands and going through the legal hoopla with Konami to bring back arcade favorite beat-em-ups like TMNT, X-Men and The Simpsons, and all with online play! This treatment went doubly so for fighting games. It started with Street Fighter II: Turbo receiving the XBLA treatment, and within years Capcom, SNK, Namco and other studios were porting over their greatest hits onto XBLA like the first two Marvel vs. Capcom and Soul Calibur titles, many King of Fighters re-releases. My personal favorite is the remake, Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix that saw all new gorgeous artwork and a new officially endorsed ReMix soundtrack from the fantastic ocremix.org community.

Non-fighting game wise I was surprised by EA Sports’ revival of NFL Blitz. It is one of the few games I somehow got addicted to online, and become somewhat legitimately good at too and was able to genuinely earn the 10 straight online wins achievement against random ranked opponents! Renegade Ops is an addicting twin-stick shooter in an mini-open world unleashing destruction as pint-sized vehicles with a gruff CO barking orders from the chaotic minds from the team that also made Just Cause. Valiant Hearts I originally played on 360, and loved the passion they showed on their unique adventure/action take on a World War I game. I 1000% related to Double Fine’s take on being a wide-eyed kid caught up in the whimsical spirit of Halloween in both of its RPG-lite Costume Quest titles. Fans of past Sega consoles like the Genesis, Saturn and Dreamcast were well treated, and new fans emerged after a plethora of XBLA re-releases of titles like Guardian Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, both Sonic Adventure games, Daytona USA, Ikaruga, Virtua Fighter 2, Nights, Jet Set Radio, Sega Bass Fishing, Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi, Rez and others saw new life in XBLA form. The Genesis saw packs of three games re-released in bundles themed around best-sellers in the Streets of Rage and Golden Axe 16-bit entries. Although I would recommend skipping the XBLA Genesis packs in favor of the 360 disc release of Sonic’s Ultimate Genesis Collection that has 40 Genesis games and bonus unlockable Arcade and Master System titles. Sega obviously treated its back catalog well on the 360, and I put in many hours revisiting these past favorites. I bought into the hype for Shadow Complex, and it became the first “MetroidVania” I ever finished. Hydro Thunder Hurricane perfectly captured the nature of the 1999 arcade boat racer, while successfully evolving its gameplay into the HD era. Adorable puzzle-platformer Ra-Skulls brought back pleasant memories of Mr. Driller! Twisted Pixel’s Comic Jumper made smart use of implementing FMV-video into its charming superhero platform-action title. Despite its stomach-turning title, Deathspank is a lighthearted action-RPG I saw through to the end with a twist ending I did not see coming. That same developer, Hothead Games, released the first two turn-based RPG Penny Arcade games I ate up that perfectly encapsulated the popular web comic in videogame form.

Two of my best-of-class XBLA recommendations are Trials HD and its sequel, Trials Evolution. It is an exemplary example of the adage, “easy to learn, tough to master.” Its quirky, bouncy motorbike and instant reloading spawns made it easy to succumb to endlessly retrying its inventive stages after each wipeout. It also had innovative use of implementing Friends List leaderboards with their ghost times appearing as you play, just teasing you more and more upon each crash when coming close to usurping their times! The sequel added online multiplayer that clicked and made perfect use of Trials unique gameplay. Microsoft I recall got a lot of flak for their curating policies for XBLA at the time because they would only allow one game to release each Tuesday, and there were many indie developers lashing out for being on the short end of the stick for not getting their game slotted for release on XBLA. Eventually Microsoft upped it two XBLA games a week, with usually a more anticipated game hitting on Tuesday and a lesser known title from a smaller studio hitting on Friday. Looking back on this the obvious downside is the lack of quantity of XBLA titles with only one or two releasing a week, but the curation process lead to the hit-to-miss ratio of them being significantly in favor of the hit range. Sure there were some stinkers that creeped in their like the disappointing Turtles in Time Re-Shelled remake, but the good outweighs the bad greatly in the XBLA market, especially compared today to the ridiculous amounts of low-rent DIY shovelware hitting every week on all consoles with there being seemingly no restrictions for any developer to get their game on a current console, for better or worse.

The digital store also made game demos more easily accessible instead of the traditional demo disc, and downloading demos in the early years of the 360 was kind of a big deal, especially when they had major opening acts of action and intriguing narratives like the Prey and Just Cause demos that made a huge impression on me and triggered me to rush out and buy them. This also worked against games, with the most egregious case being EA Sport’s planned reboot of its basketball series with NBA Elite ‘11’s demo being so plagued with bugs and glitches, that EA infamously flatout cancelled the game days before its street date release and forced retailers to return their copies of the game. That last minute recall tempted overzealous retail employees to snatch up precious copies to make it one of the rarest physical releases on the 360, with copies going on eBay for many thousands of dollars. An Awesome Debut Year of Games

I have no idea if it was happenstance, or intentionally planned, but it worked out pleasantly in the 360’s favor in its first year of next-gen exclusivity they had one or two AAA exclusive games launching per month. Noticing multiple users on my friends list playing the latest AAA game, and with the dawn of podcasts in 2005 featuring their affable hosts discussing the latest games in exhausting detail on launch week is what I feel created the horribly named sensation, “Fear of Missing Out.” I ate up gaming podcasts upon discovering them in 2005 with 1up Yours, The Hotspot, Broadcast Gamer and Team Fremont Live being early favorites of mine and influencing my gaming purchases with their genuine positivity on the latest games that made it difficult to ignore their top picks. They, along with traditional print and online gaming press made it easier to keep up with the latest must-have game of the month for the 360’s first year. A month after launch Dead or Alive 4 snuck in at the end of 2005. It was the first fighting game on the system, and with it having a Spartan character from Halo’s universe as a guest fighter, and an innovative-for-the-time pre-fight lobby system lead to me spending many hours in it online and offline. I was terrible at it, but still had countless hours of fun, even while legitimately earning the dubious zero point achievement for 25 straight online losses.

Oblivion’s Adoring Fan I loved seeing respawn every couple of in-game days to tag along on my adventures before quickly getting slaughtered, and Test Drive Unlimited was an unprecedented always-online open world racing title that laid the foundation for Forza Horizon and The Crew! A couple months later, the first big RPG hit on 360 with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. It was a huge improvement from Morrowind, and this Western open-world RPG was publisher Bethesda’s first mainstream console hit. It took me well over a hundred hours to finish that I spread out over the course of five years (just in time for Skyrim!). I had to resort to abusing the hell out of the dupe glitch for infinite invisibility potions to get past those dastardly Oblivion Gates, but it was an immensely gratifying experience to complete and fully 1000 gamerscore Oblivion! Pro tip, make sure to avoid a near freak-out experience like I had and have a bow in your inventory on the final Thieves Guild mission where you steal an actual Elder’s Scroll!

The string of big-release games kept rolling through 2006. Test Drive Unlimited broke new ground for the racing genre with its always connected open world! Before From Software had blockbuster success with their string of Souls games, they were known at this time for their niche mech games, and had their most success yet with the release of Chromehounds in 2006. The online-focused mech game was more accessible from their previous feature-extensive Armored Core titles. A pair of popular third-person Tom Clancy games hit in 2006 with the first Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and Rainbow Six: Vegas titles. I rented both of these and was terrible at them online, but I do recall having fun as the decoy in Vegas to draw out enemy fire so my friends could pick off my assailants! My anticipation for Saints Row paid off, and it wound up being an awesome GTA-clone done right that year! The first Gears of War was the big 2006 holiday release from Epic Games, riding the success of several hit Unreal FPS games, but long before their current Fortnite fame. It lived up to the hype and delivered with its unapologetic brand of in-your-face gore, and smooth drop-in/drop-out online campaign play. It became one of my favorite franchises on the 360, and I would up playing through the campaign of every single game released to this day! The final big 2006 release I want to highlight is Dead Rising’s brand of campy, zombie mayhem from Capcom that became a huge new IP for Capcom and also the catalyst for many 360 owners to… Upgrade to HD Up through most of 2006 was when I used a traditional CRT (AKA “Tube TV”) as my main gaming television. HDTVs were first noticeable on the market during the PS2/Xbox/GCN era, and a fair number of games supported HD resolutions (especially on Xbox), but HD graphics were never a marquee bullet point of that gen. That all changed with Dead Rising. For the first several months I remained content with the CRT visuals of launch window 360 games, then when playing the Dead Rising demo, I could not help but notice the game’s text was rather tiny and kind of difficult to read. Upon listening to podcasts I learned I was not alone on this and it turned out the game’s text was optimized and quite readable for HD resolutions. Many more games would soon follow this trend in the following months. I noticed this even more when a friend brought over a smaller HDTV and we put them side-by-side running Rainbow Six: Vegas and I saw for myself the difference in the legibility of the in-game text. So yeah, the core graphics for all games where shinier and crisper in HD, but my primary reason for upgrading at the end of 2006 was just to read the damn text. History is repeating itself in recent years with text starting to look smaller and requiring more eye-squinting again to read in games like Wreckfest and MLB: The Show for me, when I later learned that is so because the visuals are optimized for 4KTVs (which I finally upgraded to several weeks ago).

Did you experience the ‘Look and Sound of Perfect’ with 360’s HD-DVD player, along with its killer app of a film in Tokyo Drift? HD movies also arrived to the 360 in 2006 with the release of the ill-fated HD-DVD add-on. Sony getting the better end of the stick in exclusivity deals with studios lead to it losing the physical HD format war against BluRay, and movies stopped releasing on HD-DVD by the end of 2008. I almost impulse-bought the add-on upon seeing it on the clearance rack for $50, but thankfully I held off. By that time however HD streaming was starting to take off with TV shows and movies available to rent and purchase from 360’s online marketplace, and the 360 nabbing a year exclusive on being the first non-PC device to offer streaming Netflix. Streaming movies and TV shows exploded in popularity and before I knew it, almost anytime I logged on nearly half of my Friends list was making use of one of many streaming apps that would become available on the 360. A couple years before the 360 got to this level of success, it had a couple major hurdles to overcome, especially the right-of-passage a vast majority of early 360 owners fatefully dubbed…. Three Red Lights There have been a fair number of platforms that have been notorious over the years for noteworthy faulty hardware ratios like the first three original PlayStations and the problematic powering on trickery required to boot NES games, but those all pale in comparison to the atrocity of the launch year 360 units. Within a few months after launch more frequent whispers started to become prominent of knowing someone who had a 360 that failed on them with the telltale indicator being three flashing red lights on the system. Users would then have to call Microsoft to set them up with a shipping container to mail to Microsoft to repair and mail back. I was the first among my local friends and peers to get the three lights of doom, and I have painful memories of it because my system was lost in UPS transit for three months before I finally got it back after visiting the local UPS center’s lost and found.

360 #2 only lasted several months before red-lighting in 2007, and the third met its expiration date in 2011. I will refrain from going into the nuts and bolts of the architecture problems, but in layman’s terms Microsoft was in such a rush to get that year head start on Sony, that a high amount of faulty chips made their way to manufacturing and resulted in the system’s high failure rate. To Microsoft’s credit, they gave all launch year 360 owners an extended three year warranty to get their system replaced free of charge, which I took advantage of twice. The third one died after the extended warranty, but by that point Microsoft had a slim version of the console on the market releasing alongside Gears of War 3 that I snatched up, and **fingers crossed** have had no issues yet with. Being the first to be hit with the three red lights amidst my immediate local circle of friends and co-workers made it interesting. Over the next year every couple of months another friend would call or text me, and/or another co-worker would catch up with me at work and relay to me their troubles of their 360 bricking and I would be their unofficial tech support on how to get ahold of Microsoft to the point where I still remember the phone number to this day (1-800-4MY-XBOX) to get set up with the replacement system. I wound up buying a hard drive transfer cable to transfer data to new hard drives when switching systems and I recall at least a handful of people borrowing it from me when they switched systems due to switching systems and/or upgrading hard drives. In a bizarre twist, I will put a curse on Hollywood Video for my first two 360s red-ringing! The first time it happened I was playing a rented copy of Chromehounds. The Hollywood Video curse struck again in 2007 when renting Shadowrun caused my 360 to crash!!! As ubiquitous as the three red rings became, Microsoft wanted to ensure a 360 makeover image with a marketing assault for the 2010 launch of… Kinect + Avatars = Wii’s Userbase Nintendo’s Wii launched Holiday 2006, and the motion-based console was an initial sales juggernaut, and it took over two years before it was commonly available on store shelves. Both Sony and Microsoft initially had meek responses to it with Sony essentially patching in motion controls in time for the PS3’s launch with the Six Axis controller that was not that well received or regarded for its precision, and the 360 had the aforementioned Vision Camera, which was essentially Microsoft’s take on an Eye Toy that only saw a handful of games support it for motion controls. Holiday 2010 saw both companies with a meaningful response with PlayStation Move on PS3, and Kinect on 360.

Microsoft pulled the same marketing strategies as Nintendo did years earlier intentionally marketing the Kinect towards families and advertising it heavily on daytime television. Most of Microsoft’s Kinect games were more-or-less their takes on the hit Wii versions. This is when Microsoft implement cartoony characters that could be implemented across games called “Avatars.” They were especially prominent in Kinect games, and one cool side effect for them was the many digital clothing items for them that could be either bought off the Avatar Marketplace, or unlocked for free by playing through games. I am especially proud of my You Don’t Know Jack dummy, and goofy oversized head ornament I unlocked from finishing Comic Jumper. A fair amount of late gen 360 titles supported Avatars in-game, which made for some interesting sights like having your Avatar onstage in Guitar Hero 5 jamming out next to Kurt Cobain. Microsoft’s gamel paid off, and for two-to-three years, the Microsoft moved millions of units of that camera. It is safe to sumrise that the 1-2-3 punch of Kinect, Move and smartphones all combined to steal the “casual gamer” userbase that the Wii was known for and the Wii’s console sales in America plummeted from 2011 onwards. The Kinect boosted 360 console sales so much from the Holiday 2010 period until the Xbox One and PS4 launches in Holiday 2013 that in that three year timeframe Microsoft sold the most systems in America for all but a handful of months. By the Holiday 2013 launch of the Xbox One/PS4, the 360 overcame the Wii’s sizable lead to become the best-selling console of the Wii/360/PS3 generation in America.

Only Kinect game I ever played was the river-rafting follies seen in Kinect Adventures, but surprise hit games like the Gunstringer seen above tempted me to almost get a Kinect on multiple occasions. I never bought a Kinect, but did play Kinect Adventures at a friend’s….yes, it was that damn river raft mini-game. I paid attention to the games releasing for it and supporting the peripheral, and a few looked like genuinely entertaining games and went on to have critical acclaim. Many traditional games added optional “Better with Kinect” features like zoom-in art gallery halls, or audio play-calling in sports games. Even though the ardent game player in me despised the change in direction Microsoft took with the Kinect, I cannot deny there were still several games I wanted to try on it after seeing the positive reactions for Harmonix’s trilogy of Dance Central games, Twisted Pixel’s The Gunstringer and even the limited on-rail experience that is Fable: The Journey. Backwards Compatibility & Indie Games…..not those Indie Games Hitting around the same time as Kinect was Microsoft patching in a new division of purchasable digital games initially called Community Games, but later rebranded Indie Games. Microsoft made its XNA development tools easily available for almost any level of experienced developer. This lead to a deluge of DIY games that looked like they were made as a semester long development school project flooding the Indie Games channel. Some developers embraced the campy nature of the amateur works that dominated the 360 Indie Games scene, with Silver Dollar Games especially unleashing a plethora of their…brand…of games like Try Not to Fart and the ironically titled, Why Did I Buy This?

The 360 Indie Games scene left a lot to be desired as seen above with the quality of games from infamous companies like Silver Dollar Games There were a few gems in the rough to be discovered in the Indie Games channel, and like XBLA games, Microsoft enforced a free trial on all games so you knew what you were getting yourself in for before throwing down some hard earned Microsoft Points, which are like regular points, but fun! There are two DLC Quest games that are fun quirky $1 platformers riffing on how gratuitous in-game DLC would become. Tribute Games gained notoriety on here with their adorable Breakout homage, Wizorb. Finally, I was a huge fan of Zeboyd Games that earned their reputation for their 360 Indie Games and I played through and devoured all four of their humorous takes on throwback pixel RPGs (Breath of Death VII, Cthulu Saves the World, Penny Arcade’s Rain Slick 3 & 4) that released as Indie Games. Zeboyd earned their development stripes on the 360 Indie Games platform, and I am happy with their continued success today! For every one of these hits that broke through however, there were at least a few dozen forgettable releases overshadowing them. Indie Games was Microsoft’s answer for their curation policy to XBLA, but as you can see it only went so far.

Zeboyd’s four 360 Indie Games are excellent retro-style RPGs well worth your time and can be found on Steam today to experience these gems! Microsoft had similar lukewarm success with their backwards compatibility efforts on the 360. There was a huge demand leading to the 360’s launch to be fully compatible with all original Xbox games. Microsoft only originally promised that the first two Halo games would be back-compat on 360, but after enough user outcry, Microsoft released several updates over the 360’s lifespan patching in support for what ended up being a little under half of the original Xbox’s library being supported on the 360, but the software-based emulation had a list of issues and bugs that accompanied each compatibility update. Aside from a fair amount of both Halo games, I played through Fable and Spider-Man 2 via 360 back-compat, and ran into intermittent bouts of slowdown with the former, and random little portions of graphic flickering with the latter. Still enjoyed my time with both, but not without these added issues. Speaking of Halo…. For the Love of Online Co-op

The 360 featured countless games that supported online co-op which made playing the latest big AAA title all that more fun. This primarily effected first and third-person shooters with the big example for this being the Halo titles on the 360 (3, 4, Reach, ODST, Halo Anniversary Remake). I played through all five of those games in online co-op and enjoyed them all tremendously. I will give props to Halo 3 and 4 having my favorite narratives, and I loved the final level of Halo 3 being an homage to the last level of the first game where you drive a warthog through a lengthy labyrinth of enemies and terrain to navigate before a time limit expires and everything explodes, MacGrueber-style! Halo 3 brought in four player online co-op, which I experiment with friends online by trying out the “Skull” modifiers which only upped the difficulty and lead to us finishing a good chunk of the game on the highest difficulty. Halo 4 I continue to this day to reference an ill-fated moment I had when playing with my friend Derek, where I was controlling the Scorpion tank whilst marching it up a lengthy incline, and he was walking alongside me and I misinterpreted the level’s geometry where I did not see a turn and nonchalantly drove the Scorpion tank off the edge of a level and plummeted it down to its awaiting death to the erupting laughter from Derek on the headset.

While I had a lot of fun with the Halo titles online, there were plenty of other worthy options, with the first Crackdown standing out among them. Getting lost in that open world with a friend and wreaking havoc with powered-up heroes whose jumping abilities had seemingly no limits was a blast, so was coming up with random challenges for each other like making a competition to see who could race up to the top of the mammoth Agent’s tower first. Saints Row 2 is another open world game that had online co-op, and made discovering some of the game’s secrets I had no idea about like its hidden mall worth going out of the way to show to friends. Dead Island’s online co-op stood out to me with its in-depth crafting system and emphasis on melee combat ala Condemned. The four Gears of War titles on the 360 all feature first-class online co-op. Gears of War 3 I have classic memories of bringing over to a friend’s the night it launched and we set up our TVs next to each other and played through the entire journey over two days. The survival-based Horde modes from the Gears titles created a new sensation for online co-op, and I played many hours of it online in the first three Gears. I even became invested into the “deep” lore of the Gears franchise to the point that I read a couple of the novels. Gears of War: Judgment switched developer to People Can Fly who tried to freshen up the controls and gameplay a bit. They also focused the narrative on Baird and Cole’s origins which did not go over well with the fanbase, and while it was the least popular of the four on the 360 I will still give Microsoft props for trying something different with it.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance’s final boss battle with Galactus was made to experienced and conquered with someone in co-op, and while the Army of Two games weren’t perfect, I would be lying if I didn’t admit to having some fun times with all the games in online co-op If it was not for online co-op I would have not broken my curse to finally finish the first Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. I started and never finished that campaign on five, yes five, separate occasions with different sets of friends each time and stopped because we either lost interest and/or ran into logistic issues setting up times for everyone to meet together. A former co-worker Sean reached out to me to play with him online and I reluctantly agreed and started it the sixth time, but sure enough we stuck with it and completed it, and it was worth all the starts and stops because it remains years later one of my all-time favorite comic book games. That Galactus boss fight is a final boss fight that I will never forget and a truly epic final encounter to close the game! The second Ultimate Alliance game also featured online co-op and I finished that game on a much timelier basis because a lot of my co-workers also picked it up and we met up regularly for a couple weeks to finish it twice because it focused on the popular Civil War Marvel event that had two separate storylines. It had a more polished presentation, but the first Ultimate Alliance I easily rank as the superior game!

Some rapid-fire quick online co-op memories to wrap this segment up on: The first Kane & Lynch game was an interesting experience in co-op because I played it on this insanely huge HD projector. The first two Borderlands games were both huge hits with my friends and peers that won us all over with its loot-driven FPS gameplay. Credit to Derek for having patience with my crazy work hours and sticking with me for the better part of a year to pick away at and eventually finish Borderlands 2! To a lesser extent, another fun FPS co-op focused title were the Army of Two trilogy of titles. The games all had noticeable control issues, but the teamwork focused gameplay worked for us, and the franchise had a certain charisma to it with their many unlockable masks and charming fist bump animations to equip. Real time strategy games have historically been troublesome to pull off on consoles, but Ensemble Studios found the magic formula to make it work with Halo Wars, and somehow made online co-op viable with it too, and it was another game I found myself teaming up with Sean in a very enjoyable campaign that also featured some of the best CG cutscenes that remain stunning to this day. Finally, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand has likely the most ridiculous storyline of all these co-op titles where you play as 50 Cent himself to track down a prized skull across the middle east that made it a zany quest to just shake my head and go with to see where it took me next, and also for my friend Matt and I to jam out to its hip-hop flavored soundtrack to throughout. Bringing on J-RPGs and Doubling Down on Western RPGs In the console space, before this generation, role-playing games were dominant on the first two Nintendo and Sony platforms. That surprisingly changed this generation. Microsoft made pitches to Japanese developers in the early years of the 360 to release their games exclusively, or at least timed exclusively on the system. This lead to Square-Enix releasing exclusives like Infinite Undiscovery and Last Remnant on the 360, and porting its MMO, Final Fantasy XI onto the 360 in 2006 and making it cross-platform-online compatible with the PS2 and PC versions which meant it was the first game to share online user bases between consoles from different manufacturers. It took a little over a decade for this to happen again, so this was kind of a big deal. I still recall Square stunning gaming fans with their E3 announcement that Final Fantasy XIII would release day and date with the PS3 version (along with XIII’s two sequels later on), so it was surprising during this time to see Square open up its publishing portfolio on other platforms.

As twisted as its plot may be, I still got a lot out of Eternal Sonata with its highly entertaining battles. Blue Dragon was another early J-RPG that drew a lot of attention that Microsoft was serious about RPGs this gen. Other Japanese developers also released RPGs in the early 360 years with Blue Dragon, Enchanted Arms, Resonance of Fate, Eternal Sonata and Lost Odyssey all appearing. I purchased nearly all these games, but only one I played through of these was the bizarre Eternal Sonata, which is a traditional J-RPG set in the mind of dying legendary composer Federic Chopin. Its plot is as out there as its premise, and I will never forget its equally bizarre post-credits stinger, but I loved its engaging battle system that kept me glued in all the way through. I was also taking a music history class in college at the time, so the brief Chopin historical fact interludes between acts also did a lot for me. While Japanese RPGs took off on the 360, so did…. …. “Western RPGs” from companies on this side of the global hemisphere. Bethesda and BioWare are the two most prominent developers responsible for this slate of RPGs this generation after lighting the fire on the original Xbox. I already discussed my love for Oblivion, and Bethesda capitalized on that success with another blockbuster in the form of Fallout 3. Take the medieval fantasy world of Elder Scrolls and apply a retro-50s post-apocalypse skin to it and you have the formula for another Bethesda best-seller I once again put in over 100 hours in completing the main campaign and all of its DLC expansions. After that I needed a break from Bethesda’s games and have yet to play New Vegas. I did start up the Oblivion sequel, Skyrim and briefly made some headway into that, but got sidetracked by other holiday tent pole releases at that time and it regrettably succumbed to becoming lost in my backlog. I eventually picked up the remaster on Xbox One, and one day I will restart and finish that game!

Giant Bomb’s videos of their complete play-throughs of the Mass Effect trilogy is some of their best work that should not be missed! A series that did not get lost in my backlog was BioWare’s Mass Effect trilogy. The first game I initially got into as an awesome modern-day take on Star Trek, with an engrossing cast of crew mates on the Normandy. The first Mass Effect was a little rough around the edges, so I eventually fell off halfway through, but picked it up a couple years later and plowed right through it. The same thing happened with Mass Effect 2, but the advantage to finishing it in 2014 was that all the bonus story DLC add-ons were released and combined for a gratifying experience all together. ME2 delivered on hyping up being careful with pivotal story decisions that would have consequences in the infamous final “suicide mission” in the game. My initial run through of it saw three of my crew members not survive it through, and it gutted me so much I restarted that final mission and had to compromise with only two crew members passing away. Immediately after finishing ME2 I jumped right into ME3 and this time saw it all the way through within a couple months, luckily by this point the extended ending and all the story DLCs also just finished releasing and I was stunned with what Bioware held out of the core game and I can feel for players who initially played it and missed out on having a central character like Javic locked away behind DLC and missing out on essential storyline DLCs that dealt heavily with the origins of the Protheans and Reapers. The way I played it felt like a complete experience with all the DLC, but without it I sympathize for the critics who stated it felt unfinished upon first release.

There is also the fantastic “Citadel” DLC I want to give props to which is its own standalone swashbuckling adventure full of lighthearted campy jokes, and concludes with throwing a the party of all parties for all your friends! For people who have not played the initial Mass Effect trilogy, at least give a couple episodes of Giant Bomb’s Mass Alex play-through videos of all three games in their entirety a shot. I am almost wrapped up with them as of this writing, and it has been wonderful experiencing that trilogy all over again this way. Like Gears, I became so absorbed into the Mass Effect lore, that I have bought and read all of the novels, and almost all of them are good, even the Andromeda-based ones! I know the first Fable has been on the receiving end of a lot of criticism over the years for not delivering on all of its promises, but that does not take away from the final product on original Xbox still being a astounding action-RPG! I treasured my time with it, and the “Lost Chapters” expansion, and late in the 360’s life in 2014 it got the remastered treatment to bring the entire trilogy (and the spin-off Kinect game, The Journey) all on 360. Fable II from what I gathered has been the highpoint of the series from everyone I have talked to. I have only played through the prologue, and failed at getting back to it while covering other games in the gaming press at the time amidst another busy holiday release season. Fable III sounds like it did not win everyone over with its major storyline hook it marketed of overthrowing a corrupt sibling at the throne, and sadly the Kinect game, The Journey was the last major single player installment of the series as of this writing. Becoming a Pinball Wizard I have played various videogame pinball titles over the years, but for whatever reason the 360/PS3 gen is when it got ahold of me and never let go. It started with Crave’s Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection. Each real life table replica had their own set of goals to accomplish in order to unlock an achievement for each table, so I kept plugging away, and little-by-little I found hooked into addicting tables like Gorgar, Medieval Madness and No Good Gophers especially being my favorite. Later on Crave released an XBLA pay-per-table platform with tables from multiple companies called The Pinball Arcade. Every several months a new batch of tables were released and I found myself immediately downloading them and studying the in-game instructions for each table to thoroughly learn all of its intricacies and the addicting nature of filtered online Friends-list leaderboards had me plugged in to top the scoreboard for each table.

Well over 100 hours I invested into Pinball Arcade and Pinball FX on the 360. Two of my favorite tables are pictured above with No Good Gophers on the left, and Mars on the right. The same exact thing happened with Zen Studio’s XBLA title, Pinball FX. Their tables were not based on real tables, and as they gradually released more tables for download, they embraced their interactive nature and featured more computer animated toys that flew off of and around the table, and more dynamic special effects on the playfield that simply are not possible on real life tables. Despite them being not lifelike, and featuring more exaggerated pinball physics, I still embraced them when I was in the mood to switch up from the real tables in Pinball Arcade. Zen released a sequel a few years later in Pinball FX2 that had more dynamic community and hub-based features and integrated online friends leaderboards into actual gameplay with in-game pop-ups when your score was approaching a friend’s high-score which only intensified every attempt and kept me coming back more frequently. Some of my favorite tables from the first two PBFX games are the spooky mystery pin Paranormal, the Monty Python-influenced Epic Quest (with RPG stats and leveling that carries over in each attempt!) and the outer space themed Mars. Pinball FX3 on Xbox One/PS4 added even more community based features that keep me playing it weekly to this day, but that is a story for another time! Racing Away to One of the Best Eras for the Genre I believe Microsoft somehow found a way to publish one marquee AAA racing game each year for almost the entire 360 lifespan. They originally rotated between Bizarre Creation’s Project Gotham games, and Turn 10’s Forza Motorsport series each year. I never got into either of those series that much. Forza is the more serious sim, and I have tried out a couple installments over the years, but the intense sim mechanics are just not for me. If I would have put more time into PGR I feel I would have really got into that series, and I have some fleeting memories of getting into the second game for a brief moment on the original Xbox.

While I did not get reeled into Forza Motorsport, I fell hook, line and sinker into PGR’s replacement, Forza Horizon from the developer, Playground. It lightened up the sim-based controls and offered up enough assist options to procure that comfortable blend of sim and arcade racing. I also wound up in favor of its open world hub nature to either drive around to new races and take in the country side, or hang around the game’s central music festival. The first Horizon had such a fitting licensed soundtrack of rock and electronica-based songs that I sought out the entire soundtrack and it is its own separate running playlist for me. Since I did not upgrade into the Xbox One/PS4 gen until 2016, that meant I picked up Forza Horizon 2 on the 360 instead, and thankfully it was not all that downgraded from its Xbox One version. Both games I wound up completing all the races, challenges and finding all the hidden barnyard cars. Yes, I even played through all of the Fast and Furious licensed expansion for Forza Horizon 2 where Ludacris himself as Tej provided voiceovers to set up each race. Before Forza Horizon, another game attempted the same thing a couple years earlier with Test Drive Unlimited. It featured a sorta-GPS replication of the entirety of Oahu as its open world hub and I absolutely ate it up and was white-knuckling the final race which was a one-on-one endurance race against the top ranked AI around the entire outer highway of the island. The sequel was fun too and added another island, but I think one Alex Navarro’s reaction to the opening cutscene in his Quick Look video will be my main takeaway of it. I have mentioned in previous console flashbacks how I love demo-derby racing games, and on 360 Flatout: Ultimate Carnage was king! It is a fantastic follow-up to the PS2/Xbox games, and my brother and I played it online regularly for years, I can go on about it forever, but instead I will embed below a special three-part video where my brother and I raved about why it was one of our favorites….

Many years ago my brother and I made this three-part YouTube series on our fandom for Flatout: Ultimate Carnage The summer of 2010 saw two new arcade racing games debut that both should have been successful new IPs with sequels to this day, but since the two released within a month of each other they presumably took up each other’s player base and both Activision and THQ did not pick them up for sequels. Activision invested in Bizarre for an all new racing IP in Blur, which is essentially conflating the power-ups of Mario Kart with underground street racing, and it was indeed as awesome as that pitch sounds. I played hours of it in the main career mode and online as well. On the other end THQ invested in Black Rock Studios with their innovative racer, Split/Second, a reality show-based driving game where studio directors would triggers obstacles and destructible environments to activate and provided an all-new gripping racing experience. It too was also a riot to endure and 100% finish, but it sadly never received a sequel either.

I loved the Burnout series the previous gen, and EA delivered with an upgraded port of Burnout Revenge that remains my favorite entry in the series to this day. I got into its open world follow-up, Burnout Paradise and developer Criterion were aces with their long-term support of free updates that kept me coming back to it. EA’s other flagship racing series, Need for Speed had a few entries I put serious time into. The 360 launch title, Most Wanted had an intriguing concept of working your way up the “Blacklist” of the most wanted street racers to compete against. When Criterion did an all new reboot of Most Wanted several years later, it combined that concept with the blazing fast gameplay from the Burnout series to my approval. Finally, I will give head-nods of recommendation to both of Sega’s Sonic kart-racers on the 360. They are the top Mario Kart-clones out there, and ooze with Sega fan service. The second game, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed successfully innovated with evolving stages that switched up from racing in karts, then into mini-bi-planes and then onto water-based hovercraft. I completed the careers for both games and put in a fair amount of online play with both entries too. The Fad that was the Plastic Instruments My gut told me the original PS2 Guitar Hero was going to be big within minutes of trying out the original demo in the fabled Kentia Hall at E3 2005. Adored the first game, but the second game was when it went mainstream, and was thrilled with the second game’s HD 360 release in 2007. 2005-2009 was the apex of the genre for my friends and me. There were countless nights of my friends and family passing the guitar around trying to best each other’s scores, and when 360 introduced online leaderboards for each song it upped the competition level even higher. Local city clubs and bars did Guitar Hero tournament nights and my favorite memory from these was on a Guitar Hero III tourney night when it was my turn to go up on stage to pick a random song out of a hat I was the lucky soul to draw one of the hardest songs in the game in the form of Slayer’s “Raining Blood.” I suffered on stage, and barely managed to finish, yet it remains a memory I shall cherish! In fall of 2007, Harmonix splintered away from Red Octane and teamed up with MTV Games to unleash the revolutionary Rock Band that brought in drums and karaoke to the fold for four player co-op play!

I will forever love the countless Rock Band nights I had in the first two Rock Band games that hit in 2007 & 2008, especially the nights I played with my old podcast co-hosts Chris and Scott. I downloaded well over a hundred extra DLC songs over a few years for it, and we would routinely meet up one or two nights a month for Rock Band nights for two years. Almost always, our last song to finish off a session was the final song in the first Rock Band’s career mode that was filled with many wrist-suffering solos, yes I am talking about Outlaws’ “Green Grass and High Tides”. Our Rock Band addiction culminated with the “Bladder of Steel” achievement which we procured when playing every song straight without a fail over the course of several hours! I was almost always the drummer on Rock Band nights. At first no one else wanted to do them, but eventually I got into them and kind of became somewhat decent at it on medium difficulty. One night at an Alice Cooper concert I became entranced at watching the drummer wail away all night that I convinced myself after the show to lay down a $200 pre-order for the premium ION Drum Set for Rock Band….though after a few months something about that bulky set did not gel with me and I did not prefer the way the drumsticks clanked off the pads and I never developed a rhythm for them and eventually gave them away to free up space.

The forgotten gem Rock Band title no one talks about, LEGO Rock Band! Behold one of its awesome boss stages with the Ghostbusters theme song! The plastic instrument genre quickly became oversaturated with numerous entries a year from Activision and EA. At first it was kind of interesting to dive into some of the band focused entries of the series like how Harmonix did a wonderful tribute to The Beatles with reliving their career and its groovy “Dreamscape” stages in The Beatles: Rock Band. The Metallica nut in me feasted on forcing carpal tunnel upon myself with the painfully intricate, yet entrancing solos from almost every track in Guitar Hero: Metallica. By the time Green Day: Rock Band and Guitar Hero: Van Halen rolled around though and other offshoots that I completely skipped like Band Hero and Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits, it was clear the writing was on the wall for the genre. I did manage to sneak in some last doses of fun with a couple other off-the-beaten-path entries though before this genre faded away from its zenith.

The head-bopping mash-ups of DJ Hero with its uniquely intuitive turntable controller and feeding my karaoke addiction with Lips were breaths of fresh air for the genre late in the 360’s life.

Microsoft’s karaoke series on 360, Lips, supplied a fair amount of fun with its unique glow-in-the-dark microphones and four volumes of songs released before Microsoft eventually morphed it into a karaoke pay-per-song app late in the 360’s lifecycle. My buddy Matt introduced me to LEGO Rock Band, which Matt got for free with any Black Friday purchase one year at Kohl’s and we were both nearly burnt out on the genre by this point, but thought we would at least give this graphically unique version a shot. The adorably twee nature of the LEGO visuals with its complementing soundtrack were irresistible, and it instantly won us over. We stuck with it all the way through, and were fans of its music video-esque “boss” levels, with the Ghostbusters theme song stage being one we replayed far too frequently. Another refreshing take on the genre was through DJ Hero and its sequel, DJ Hero II. I loved that turntable controller, and it flawlessly placed me into the DJ world with its mash-up stylings soundtrack and fitting club visuals. Both games were unsung heroes of the genre when they released because they both came out a year or two removed from the apex of the genre’s success, but the DJ & LEGO games brought in some much needed fresh air in that scene. Non-Kinect Casual/Family Game Hits and the Failure that was NXE Now while I almost entirely avoided the Kinect, there still remained deluge of non-Kinect casual party games that were a hit with the family on holidays and friends on game nights. The two Microsoft published Scene It games that came bundled with their user-friendly big button wireless controllers were family favorites for a few years and successful adaptations of the hit movie trivia DVD-board game. A guilty pleasure of mine is legacy licensed trivia/board games/game shows on consoles, and the 360 had plenty of them with solid editions of Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, Apples to Apples, Risk and Family Feud 2012. Doritos Crash Course seemed initially like a forgettable promotional game that was free on XBLA that only offered avatars racing each other on a variety of obstacle courses, but somehow its simple gameplay was addicting and far more entertaining than it had any right to be at family and friend gatherings.

You Don’t Know Jack was a fun revival of the hit PC irreverent trivia series that was dormant for nearly a decade before THQ brought it back on consoles in 2011. Friends and I played through every episode on the disc and its DLC packs, and I revisited it for several years because of one dumb habit where the adorably jerk-of-a-host, Cookie Masterson, would have a unique greeting to open the game if you played on a holiday. The success from this You Don’t Know Jack revival got the developers at then-Jellyvision to revitalize the brand and include a bunch of other party games in the popular yearly Jackbox games that are still going strong as of this writing. I also wanted to squeeze into this chapter of the flashback Microsoft’s polarizing decision to appeal the UI of the 360 to a more family/casual audience and changed the fan favorite “blades” UI into the detested “New Xbox Experience” (NXE) in 2008. Microsoft was trying to synergize with the equally detested UI of its latest PC operating system, Vista. Tablets were starting to become trendy at this point, and Microsoft was resilient on forcing a tablet-esque UI across all its devices and the results were a total system failure. I was among the many who made their outcry heard over how ugly the many rows of diagonally aligned boxes filled with ads were a visual nightmare on the eyes. I was use to some minor ad implementation in the Blades UI before promoting other 360 games available, but the NXE mixed in all sorts of commercials, movie trailers and other assorted promotions that hit the same wrong nerves as those eye-blasting web browser ads.

Microsoft eventually updated and tweaked the NXE into a much more aesthetically pleasing and user-friendly UI that remains on the 360 boot-up today. With the 360 user base understandably a modicum from what it was in its prime today, it is refreshing to see Microsoft lay off as of this writing with a complete absence of ads on the UI. I will also use this space to shout out the premium theme backgrounds that I have used for many years being the pumpkin patch and winter wonder land themes that are always a delight to see when I boot up the 360. Yes, the Xbox Live 360 servers are surprisingly still online in 2020, 15 years after the 360 launch. Most 360 online multiplayer supported games support peer-to-peer multiplayer so as long as Microsoft keeps the lights on, you will still be able to play 360 games online. Microsoft only kept the original Xbox Live servers up for seven and a half years, so to see them more than double that for 360’s servers as of today is…astonishing. Worth noting is some games like Chromehounds, Final Fantasy XI and all EA-published games utilized their own private servers which the publishers have shutdown long ago, so those games are unplayable online, but a vast majority still support the option. Wanna Wrassle? For several years on the 360, one of my yearly holiday season traditions was to buy the latest WWE Smackdown vs. RAW game and complete the career/season story mode and unlock all of the hidden wrestlers and features over the course of a few months. I did this from WWE Smackdown vs. RAW 2007 through 2011. For one of the yearly installments I was so close to unlocking all the achievements to get 1000 gamerscore, but the last one I needed required a grind to complete the main single player career mode five times. I decided at the time this was a perfect opportunity to catch up on past seasons of 24 and brought a second, smaller TV next to my living room TV and absentmindedly button mashed my way through those extra career mode playthroughs, and it took almost the entirety of the second season of 24 to accomplish that feat and earn that final achievement. No regrets!

WWE's yearly Smackdown vs. RAW games featured zombies in their storylines, while All-Stars shifted the gameplay to more arcadey fun for all! The story modes in those yearly WWE games were worth playing through because the writers in some cases got creative and did things that were not possible on TV like having the Undertaker cast mind control spells for example. They added and experimented with a plethora of new modes and options, with the WWE Universe mode being a prime example of going all out creating dream cards and custom storylines. The creation options became incredibly in-depth each year too, in the later installments the developers added a Create-a-Storyline feature that had a surprising level of customization full of custom text entries for dialogue and branching cutscenes. One infamous online community, Video Game Championship Wrestling, became famous for its machinima they created with this system that contained intricate storylines with created wrestlers in its league consisting of video game character icons, developers, comic book & anime characters, fabled movie legends and yes even sprinkling in a few wrestlers. I dabbled in creating a couple simple storylines, but it was too much for me to invest into, but thankfully users could upload and download storylines from the community which added seemingly infinite replay value.

You have not lived until you witnessed an episode of the acclaimed wrestling videogame machinima that is Video Game Championship Wrestling. Will it be Gabe Newell or Dr. Wily who will emerge here as VGCW champion? WWE released a couple spinoff games that were not as feature-dense, and contained more accessible, arcade-like controls. They were on the right path with Legends of Wrestlemania, which highlighted the 80s success of the then-WWF, but absolutely nailed it with WWE All-Stars which featured a hybrid of past legends and current stars, and all of them were intentionally designed to look like roided-out action figures capable of larger-than-life moves like hurling opponents 30 feet into the air in addition to juggling, fighting game-like air combos. This all combined for fun multiplayer sessions with friends and family members who usually are not fans of wrestling games, but genuinely got into the gameplay to my surprise. I rampaged through everything All-Stars had to offer within a couple months after the latest Smackdown vs. RAW game, and was kind of burnt out on wrestling games after this for a while and skipped all future WWE games for several years starting when they changed the branding with WWE ‘12.

TNA iMpact! was from the same people who made All-Stars and had super-fun Ultimate X match as seen above! FirePro Wrestling on the other hand features only controllable Avatars and none of the trademark legacy 2D gameplay the brand is usually known for. There were a few other non-WWE games I tried out before I took a 360 wrestling game sabbatical. Rumble Roses XX was the first 360 wrestling game and the second all-women wrestler game in America after its PS2 predecessor. Never put as much time into it as I meant to, so I cannot leave any lasting impressions on it other than it gave Dead or Alive a lot of competition with its variety of costumes. I did put a lot of time into TNA iMpact! however, which was the game the All-Stars developers worked on before. At the time it hit, I was into the TNA promotion, and the game was a pretty good representation of that product with a fun Ultimate X mode, and a story mode circled around a fictional costumed wrestler named Suicide who went on to become an actual wrestler in the promotion in 2008, and the character has remained there off-and-on to this day. Lucha Libre AAA Heroes del Ring introduced the high-flying luchadores from Mexico with their own exclusive game and featured some familiar past WCW/WWE/TNA stars, but had problematic controls to prevent it from having any lasting appeal. I never played the Kinect motion-based wrestling game, Hulk Hogan’s Main Event, but I have seen clips online to witness it in its near-broken state that lives up to one of my favorite reviews on Game Informer where it became one of their worst rated games ever. There are a couple of low budget Avatar Wrestling games on the Indie Games channel on 360 that are basic affairs, but there is one Avatar-based grappler that somehow got a full fledge XBLA release with the much-respected, best-in-class FirePro Wrestling branding. Those games have been a decades-long line of some of the best 2D wrestling games of all time, and somehow Microsoft was able to secure that branding for an admittedly decent and accessible Avatar wrestling game, but a game that should in no way be worthy of that elite branding. That would be like Phillips securing the Zelda and Mario licenses for their own low-rent made games on their CDi system….oh wait. Sports-ball Forever! Time to highlight some of my favorite go-to sports games on the system. Starting off with football, there I got use to buying Madden every two or three years. I only rented the 360 launch title, Madden NFL 06, which wounded up being one of the worst debut Madden titles on a console ever. This is because of EA’s overblown “Target Gameplay” video they debuted at a previous E3 where the final game, while still graphically a leap above Xbox/PS2, was far from what they teased. To make it worse, that was the same year they debuted the doomed “vision cone” gameplay feature in the earlier PS2/Xbox versions that went over so poorly that they had to disable it as a default option for the 360 version and hide it in the options. This was also the first lead Madden game to remove John Madden himself (and co-commentator Al Michaels) from commentary in favor of a nameless afterthought of a radio-style announcer. Madden NFL ‘06 is easily the all-time worst lead-platform version of Madden!

This video encapsulates why Madden 06 was an atrocity of a debut on the platform…at least it had easy achievements.

EA stepped it up with later entries, with Madden ‘10 remaining a favorite of mine for the brand this gen. I still recall that edition was when EA initially introduced their cash cow microtransaction-focused “Ultimate Team” feature as a free DLC a few months after its release. How foolish I seem now for at first dismissing it as an interesting curiosity I could not bother to invest a dime into ever, but only to see it blow up in DLC sales for EA and become integrated across all of EA’s sports titles and other publisher’s sports games within a few years. I only picked up one college EA effort this gen via NCAA Football ‘12 which was technically free with a six-month subscription to Sports Illustrated, but I got the most out of that game, and was huge into its “Road to Glory” mode. Road to Glory had my created player play out his final year of high school, and then go through a full college season. EA were absolute pros at this point with their college game, perfectly capturing the college game pageantry by jam-packing the it full of college anthems, cheerleaders, mascots and first-class commentary from the old College Gameday crew of Kirk Herbstreit and Brad Nessler. EA was also surprisingly generous with a community create-a-school option where users could create and upload teams and stadiums, and sure enough someone created my middle-of-nowhere Midwest FCS school and high school teams. It remains a heartbreaker (for good reason though) that EA pulled out of college sports games after the NCAA student athlete class action lawsuit, with NCAA Football ‘14 being their final installment. I do not feel that much love for EA though because of how they squashed 2K’s attempt at returning to football videogames with All-Pro Football 2K8. 2K signed on a couple hundred retired legends for their game, and players could pick a handful of legends to be the standout stars on their otherwise auto-generated teams. It was a fun, different approach, which EA quickly put the kibosh on by signing many of those legends away to appear in throwaway historical features in future Madden games. As I mentioned earlier though, EA did win back some favor with me by resurrecting the Blitz franchise with their excellent XBLA version of NFL Blitz.

There were a few other non-NFL games on the 360 I gave an honest try to, with Midway releasing an unlicensed, M-rated version of Blitz before they went bankrupt with Blitz: The League II. It showcases M-rated behind-the-scenes drama storylines, and more brutal and violent hits that bestow it the M-rating, and if you can handle that, then it is worth checking out. Finally, Backbreaker was an ahead-of-its-time pigskin game that debuted an all new physics engine that EA would eventually incorporate into Madden games. While the tech was not quite all the way there, the thing I associate most with that game is it playing P.O.D.’s “Here Comes the Boom” on every…single…kickoff. It was a huge detraction in my review, and I was surprised to see a few weeks later an email from my editor at the time passing along a note from the developers to revisit the game after an update addressing reviewer feedback, which did address a multitude of things, but at the top of the list was reducing the amount of times P.O.D.’s jam played to only twice a game, thank god! On the basketball side of things, I remained a huge fan of the NBA 2K series. The 360 carried over the awesome 24/7 mode I adored from PS2/Xbox era, which was an in-depth career mode for a single created baller, doing a global tour of the street hoops circuit. The 2K games struck gold in NBA 2K11 when Michael Jordan graced the cover and the game added a new historical Jordan mode where he relived his most monumental games with historically accurate rosters, and vintage 90s telecast presentation and commentary. The Jordan mode was a success, and integration of NBA legends became a big selling point on the 2K games going forward with future installments having a theme around the Jordan/Magic/Bird NBA breakout success of the 80s and the iconic ’92 Olympic Dream Team.

EA had a downward spiral with their sim hoops games, and I only tried out a couple demos of the earlier NBA Live titles this gen that did not win me over, including the attempted re-branding of the series with NBA Elite ‘11. That doomed demo was so glitch-laden that it got EA to cancel and recall the game from retailers mere days before its street date, and took them three years to launch another proper console NBA sim. I did love EA’s re-launch of NBA Jam however, along with the XBLA sequel, On Fire Edition. They hit all the right notes on re-introducing the classic arcade gameplay to a new generation. No idea why they have not done another NBA Jam since however, but at least On Fire Edition is back-compat on Xbox One and Series S|X. The PS3 consumed the bulk of my baseball playing time with their awesome MLB: The Show games of that era. However, I do have one chuckle-worthy memory of staying up late playing a lot of 2K’s arcade take on baseball, The Bigs, at a friend’s place one night. We played several games and I recall being impressed at how fast each game breezed by. I skipped all hockey sims this generation too, with the only time I digitally hit the ice this gen being EA’s killer NHL game on XBLA, 3-on-3 NHL Arcade, which delivered the hat trick of arcade fun gameplay, creative power-ups and intuitive controls.

For alternative and single player sports games, I already raved about Top Spin 2 during the 360 launch window. I could never get into EA’s thumb-stick controls for its Fight Night games, but I did enjoy 2K’s Don King’s Prize Fighter, which came from the same team that made the Rocky games on the previous gen I preferred more. Of all the MMA games, I briefly got into THQ’s UFC 2010, but the game always became a chore when gameplay transitioned into ground submissions. I enjoyed Tony Hawk’s Project 8 when it launched, but that series also had a fall from grace with several failed experimental games once EA stepped up the competition with Skate. One of the greatest mysteries in gaming history to me will always be Skate 3’s staying power in sales seeing it on sale for so many years that eventually EA repackaged the game in an Xbox One case with a sticker on it saying it is playable on both the 360 and through back-compat on Xbox One because there were no longer any other 360 retail games on store shelves. I tried a few times to get into Skate, but like the Fight Night games, the thumb-stick focused controls never gelled with me and I could never adapt. No Russian, No Cauldron

For several years straight, from the 360 launch in 2005 through 2012 I played every yearly installment from Activision’s flagship brand, Call of Duty. The first couple of years it was not that much though. Call of Duty 2 I only played several times in local couch multiplayer battles when friends brought over a copy. I always regretted never renting or buying it cheap to play through the single player campaign which I heard is excellent. Ditto that for the original CoD which eventually got a re-release on XBLA as Call of Duty Classic. However, I played through the entire campaigns for the next six games. CoD3 I rented from GameFly and breezed through in a weekend in split-screen co-op with my brother and did not think much of it at the time, but came to learn later that when playing in co-op it removes a few levels that proved to be too daunting to be handled in split screen. Then in 2007 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare released and first person shooters as we knew it changed. 13 years later it still has two of the most powerful moments in a FPS campaign in the form of the nuclear blast and its immediate fallout in the failed helicopter escape, and THE sniping level of all sniping levels in the flashback mission which immerses the player so well into the sniper role at its apex moment, that few other games since have managed to achieve. It overall was an incredibly gratifying campaign, which was equaled with a revolutionary online multiplayer experience that popularized persistent online multiplayer unlocks with a seemingly endless barrage of weapon and character customization unlocks to keep players reeled in. I was never “hooked” into the multiplayer on a regular basis, but starting with CoD4 and for the next few games I would occasionally pop on and play with colleagues who did play all the time, and had a blast catching up while apologizing for not carrying my own with my less-than-ideal kill/death/ratio.

World at War was an interesting revisit back to World War II and I enjoyed Keifer Sutherland’s voiceover talents as a superior barking orders at me throughout. It also debuted its survival variant in Zombies mode that was a hit that year and frequently played with co-workers on game nights. While that mode would become a bigger focus and more expanded with each successive CoD game, for whatever reason it never became as popular or played as much then as in World at War. 2009’s Modern Warfare 2 somehow met the high bar for the quality of campaign that the first game set, and its “No Russian” level I will never forget and I was bug-eyed throughout it as I never experienced anything like it before or since while my character attempted to keep his cover. As good as Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare titles were, Treyarch stepped it up with 2010’s Black Ops and its Vietnam War setting. It remains my favorite single player campaign from this stretch of CoD games. The meaning of the “numbers” touched on throughout the campaign had a meaningful payoff, and I loved how Treyarch sprinkled in their own unique gameplay intricacies like “diving to prone” and my love for the RC Car killstreak bonus in multiplayer. No matter how much of a weak link I was for my coworkers in online multiplayer, as long as I got just one set of three kills straight to get that fun RC Car perk, then I considered that a successful multiplayer session! Infinity Ward had a satisfying conclusion to the Modern Warfare trilogy with MW3 in 2011, but 2012’s Black Ops II was surprisingly underwhelming to me. It felt like they tried to do too much with the campaign, and sprinkled in optional bonus missions I felt obligated to do, but broke up the narrative for me. Of course, it could have been CoD burnout by this point, and I have never played another CoD game since. If I were to play the campaign of just one CoD game after this from 2013 on, what would you recommend?

For five years I anticipated the low budget FPS efforts from Cauldron that had me reliving past historical battles and as a DC Secret Service agent seen above. Interestingly, while Treyarch and Infinity Ward took turns each year this gen delivering Activision’s big holiday FPS hit, quietly another studio, Cauldron, yearly released five budget-tiered FPS titles under the Activision Value banner. These little publicized releases always caught my eye, and I had no idea if it was the case, but Cauldron’s games felt like where Activision would send freshly recruited developers to get their feet wet before getting promoted to the CoD teams. Three of Cauldron’s five games were History Channel licensed games themed around recreating and reliving both sides of war in two installments based around the Civil War, and another in the Japanese theater of World War II. The history nut in me appreciated the History Channel-produced intro video for each level, and it was a budget-friendly alternative come down FPS game to breeze through in a weekend after the latest blockbuster CoD game. Cauldron also did a DC-terrorist themed FPS in Secret Service, and Jurassic Park-inspired FPS titled, Jurassic: The Hunted. I imagine all of these play horribly outdated now, but I still will appreciate them for what they brought to the plate. Dubious Honors

Hulk Hogan’s Main Event and NBA Elite 11 top the dubious honors list for reasons I already ranted on above, but wanted to make sure to at least notate here. Moving on to other bad games, here are a handful that I was not a fan of: Rogue Warrior was a super-short and barebones functioning FPS published from Bethesda, but bizarrely got AAA buzz and marketing. It did have a catchy closing credits song though. Turning Point was an FPS from Codemasters with an interesting concept of a post-WWII shooter if the Nazis won the war, but poorly executed and reason why Codemasters has primarily stuck with racing games since (although they did attempt one more FPS with Bodycount which I did not play, but understand is just as atrocious). One game that went on to have a misrepresented history I reviewed at the time was Bullet Witch. It was a middle-tier single player action game published by Atari, and while it had some problems I made sure to point out in my six out of ten review, I received serious flak from a few friends for overrating the game. While I addressed the game’s issues and marked it down appropriately so, I did have a fair amount of fun with the boss battles and messing around with some of the more powerful spells. Over the years I have seen many bill this game with the label that it is among the worst on the 360 with the same kind of tone and vitriol as ET received on the 2600. Even Mr. Microsoft Larry Hyrb poked fun at the game in an online video long ago. Again it is not a great game by any means, but it is far better than what a lot of people make it out to be.

An XBLA game that got one of their marketed themed event releases (‘Summer of Arcade’, ‘Fall Feast,’ etc.) was TMNT: Out of the Shadows. It looked to be a cannot-miss 3D brawler TMNT game, and with that level of hype how could it go wrong? Very much so in fact, and with some of the worst camera controls in gaming I could not put it down fast enough. Another painfully disappointing TMNT game was the aforementioned XBLA remake of Turtles in Time. It played well enough like the original, but the redone visuals did not capture the spirit of the affable 80s/90s cartoon like the original did, and it stripped out the SNES bonus levels and had poorly substituted voiceovers. Stay away! There were a couple of semi-decent 360/PS3 era Turtles games. Nickelodeon TMNT was a perfectly serviceable brawler that did a better job of bringing back the good memories of the arcade classics than Re-Shelled did. Ubisoft released a single player platformer/action game to coincide with the 2007 CG film, TMNT. It too was pretty straightforward, and not earth-shattering, but at least hit some TMNT fan service marks good enough to be a worthwhile entry. Danger of the Ooze is one that slipped through the cracks that I rarely hear talked about likely because it released late in the 360/PS3 lifecycle in 2014. This should be played by any Turtles fan because this is the standout Turtles game this gen from the platforming masters at Wayforward with their take on a pretty fun MetroidVania-style game the TMNT license seemed destined for all this time. Lightning Round Quick Hits

Microsoft did not release 360’s successor, the Xbox One until 2013, so with eight years between the 360 and Xbox One, a boatload of games hit that system and I played far too many of them which is why this is going on far longer than it should have. There remains a hearty amount of AAA, mid-tier, XBLA and other noteworthy games that I want to give their due, so bear with me as I attempt to rapid fire through these… -I got wrapped in too many open world games this gen, and I want to first give props to RockStar Games for managing to finish two of their behemoths in the form of Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption. GTAIV is the only GTA I finished the storyline for, and Niko Belic will be one of my favorite protagonists. The cell phone activities were initially a chore to retain friendship ratings, but eventually I came around to bowling, cab rides, comedy clubs and rounds of pool. RDR was the ultimate Wild West open world game. Neversoft’s 360 launch title, Gun, was in my backlog still and I blitzed through that in the weeks leading up to RDR’s launch because I just knew it would blow it away. Gun was a decent effort from Neverseft, but quickly became obsolete when starting up RDR, which did not disappoint, and delivered a remarkably atmospheric experience for its time in 2010. I loved getting lost on adventures out in the wild, and that original score is masterful and could not be have been better crafted. That final several hours of gameplay based around the family ranch is an incredibly bold choice of gameplay that will always have a special place with me. Kudos to RockStar with their spooky-themed story expansion, Undead Nightmare, which is a hell of a side story to RDR that is well worth your time all these years later!

GTA IV put a lot of attention on its mini-games that were entertaining shoulder content, and Red Dead Redemption introduced a drop-dead gorgeous wild-west open world I would crave getting lost in and exploring for adventures. -Another one of my top 10 favorites on the 360 released on the same day as RDR, and I am talking about sci-fi third person thriller that is Alan Wake. I got completely absorbed into Alan’s quest to find his wife, and Remedy had a five star presentation to keep me on my seat. Some people criticized its style of combat, but it worked for me, and I believe it will go down as the only game where its deadliest weapon in its arsenal is a flare gun! Easily the spookiest T-rated game I have played. Do not skip out on the DLC episodes that put a nice bow on the story, and the XBLA sort-of time loop sequel, American Nightmare

-Two open world games that I shamefully have resting in my backlog to this day are GTAV and Bully. I picked up both on 360, and eventually picked up the Xbox One version of GTAV. You know what open world games I did play through though? The first two Just Cause titles. This satirical take on the James Bond-super agent was right up my alley, and Rico’s unique gadgetry like hookshots, parachutes, and wide variety of instant vehicle drops innovated in new ways to traverse its gigantic open world. The chaos and destruction those games both were capable of raised the bar with how creative one could be to lay waste to their surroundings. -I already commented above how the first Saints Row lived up to its potential from its E3 demonstration I saw a year before its release. The sequels surprisingly kept getting better and better. The first two games were essentially damn good GTA-clones, but with both games having more zany activities and side missions than in GTA. Saints Row the Third upped the outrageous quotient for its plot and side missions, and was groundbreaking for how far it pushed the boundaries with its whacked out style of storytelling.

-It did not feel right to include it with the racing games above, but another recommended open world title from this era is Driver: San Francisco. Ubisoft and Reflections nailed making an open world driving game without races being the focal point. The spirit-car-swapping feature against all odds is cleverly explained, and actually works! -Despite its popularity I could never get into the Assassin’s Creed games which debuted in this generation. A friend borrowed me the first game and at first I was into its setting and gameplay, but that first game was notoriously rough around the edges and I believe I got hung up on a glitch that prevented me from making progress roughly halfway through, and I have inadvertently been done with the series since. I picked up a few other entries over the years and have been wanting to at least try them, especially hearing how the latest ones keep getting better and better. One day! -I finished my first Resident Evil game on the 360 with Resident Evil 5. That game also featured online co-op, but I ventured fourth and played it solo and still had an impeccable time with it. It put more of an emphasis on action to the dismay of critics, but having not played too much of prior entries that did not bother me, and there were still plenty of intense thrills had throughout.

This is easily my favorite arcade stick ever, and the exquisite 2011 Mortal Kombat reboot made its tall asking price worth it! -This generation saw collector’s editions become out of control, with games packed with all kinds of statures, Master Chief helmets, night-vision cameras and other gadgets for well over $100. The only one of these I invested in was 2011’s Mortal Kombat. I originally was not too hyped for that game because I had my fill of the series at that point after the three good entries on PS2/Xbox, and felt the series had nothing else to offer. My brother however is a big MK-fan and told me how he ordered the $200 edition that came with premium arcade-replica fighter stick. I went to his place to drop something off one day when he wasn’t home, and he told me had the game and stick hooked up and to give it a try while I was there. Within minutes of starting the story mode and realizing how they were reimagining the original trilogy and how they switched up the gameplay for that generation, I became immediately entranced with it and could not think of any other way to play it without that stick and could not rush home fast enough to pluck down a $200 order. I made sure to get a lot of use out of that stick, and is was absolutely worth it!

-Sniper: Ghost Warrior is an unorthodox FPS focused entirely on sniping, and for being a low-budget game at the time I had way more fun than I should have with it. Also loved how it did a 180 from games like CoD, where instead of one sniping mission to mix up the campaign gameplay, here there is one run ‘n gun mission for a break from all that sniping throughout the campaign! I am glad this game had a ton of success and City Interactive has released a few sequels that I hope to emerge from my backlog of doom. -I already elucidated on my Borderland 2 experience earlier. The first Borderlands was a surprise out of nowhere hit that I loved my first few days with it and could not get enough plowing through the campaign online with friends. Unfortunately I went on vacation a few days after it released for a week, and when I got back, sure enough, most of my friends were many levels higher than me and already vanquished the game, so I soldiered on the final third of the game on my own. It was a challenge and a half to beat the final gi-normous tentacle-laden boss, but I managed to squeak by it after gradually picking away from it behind a boulder for nearly an hour!

-I had a unique experience with the Portal games. The first one I initially played for about 15 minutes, quickly became frustrated with the teleporting mechanics and had to step away from it. A couple years later, an old co-worker Rick was one of many by that point stating why those games were some of the best games out there. I told him my case, and he offered to come over and bestow his Portal wisdom upon me. Many thanks to Rick, who did not straight-up spoil and told me what to do to get past Portal’s many puzzle rooms, but instead kind of nudged me into gradually easing into a feel for the core mechanics of the game and it helped greatly! I would not have been able to get into it without him. He had a surprise for me when he left, and left me his copy of Portal 2 to borrow and told me not to give it back to him until I finished it. I knew he was moving in a couple months at that point, and that compelled me to put all my attention into the Portal games. I am glad I did because both games are spectacular, especially the sequel which had a noticeably bigger budget to go all out with a AAA experience and narrative that came together to be one of my favorite games of that generation. -Bulletstorm was another innovative FPS with its implementation of a whip, and combining it with melee strikes and gunplay for a refreshing take on FPSs. It kind of came and went though, and I rarely hear people talk about it anymore, except for briefly last year when it got a re-release on Xbox One/PS4, with an extra DLC to have Duke Nukem replace the original protagonist’s voiceovers for the game. I will also associate the original Bulletstorm release for having one of the worst box arts of all time. It is just a no-frills footprint. If you played Bulletstorm before, sure, it will kind of make sense since kicking is a core melee attack, but if you were a potential consumer browsing games and had no clue about Bulletstorm then I would not blame you for not giving that cover more than half a second’s worth of thought.

-The trilogy of BioShock titles were all high ranking in my top 10 game of the year lists for their appropriate years. The first game immersed me into its aquatic utopia gone haywire, and it stood out from standard FPSs of the time with its heavy emphasis on its narrative and hunting down those audio tapes to get every nook and cranny of the story. Its “twist” was something else for its time, and remains one of my favorites to this day. The sequel had a lot of polarization because it was from a different studio, but I felt they mixed it up by playing as a Big Daddy for the whole game and I could not get enough of freezing Splicers and then doing a drill rush attack that shattered them into pieces. BioShock Infinite was an astounding way to wrap the trilogy with its mesmerizing city-in-the-sky setting, and one of my favorite storylines from this gen. Its two storyline DLC episodes that released around a year later are worth checking out if you missed out, especially the second episode that changed the gameplay into more stealth-based by playing as Elizabeth. It felt like a whole new game, and developer Irrational absolutely perfected the change-up! -Spec Ops: The Line will not light the world on fire for its stick-to-fundamentals third person action gameplay, but what appears to start off as just another rah-rah military shooter, eventually morphs into a far deeper and complex plot than what I thought it was going to be. A book eventually came out thoroughly breaking down its exposition because it stormed up that much of a discussion around it.

-Shmup fans had several worthy entries to play on the 360. Raiden IV and Deathsmiles were landmark new entries for the genre in their time. On XBLA, there were re-releases of a pair of renowned shmups from Treasure: Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun. A pair of original shooters also stood out among the XBLA crop with the free of charge student developed game, Aegis Wing and also the beloved Sine Mora that captured the pilot play-by-play stylings of Star Fox and successfully merging it into a shmup. There were also a fair amount of Japan-exclusive shmups for the 360, most notably from respected shooter developer, Cave. Many of them are region-free and can be played on American 360s, so please keep that in mind! -I already told some tales above about my favorite comic book games, and embedded below is a video where I and my friend Matt painstakingly dissect a ton of comic book games that hit the 360. Highlights include the shockingly good movie licensed games, X-Men Origins: Wolverine & Captain America. Not-so-good highlights include the movie licensed Watchmen, Fantastic Four and Hellraiser games. Matt also had a lot more hands on time with the acclaimed Batman: Arkham and Spider-Man games on 360, and I have always respected his expertise in the genre so please give his takes a listen below! -The Telltale adventure/choose-your-own path story-driven games originally started off on PC, but became more and more popular with their console releases. I was 100% into the first two seasons of their Walking Dead games like everyone else. Loved the first one more, but my favorite Telltale episodic game is still Back to the Future. The Wolf Among Us was a fascinating twist on a mature dystopian fairy tale world. I was not impressed by their take on Game of Thrones, but I surprisingly enjoyed all eight episodes of Minecraft. I originally got that for my nephew who was huge into Minecraft at the time to play with, but he was not all that into this genre and I found myself getting into it instead. Telltale was pumping out so many of these episodic series that I could not keep up, and still one day want to go back and play through both Batman seasons they released, and their Borderlands series too which I hear is their best work.

Back to the Future remains my favorite Telltale episodic game, but the event-like nature of the first season of Walking Dead was an undeniable zeitgeist while it transpired. -The LEGO co-op games we know today based off nearly every license imaginable became ubiquitous this gen. Only one I put serious time into and was able to finish was LEGO Marvel Superheroes. This one is special to me because it was the first game that I got my nephew Carter really into right when he was old enough to start grasping modern controller-based games. Had to help him out in quite a few parts, but we got threw it, and now several years later his gaming skills have greatly improved, and I will gladly give him a humble brag on his conquest of finishing the tough-as-nails Cuphead.

-I subscribed to the Official Xbox Magazine for several years, until around 2009-ish, and I was surprised that they stuck with including demo discs for another year or two after that since downloading demos quickly made the discs obsolete. OXM did attempt a few exclusive disc goodies though, and one I always came back to was their own take on an episodic game called OXM Universe that lasted for about a couple years. The disc itself awarded up to 1000 “OXM” points based on checking out all the demos and videos on the disc. Those points could be used in the space ship station game, OXM Universe, which was entirely menu-driven to build space station tech and explore a galaxy. It did lead up to a decent conclusion if you stuck with it all the way to the demo disc that came with issue 100 and upon completing all the final tasks you are rewarded with a lengthy video filled with OXM staff past and present thanking everyone. THAT IS MIGHTY COOL OF THEM TO GO TO ALL THAT WORK FOR A DEMO DISC EXTRA!!! -I think one thing we take for granted in today’s console space is the ridiculous amount of weekly sales and specials on digital games across all platforms. It was not always that way. In the early years of the 360 digital marketplace, for a couple years all that was available was one weekly game on sale and one piece of DLC on sale each week and that was it for a couple years. Luckily, Steam was catching fire with their acclaimed Fall and Winter sales with their monster savings, and that eventually rubbed off on 360 and PS3 and by the end of those system’s lifecycles both started offering a surplus of weekly deals and flash sales. -Digital game preservation is something that is brought up more and more lately, and one thing that periodically ruminates in my mind is how the 360 handles patches/updates. For the longest time, most games had limits of 4mb patches until the later years in the system’s life where they started to change into the larger file sizes we associate with them today. However, the 360 has a nasty habit of auto-purging a game’s update on the 360 after several different games get played on the 360. So if you were to revisit an older comfort food game many years down the line long after the 360 online servers got shut down, any updates for that game were likely auto-deleted and cannot be re-downloaded. This could be huge for a lot of games whose patches likely helped patch out game breaking bugs and other issues that can no longer be downloaded whenever the 360 servers go offline. Just food for thought.

-Final random item I want to bring up is something you saw in the header image to this special. Yes, that is a leaning gallery of 360 faceplates! Remember those? They were kind of a thing for the first couple years of the 360 when Microsoft was flexing the customization options of the 360 so anyone can snap on or off a variety of 360 faceplates to make their system stand out in their own way. I never bought a single faceplate, and only procured them if they were pre-order bonuses, or part of some promotional giveaway. The only highlight of this was how I got my Madden NFL 08 faceplate, and that was when I participated in my Gamestop’s yearly Madden tournament where no more than four people showed up for the few years I participated. The year I won, was when I got the Madden NFL 08 faceplate, which sure as hell beats my Madden NFL 07 plastic beverage cup from the previous tourney! It will forever remain in my drawer with my faceplates for Full Auto, Eternal Sonata and Deathsmiles. It is not like there is some uber-popular YouTuber who has a unique fandom for that particular version of Madden who could benefit from it in any certain way. To the drawer the faceplate remains! ”It’s an Ocean” (THE END!!!) OMG, this took me a whole month to gradually pick away at. I did not come close at all to releasing this in time for the 360’s 15th anniversary of its launch. I feel that I could have made this into a mini-eBook and charged six cents for this!!! As you can tell from my many memories I have shared thus far, the 360 is a platform I hold in high regard. I waited three years to upgrade to the Xbox One and PS4 in 2016, so from late 2005 until late 2016, the 360 was one of my primary go to consoles. Which is why I had so many memories, good and bad, to get out of my system. If you want to catch up on one of about a dozen other flashback specials I have crafted like this (which are thankfully significantly shorter) over the years check out the links below. In the meantime, I will close this off with two embedded videos of episodes of my old podcast I recently un-vaulted circled around the 360. They are the final installments of our history of comic book games and RPG games series. Both episodes focus on the games that hit for those genres up until the point the episode was recorded for 360, PS3 and Wii. Many thanks once again if you have stuck with me for these near-18,000 words of garbled memories of mine, I sincerely appreciate it and I will see you all next time if I can somehow muster enough energy after this beast of an entry for yet another anniversary flashback special!

Listen to us break down almost all the RPGs that his this gen released through 2008

And here we dissect all the comic book games released on these platforms through April of 2011 My Other Gaming Flashbacks Dreamcast 20th Anniversary GameBoy 30th Anniversary Genesis 30th Anniversary NES 35th Anniversary PSone 25th Anniversary PS2 20th Anniversary PSP 15th Anniversary and Neo-Geo 30th Anniversary Saturn and Virtual Boy 25th Anniversaries TurboGrafX-16 30th Anniversary and 32-X 25th Anniversary

If you made it this far and have yet to experience the THING that is Rogue Warrior’s end credits theme song, then I dare you to click it above and not have Mickey Rourke’s lyrical lashings remain forever stuck in your head!

Enjoy this montage of the many creative demises of the worst sidekick in the history of videogames! You’re Still Here!? Well Then, Let Me Tell You Another Story About the Shephard….Not That Shepard

It is not my tale to tell of “another story about the Shephard.” Hopefully, EA and BioWare will right that ship as they teased at the recent Game Awards a few weeks ago. I am talking about the other Shepard on Xbox 360, that being Lost: Via Domus’s Jack Shephard. Jack and most (not all) of the cast from the first season of Lost are in that game, but are not playable. Instead, a new offscreen Oceanic survivor is introduced as the playable character, Elliot. The game was an average licensed adventure-lite game affair (find out all about by click or pressing here for my original review), but at the time when it released Lost was in its fourth of six TV seasons, and I was eating up every bit of fan service that game offered. It did have a couple minor things never seen in the TV show like the Dharma magnet, and I loved its ending which got my mind reeling with it possibly tying into new fan theories from the latest episodes of the show at the time. One in particular being my favorite episode of the series, “The Constant.” Not a great game, but loved how it treated the license. That said, this hit a few years before Telltale hit big with its Walking Dead games, and I can only imagine if they were the ones to give their episodic adventure game treatment to Lost instead. Now that is another story about the Shepard I would be all-in for day one!

[itsjanetimbengan]

South Korea 2018: Travel Guide (6-Day Itinerary + Budget)

It was mid-September last year and with the autumn approaching, South Korea boasted its mixture of green, yellow, orange, and red glamorous shades of leaves. It’s the season where it is mostly sunny but still giving you chill temperature that you still have to wear cozy clothes to keep you warm, especially at night.

And aside from being a dreamy background during this season, South Korea is well-known for its K-drama, K-Pop entertainment, Korean fashion, and, of course, Korean skincare!

How to get a Korean Tourist Visa?

Before, anyone can apply directly at the Korean Embassy, but by the time I was processing my Korean Visa, around August 2018, a new policy has been made that the application will need to course through Korean Embassy’s designated travel agencies only.

Step 1: Prepare the documents/requirements needed for your application. Below is the list of the documents you need to prepare in getting your Korean Visa:

1. A duly accomplished printed visa application form. Download the form HERE. Print the form in A4 size of bond paper. Fill in the form completely (Must be computerized, not handwritten. Do not leave anything blank). For items that are not applicable for you, kindly leave it blank.

2. Passport-sized Picture. Prepare a colored 4.5 cm x 4.5 cm photo with white background.

3. Philippine Passport. Must have at least 6 months validity and with at least 2 blank pages.

4. Photocopy of current Philippine Passport bio page. This is found on page 2 (the part where your passport photo and other info are shown).

5. Original and photocopy of valid visa(s) and arrival stamps to OECD member countries within the last 5 years, if applicable. Click HERE for a list of Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries. If you have been to any of the OECD countries, make sure to submit the original and photocopy of the relevant visas and arrival stamps.

Additional requirements if you’re applying WITHOUT GUARANTOR:

If you’ll be shouldering all of your travel expenses in Korea, you must prove that you are capable of doing it. You must present the following:

a. For Employees

1. Certificate of Employment. Must contain the address of the employer, the landline number and email address of employer’s HR department, applicant’s position, date hired, and compensation.

2. Original Bank Certificate. Must include account type, current balance, account opening date, and 6 months average balance (ADB).

3. Original or certified true copy of bank statements/passbook covering the last 3 months.

4. Photocopy of ITR (Form 2316). If you have travelled to OECD member countries within the last 5 years, you are exempt from submitting an ITR.

5. Copy of PRC Card or IBP Card, if applicable only.

b. For Self-Employed

1. Photocopy of Business registration form from DTI or SEC. Must include pages with the names of stockholders.

2. Photocopy of Business permit or Mayor’s permit.

3. Photocopy of ITR (Income Tax Return) or Form 2316 with corresponding payment receipt from BIR authorized bank and with pages including net income and total revenue.

4. Original Personal Bank Certificate. Must include account type, current balance, account opening date, ADB.

5. Original or certified true copy of bank statements/passbook covering the last 3 months.

6. Copy of PRC Card or IBP Card, if applicable only.

Step 2: Submit the requirements to accredited travel agencies

As mentioned, Korean Embassy will no longer accept direct application. You will need to submit your documents to accredited travel agencies.

For list of Korean Embassy – accredited travel agencies, click HERE.

I processed my visa application through Reli Tours and Travel Company in SM Megamall since it is near our office. They charged me 700 pesos for the handling fee and kindly note that personal appearance is required. You can check their website HERE.

Step 3: Wait for your Korean Visa

Normally, visa processing will take 7-10 business working days but, sometimes it can be as fast as 3 working days.

Reli Tours texted me on Saturday morning that my visa was already available however, they didn’t indicate if it was approved or not (side story: I was in Cebu that time and will be back in Manila the next day so, imagine the anxiety of waiting to see the result of your application…) The Monday next week, I claimed my passport and yay it was approved!!!

How long is the validity of the visa?

Korean Visa is valid within the next 3 months (90 days) of the issue date and you can stay in Korea for as long as 59 days.

How to get to South Korea?

Typically, people book going to Incheon International Airport which a lot of airlines fly from Manila. Flight prices start from 10,000 pesos (if not promo), excluding the baggage allowance. Luckily, we scored our flight for only 3,000 pesos!!! Thank you, Cebu Pac piso sale!

WiFi in South Korea

We booked an unlimited 4G wifi for 7 days thru Klook. While you can connect to internet anywhere in Korea, it is best that you have your own pocket wifi so as to help you navigate the places around (hello, Google maps!). The rate is P110 per day which is pretty cheap yet giving you a super reliable internet connection. Book HERE!

Upon arrival at the airport, we picked up the device at their booth.

Getting Around South Korea

The most efficient and easiest way to travel around South Korea is by train. Just purchase a T-Money card (like a beep card) from any 711 store, load it, and use it in subways, trains, and public buses. With this, you can save the hassle from purchasing single journey tickets every time.

We mostly use Google Maps to guide us going to our destination and to see train stations. You can also download Seoul Subway App to help you find out which stations you should take.

From airport, since we arrived late at night, Airport Express Train (AREX) was already closed - operating hours is from 5:30 AM to 11:00 PM only. However, there are buses outside the airport, just check the nearest bus stop from the location of your hotel.

Place to Visit in South Korea

N SEOUL TOWER

Famous for its love locks, Namsan Seoul Tower is Seoul’s most iconic landmark where you can indulge the scenic view of the entire city.

We were welcomed by a wooden terrace which will lead you to “Locks of Love” area located at the roof terrace. A thousand of padlocks were attached to the fence by the couples symbolizing their eternal love.

Inside the tower, after we wandered around Hello Kitty Island, we queued for the elevator going to the observation deck. The observatory offers the 360° panoramic view of the entire city of Seoul at a glance. As the dusk fell, darkness gathered all around and the lights from the buildings blinked on, rewarding us with the dazzling sight of stars and luminescence below.

Book HERE (N Seoul Tower Obeservatory Deck + Hello Kity Island = Php 489)

Admission fee: Namsan Cable Car = KRW 9,000, 10:00 am - 11:00 pm

Directions: Take exit 3 of Myeongdong Station (Seoul Subway Line 4), walk for about 10-15 minutes following the right side of the Pacific Hotel to Namsan Cable Car Station.

EVERLAND

Everland, the largest theme park in Korea, offers 5 different themed zones – Global Fair, American Adventure, Magic Land, European Adventure, and Zootopia, serving you some thrilling rides and some child and family-friendly attractions.

Being a kid at heart, I always have a soft spot for amusement parks. I like riding heart-stopping and rip-roaring rides. However, we just strolled around mostly in garden areas since my bestfriend is not a fan of thrilling rides.

Book HERE (1-Day ticket = Php 1,678)

Admission Fee: KRW 56,000, 10:00 am - 10:00 pm

Directions: Train to Gangnam Station and exit no 6 or 7. Walk straight till you pass dunkin donuts, cross the road and take bus 5002 from the bus stop in the middle of the road. Bus journey to Yongji takes approximately one hour. Alight and take a free shuttle bus to Everland entrance.

BUKCHON HANOK VILLAGE

A time capsule right in the heart of Seoul. A village where you can find almost 900 traditional Korean houses. Walking in the village, you will see a lot of tourists who visit here wear the traditional Korean dress, Hanbok. It was like being on the set of a Korean drama.

Admission Fee: FREE, 9:00 am - 6:00 pm

Directions: By subway, get off at Anguk station (line 3), exit 2. Walk straight for about 500m to arrive at Bukchon Hanok Village. There are actually a lot of tour guides on the street who will help you locate the village.

GYEONGBUKGONG PALACE

The largest among five grand palaces in South Korea, Gyeongbukgong Palace, which means “palace greatly blessed by Heaven,” was constructed under the Joseon dynasty and served as the royal residence. This one’s a huge palace to tour and you can opt to watch the Royal Guard Changing Ceremony at 10:00am or 2:00pm.

Admission Fee: FREE (if you’re wearing Hanbok), 9:00 am - 6:00 pm

Directions: Take the exit 5 of Gyeongbokgung Station or Exit 3 of Anguk Station (Seoul Subway Line 3).

CHANGDEOKGUNG PALACE

Changdeokgung Palace, referred to as “East Palace” and known for Huwon Secret Garden, is the second royal palace constructed after Gyeongbukgong.

Admission Fee: FREE (if you’re wearing Hanbok), 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

Directions: Take Anguk Station (Seoul Subway Line 3), Exit 3. Walk straight from the exit (towards east) for about 5-min to arrive at the palace entrance.

NAMI ISLAND

Known for the Korean drama “Winter Sonata,” Nami Island has become a must-visit place when you’re in South Korea. It is also famous for its majestic tree-lined roads, so dreamy that it has been a sought-after destination every season (especially during autumn!).

This half-moon shaped island is 430,000 sqm big and would require at least a day to stroll around the whole area and enjoy side activities like biking.

Admission Fee: KRW 13,000, 7:30 am - 9:45 pm

Directions: Take a train going to Gapyeong Station then ride a shuttle bus in Gapyeong. Gapyeong City Bus covers all 4 tourist spots in the island (Nami Island, Petite France, The Garden of Morning Calm, and Gapyeong Rail Park) for a flat rate of KRW 6,000. Alight to Gapyeong Wharf and ride a ferry going to Nami Island.

THE GARDEN OF MORNING CALM

All nature lovers’ dreamland, The Garden of Morning Calm consists of 26 themed gardens boasting a myriad of colors and occasionally a sense of warmth from Maples leaves turning red and orange (since autumn is just starting that time). It’ such a great walk admiring the undeniable charms of flowers and greenery landscape.

Admission Fee: KRW 9,500, 8:30 am - 7:00 pm

Directions: Ride the Gapyeong City Bus (from Nami Island) going to The Garden of Morning Calm.

Other Places to Visit

Ewha Womans University

Jogyesa Temple

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Seoul

Ihwa Mural Village

Style Nanda

Starfield Library

Itinerary

DAY 0 - Arrival in Korea

DAY 1 - Experiencing Seoul

DAY 2 - Everland

DAY 3 - Experiencing old South Korea

DAY 4 - Winter Sonata in Nami Island

DAY 5 - Back in Seoul

DAY 6 - Back in Manila

[hansen-family]

London Feb 2019

The kids had a week off school for midterm break, so we took the opportunity to take a trip to London. We couldn’t have asked for better weather, it was dry and sunny nearly the entire time we were there. Our last day we took a walk through Hyde Park to enjoy the sun and spring flowers blooming.

We bought Oyster cards which allowed us to take the tube and buses anywhere we wanted. There was a tube station just down the street from the hotel, which made it really convenient. All Museums are free admission in the UK, so we took the opportunity to check out 3 of them, but could have spent an entire week to visit them all.

Day 1 - London Eye, Aquarium

The Aquarium and London Eye are on the River Thames just across from Parliament, Big Ben, and Westminster Abbey. The tower clock and parts of the parliament building are surrounded by scaffolding at the moment, but it was still quite a sight. We also learned that “Big Ben” is actually the bell inside the clock tower and that it was cast in the same UK foundry that produced the Liberty Bell.

We were able to purchase a ticket package that included a ride on the London Eye, the aquarium, a 1-day bus and river boat tour, and admission to the Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum. The aquarium was neat, and probably the thing the kids will remember most.

From the London Eye you get an amazing 360-degree view of the city

Day 2 - Bus tour, Hamley’s, Trafalger square, boat trip on the River Thames

We took a hop-on-hop-off bus tour of London. Stopped in to Hamley’s, an amazing 5-story toy store, and toured Trafalger square which hosts Nelson’s Column and the National Gallery.

We ended the day with a sunset cruise on the River Thames to the Tower Bridge and Tower of London.

Marked on the river is the “Entry to the Traitor’s Gate” where treasonous prisoners were returned to the Tower of London for execution several hundred years ago.

The Tower of London is surrounded by the modern city. We were told that this area was settled by the Romans during their Empire and that stone paved Roman roads still exist beneath the modern pavement.

Day 3 - Changing of the Guard, Imperial War Museum, Madame Tussaud's

We started the third day riding the tube to Buckingham Palace to see the Changing of the Guard. There was a big crowd, and the new Guard marched past us, led by a band. The kids played at a park near the Palace, then we headed to the Imperial War Museum.

I’m a rocket geek and one of the highlights of the trip for me was seeing a Nazi V2 rocket in the museum. The V2 was developed by a team led by Werner Von Braun, who was brought to the US after WWII. Von Braun and his team then led the development of the Redstone rocket for the Mercury program and eventually the Apollo rocket which carried Astronauts to the moon.

We finished the day at Madam Tussaud’s Wax Museum, which was better than I expected. There were galleries of celebrities, royalty, Star Wars, and the Marvel superheroes. 

Princess Diana is taller than we expected :)

Day 4 - Royal Albert Hall, Hyde Park, Natural History Museum, Science Museum

Our last full day in London we visited Royal Albert Hall and walked through Hyde Park. The weather was amazing and there were lots of people enjoying the fresh air. The park is huge, and only one of several in the city. There were even kids taking horse riding lessons!

Next we visited the Natural History and Science Museums... and saw another V2!  Thought it was interesting they have the most complete Stegosaurus fossil which was uncovered in Wyoming.

The second V2..

There are still the iconic red phone booths in London, although very few actually have phones in them... suppose they’re left for silly photos with tourists

It was a great trip that I think the kids will remember. All the best to our friends and family back home!

[luckyfrogphotos]

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[quell-tea-salon]

SolidS QUELL Party (SQP) event report~! (Warning: I ramble. A lot.)

The concert was over a month ago and unfortunately I have a memory on par with a goldfish, but it was one of the best experience I’ve had in Japan so far and I’ll try to recall as much as I can ;;;

The event took place on July 16th at the Kokugikan in Ryogoku. I was blessed enough to win tickets for the afternoon session, and arrived early to queue so I could enter the hall without standing in the sun for too long. There was a booth outside selling official concert merchandise like character goods and light sticks; I didn’t buy any, but there were loads of people near the booth who had laid out their purchased merchandise for trading (since most of the character goods are blind boxes). I should’ve brought along my SolidS merch to give away, since I’m really only into QUELL. (OOT: QUELL and SolidS are usually grouped together in blind box merch. I love everyone in QUELL so my chances of getting something I like is preeeeeeeetty high, but for some reason I keep getting Shiki?! So if anyone wants Shiki merch, let me know. I have... lots.)

There was probably life-sized standees of the characters somewhere in the lobby but I couldn’t find them ;; I went to look for my seat which was on the 1st floor and quickly realised that half of my view of the stage was blocked by the speakers...grr. Couldn’t complain too much though, since I was lucky just to be there. The photos above were taken while waiting for the rest of the crowd to take their seats. In the meantime, SolidS and QUELL PV’s were played on the projection screen. Every time SolidS appeared on screen, the audience screamed lol. There was some noise for QUELL too, but definitely not as loud... I was quietly cheering for my sons in my heart ;w; Started chatting with the girl sitting next to me and found out that she was a SolidS fan (of course), and that her favourite was Dai-chan (good taste). I really wanted to give her my SolidS merch.......

About 15 minutes before the show started, the two Lizz squirrel mascots (purple for SolidS, blue for Quell) emerged on stage, dressed in sumo gear (in reference to the venue, which is usually a sumo wrestling ground), to say hi to the arena audience. They were so big and round... ;w; I was super jealous of people who had tickets for arena seats, they got to be so close to the stage!!

The lights dimmed and SolidS appeared on stage as the audience went crazy. They opened the set list with KARA DA KARA, followed by Quell’s HIKARI. My heart was about to beat out of my chest, I was just so happy to be able to see my Quell sons in the flesh ;_______; I don’t know if my seat position in relation to the speakers had anything to do with this, but I couldn’t really hear the vocals well ;_; The music was too loud and vocals sounded muffled.... Nevertheless, getting to hear the groups sing live was a magical experience.

Next, everyone came back out onto the stage for introductions and opening talk (while admiring the 360 degrees seating). I only realised this after the concert, but they were all dressed in the same clothes as the characters in the official concert art! SolidS all slick and deadly in urban monochrome outfits, and Quell looking all breezy and relaxed in loose charcoal and blue. The twins of course were wearing matching clothes, down to the accessories....... ugh... angels..... Nogami even had Ichiru’s hairstyle T_T

The Lizz squirrels popped up on stage occasionally and the cast members gave them lots of love; Takeuchi kept hugging the Quell Lizz and squeezing his tail lol (he really loves cute animals). Nishiyama and the twins took turns holding his hands or gently guiding him around the stage (family aura!!). SolidS......... grabbed their Lizz by the crotch....

Moving on to the solo performances. Shiki took the lead with Tide, followed by Tsubasa with Canaria. I wasn’t familiar with any of the songs, but i could tell that the audience loved them. I don’t particularly appreciate Eguchi and Saito’s singing styles, but they had a lot of energy and really knew how to work the crowd.

After that, it was QUELL’s turn. First to perform was of course Shu, with End of Night. Takeuchi was completely at home on stage, strutting around and engaging the audience. I was surprised that he had backup dancers and i don’t know if he was meant to know the choreograph, but he danced along with ease and at other times swayed his hips in a way that made my inner mom voice want to yell at him to behave lol (I can’t help it, he’s so young). In recordings, Shu’s vocals are bold and precise; during the concert, Takeuchi was singing as himself - messing around with the melody, using short, breathy notes, and just having lots of fun. It sounded very different from the recorded version of End of Night, but it was a great performance regardless. 

Issei took to the stage to sing Hoshizora (starry sky) as the audience changed their light sticks to blue. IMO Shugo gave the most solid performance of the show. Issei’s voice was clear and powerful, but sweet and delicate at all the right moments. And he thanked us for showing him a beautiful starry sky with our light sticks T_T At this point the CD actually hadn’t been released yet so all we had was the demo. The full song was incredible. FYI, Shugo played the guitar for Hoshizora; I would’ve died if he had actually played the guitar at the concert too...

After the song, the rest of Quell joined Issei on stage. Ichiru ran STRAIGHT at Issei and gave him a tackle hug T___T I can’t deal with these two...

The next segment was SoriRaji (SolidS radio) and QueRaji (QUELL radio). Again, my memory is pretty fuzzy, but I’ve tried to jot down as much as I can remember. 

Eichi was probably nervous and kept messing up his lines. The twins cheered him on together with “Eichi, faito!” godddddddd so cute ><

Question for Shu: When did you realise that the twins had opened up (to you/Quell)?

Shu: I took a nap on the sofa one day, and when I woke up I found the twins asleep next to me

Ichiru: WAAAAAAAAAAAAA DON’T SAY ANY MORE

Issei: You looked so comfortable sleeping there, we couldn't help joining in...

Ichiru: Though it was creepy waking up to find Eichi STARING at us

Eichi: I was so jealous!!! I wanted to join in but there wasn't enough space on the sofa ;_;

There was a question directed at Shu, I don't quite remember what it was but it had something to do with Shu's schedule being busier than the others and whether it was hard for them to spend time together.

Eichi: Shu's usually the first one awake and out at work before the rest of us are even out of bed.

Twins: We should try to get up earlier sometimes and have breakfast together!

Shu: *Weeps into hands* My children are precious... (#Mychildrenareprecious became the official twitter hashtag for SQP lmao)

Question for the twins: What kind of cakes do you like?

Issei: I like mille crepe and cream puffs

Ichiru: I like cream puffs too! And mont blanc, and chocolate cake, and strawberry short cake! Anything with whole strawberries on top!

Mom, dad & audience: Aww...

Ichiru: W-what?! I just like desserts with lots of cream, what's wrong with that?!!!

Shu: That's cute ^^ I don't eat a lot of sweets but if I had to pick one, it'd be rare cheese cake

Eichi: Ti. Ra. Mi. Su <3

Question for the twins: Issei, as the older sibling, have you ever wanted Ichiru to call you "oniichan?"

Issei: I’ve never really thought about it before and I don’t think that it’s necessary, but now that it’s been mentioned I kinda want to hear it...

Ichiru: .....Hear what

Issei: You calling me oniichan

Shu: I’m filming this :)

Ichiru was reluctant ofc, but after some prodding from mom and dad (and the audience)...

Ichiru: (smol voice) .....Oniichan

Shu, Eichi, Issei: *FIST PUMP*

Audience: *DEAD*

Question for everyone: If QUELL was to go on holiday together, where would you go?

Ichiru: Okinawa!! I reaaaaaaaally wanna go to Okinawa!!!

Shu: *fond dad face* Let’s go ^^

Ugh they were 1000000% Happy Family, it was the CUTEST thing to watch.... I was trying not to die from how cute the twins were and it was reassuring to see Shu also trying his best not to burst into tears whenever the twins did or said something cute (which was ALL THE TIME).

I don't remember much from SoliRaji (SolidS radio), but #PHO~! became the other designated SQP tag because Shiki kept yelling that word LOL. It started with Shiki answering a question about his favourite south east asian food or something, and his reply was Vietnamese pho ("PHOOOO~!!"). That became a running gag throughout the rest of the concert wwwww Dai answered Thai green curry :3c 

And oh, in response to a question about who had the biggest hands in SolidS, all 4 pressed their hands together to compare sizes (Tsubasa and Dai even snuck in a lovers grip). Cue lots of dying screams from the audience, haha. In the end, Shiki was the largest, followed by Rikka, Dai, and Tsubasa (obviously based on the seiyuus hands, though I was surprised that Hanae’s hands were bigger than Umehara’s). 

In a nutshell, Eguchi and Umehara were wrecking havoc by running their mouths, so Saito had his hands full running damage control... as usual ww

After a short break the show continued with the solo songs, starting with Rikka’s Good Night My Darling. I always enjoy hearing Hanae sing live, he has such a pretty voice! Next was Dai’s Jinsei Hard Mode. Umehara’s singing improves every time I hear it... and obviously we all know he’s ikemen, but in person he’s even more gorgeous, goddamn.

Ichiru’s Akaku Somaru Sora (red sky) was as energetic and straightforward as in the CD! Tbh i think singing as Ichiru stifles Nogami’s skills (apparent when you hear Nogami singing in his own voice, and yes, that’s Shugo next to him) but he’s great to watch live and i LOVE that he waves enthusiastically at the crowd as Ichiru!!

When it was Eichi’s turn to sing his solo, Niji (Rainbow), we were all super excited because the song’s demo isn’t even out yet, and here we got to listen to it live, in full!! It was a fun, summery pop tune, befitting its title, and the whole time Eichi was hopping around and waving at the audience with a huge smile. He really was emitting rainbows and flowers T___T Nishiyama’s not the strongest singer in QUELL, but he definitely embodies Eichi’s cheerfulness.

SolidS returned to the stage to perform Tokyo LOVE Junky, followed by Quell with Aoi Mizu. I had mixed feelings when I first listened to Aoi Mizu since it felt completely out of place on a Quell album, but i figured they probably needed at least one upbeat concert-friendly song, and sure enough it seems like Aoi Mizu was written for this purpose. It’s definitely a lot easier to shake your light stick in time with the song compared to Hikari, or even Believer ^q^

We were asked to participate in a recording for the Tsukipro anime that’s airing in October. They wanted us to yell out the characters’ names or scream “kya~!” to use during actual concert footage in the anime!!! They were only recording for SolidS in the afternoon which meant that Quell’s would get done during the night show... I wanted to be there for Quell too >< Anyway, SolidS took turns going up on stage and used hand signals to indicate when we should start/stop yelling. Each recording lasted 30 seconds iirc? The audience was happy to comply haha, we went WILD. Shiki went first, then Tsubasa. When it was Rikka’s turn, Hanae wanted some variation lol he asked us to whisper when he put his hand down, and tune up the volume as he raised his hand. It was a lot of fun, I was laughing half the time because he was contorting his body (bending over backwards etc) while moving his arm, just being a clown really. We did our best to match his hand movements and got praised for it at the end :3 Lastly, Umehara got up for Dai and his first words were “Don’t call me Dai-chan” JKSDGJLHGDFLJ CUTE he used the same system as Hanae and ofc most of us screamed “DAI-CHAAAAAAAAAAAAANNN” ^q^

The show came to a close with the obligatory event ending song Sexy☆Sense. Obviously performed by SolidS as it’s their song, but Quell stuck around to join in. There was a lot of activity on stage but I mostly kept my eyes on the twins ;w; I have to admit that SolidS’ music is not really my taste, but Sexy☆Sense is super catchy and it’s hard not to sing along. A supercharged ending to an amaaaazing concert!!!

I’ve pre-ordered the SQP DVD so that I can watch what happens in the night session >< Can’t wait!! To those of you who managed to survive my TL;DR, thank you for your patience!

[cameronwjones]

2018 Event Trends: Predictions from Event Experts

Event wisdom comes in many forms. Learn about the trends that will dominate the event space in 2018 from experienced industry professionals.  

Now that 2018 has arrived, new trends and changes in the the event industry are already rumbling underfoot. Preparing for these changes early on in the year will be a key factor for developing a successful event strategy. And what better way to kick off the new year than with event trend predictions from a group of event experts?

We asked 19 event professionals one question: What will be the biggest event trend in 2018? Our respondents covered a wide range of topics, offering insights into how the industry will continue to evolve. Some event trend predictions were in long form while others got straight to the point. All in all, these answers will help you better prepare for the changes that are to come.

Some of the topics that were mentioned include:

Partnership Event Marketing

Event Design

Virtual and Augmented Reality

Artificial Intelligence

Data Security

Event Personalization

For even more in-depth analysis of industry trends, click the image below to download a free copy of the 2018 Event Trends Ebook. You’ll deep dive into topics and ideas that will better equip you to take the event industry by storm in 2018. 

  Liz King, CEO, Techsytalk

2018 is going to have a huge focus on artificial intelligence - planners will be learningmore about how to use the data they collect to better engage their attendees, speakers and sponsors.

"Through the use of AI, event planners will be able to create a more personalized experience and reach their audiences in more meaningful ways."

This will transform the event experience and help drive more perceived value to the role that events play in overall marketing strategies.

  Gaetano DiNardi, Director of Marketing, Sales Hacker

Events are popping out of the woodwork like we've never seen before. To say the market is crowded would be an understatement.

"I predict we will see more partnerships and major brand collaborations to put on co-hosted events / conferences."

The consolidation of co-branded efforts alleviates marketing workload and lowers overhead / risk / costs of operation. I would also add that big name speakers and "influencers" are becoming less relevant. 99% of them won't promote anyway, and they're usually expensive to book. Audiences want good tactical content, and topics that align to their needs. They'd rather see an actionable deck from a presenter with high energy, ideally from a well known company from their industry.

Ella Prendergast, Digital Content Executive, HeadBox

With the release of the iPhone X, we predict a greater emphasis on virtual and augmented reality in events as it becomes more widely used by consumers across the world. From aiding event planners in the conception phases of planning to increasing attendee engagement at the event itself, virtual and augmented reality are seeping into our daily lives. 

"VR and AR are becoming part of everyday life for the millennial generation."

It's important that the event industry stays ahead of this curve, which is why we've launched HeadBox 3D, our 360* tour technology, which allows event planners to explore a venue in 360° view, to save time and money on non-fruitful site visits.

Nikita Johnson, Founder, RE.WORK

Artificial Intelligence software - chatbots and AI Assistants in particular - will allow event organizers in 2018 to automate customer questions to provide a quicker and more efficient service, and reduce customer service costs. Advanced chatbots will also provide a more personalized service for event attendees and increase user engagement.

Bianca Bujan, Marketing Consultant, TapSnap 

Experiential marketing is becoming a bigger priority for companies, bringing brands to life, and allowing consumers to see, touch, interact with and create an emotional bond with a product or service. Photo booths are emerging as an experiential marketing solution for brands through creating customized and interactive activations that entertain event guests while acting as a platform for new sponsorship opportunities.

Customized branding and event-specific photo booth backdrops, animations, and photo-sharing campaigns are delivering a high ROI for event professionals looking to offer something fun and unique that will entertain guests and drive results for their business.

Dan Berger, Founder and CEO, Social Tables

Industry suppliers are going to go all-in on tech investments that will help them prepare for a potential industry downturn. The past few years have been a seller’s market. That will continue in ’18, but who knows how long it will last. Riding out a few great years in terms of group business with record high KPIs, suppliers are feeling confident, but they will hedge their bets by purchasing new and exciting sales solutions that will strengthen their moat.

  Lloyed Lobo, Co-founder, Traction Conference

VR from an audience experience perspective will be huge. We had VR booths at our conference this year which was a huge hit. We'll be doubling down on this. 

    Juraj Holub, Marketing Director, Slido 

Given that $37 billion is wasted on ineffective meetings, our prediction is that meeting design will continue to be one of the key drivers across industries in 2018 and beyond. We believe that the ability to design and facilitate an effective meeting will become a critical skill for any business leader. At Slido, we always look at our meetings, be it anything from a team stand up or a user conference, through the meeting design spectacles. For instance at our all-hands meetings, we have a moderated Ask Me Anything session with our CEO and we even have a dedicated moderator for our online participants. With interaction at the center of our thinking, we continuously experiment to organize events that our team members and clients love.

Ciera Jones, Events Coordinator, The Gathering

Conferences will start using AI to improve networking opportunities between attendees.  There will also likely be an increase in the use of Chatbots to serve up conference information in real time i.e. address questions participants have at any given point. 

Josie Scotchmer, UK Marketing Manager, Mailjet

Events are no longer just about pitching your sales story to potential customer. You must also add value to the event audience. This might be by providing educational and thought leading content on the event stage or by adding value to the event attendees in a different way.

"Providing actual value to the attendee will be a crucial success factor." 

Some of the ways we’ve experimented with at Mailjet are by having stand activities that add value. We’ve tested headshot photographers so that delegates can get a new LinkedIn picture at an event and even administered GDPR quizzes to test marketers on their understanding of the latest data protection regulation. At Mailjet, we’ll continue testing different tactics to ensure we are adding value in the best possible way.

Corbin Ball, Co-Founder, Corbin Ball Associates

Increasing data and privacy protection will be needed. The recent data breaches of Equifax, Sony, the DMC and international ransomware attacks point to increased and more sophisticated hacking activity. Hackers will almost inevitably target some events via an online registration system and/or a mobile event-related app (likely an Android version) in the near future.

"As a planner, make sure your registration company is PCI compliant and take other steps to guard attendee information captured."

Also, be aware of the coming GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) a sweeping set of privacy regulations that will affect any event with European attendees or members regardless of where the event takes place.

   Alon Alroy, Co-Founder and CMO, Bizzabo

 In 2018, things are getting personal. In a world where brands allow   consumers to customize their shoes, socks, sunglasses and watches,   events will get personal too. This will be possible through increased access to AI technology and richer datasets provided by integrated event management platforms.

"Organizers will create a more personal event experience."

Technology will enable marketers to get to know their audience on a deeper level which will allow them to design a more personalized experience. From content, to logistics, to food, to business introductions, all-in-one platforms will have access to a plethora of data that will push the industry towards providing a holistically personal experience. 

Cathy McPhillips, VP of Marketing, Content Marketing Institute 

I hope that the events industry continues to push for more sustainability. Fortunately, at UBM, Content Marketing World’s parent company, this is a huge initiative for us.

"Event attendees are going to be attracted to conferences and events that put extra care into sustainability and think about environmental and social issues."

This includes using water jugs rather than thousands of disposable plastic water bottles, printing signage that can be used year over year, donating leftover food to charities, giving extra supplies left by exhibitors to local organizations, and even suggesting that sponsors use printers local to the event location to save on shipping. 

 Lelde Dalmane, Marketing Content Manager, Catchbox

I believe that technology will be the trend that will take off (even more than now) in 2018. Since everything is all about the audience, I think that events will become more interactive than ever and tools to gather audience response will have their time to shine.

Nick Borelli, President, Borelli Strategies 

Influencer marketing will become more of a mainstream practice for event producers in 2018. As event marketers settle on metrics and reasonable (i.e. longer) length of contracts between event and influential personal brands, deeper trust will breed increased conversions. What has been the status quo for industries like fashion and beauty, influencer marketing will humanize the core messaging of attendance while helping break into groups who aren’t as accessible through traditional marketing strategies.

 Payman Taei, Founder, VisMe

Given the mania around Bitcoin, Ether, and Altcoins, 2018 will be filled with an uptake of cryptography topics, whether or not the bubble actually bursts. And although there is no relation with Visme and Cryptography, we do anticipate utilizing this trending topic to improve our reach using data visualization and infographics as a means to simplify the understanding of complex data and translating them into snackable content.

Trey Smith, VP of Events, Human Capital Media 

Artificial Intelligence and leveraging the capabilities of this technology is something I foresee will make a big impact in 2018 and beyond. We’re already seeing this with a number of the chatbots that are popping everywhere to handle lead nurturing and customer service inquiries, among others.

"Leveraging AI-powered chatbots can free up hours of a planner’s time by delegating repetitive and monotonous tasks to the bot."

Looking forward, advanced AI will allow us to create more personalized content for attendees and deliver sponsor advertisements in new and unique ways at just the right time.

Allison Lucey, Senior Managing Director of Events, Teach For America

An important trend that we are focused on is “head up technology” to ensure people are engaged at the event, but also compelled to share their experience digitally . To do this, it’s crucial that we use digital engagement as an enhancement to the in-person experience, but not as the focus of the event itself.

"When customizing our in-person event experiences we look to ensure that the engagement on the ground is meaningful and relevant to our audience, but also compelling enough for them to share on their social channels."

We do this through the creation of interactive elements that do not incorporate any technology but force attendees to interact with the installation and with one another. These engagements are always crafted with the digital share in mind, ensuring that the end result is a photo or post that reaches the social or professional circles of our attendees to further generate interest or engagement with our organization.

Liron David, Founder, Eventique 

The biggest and most exciting trend I'm anticipating this year is utilizing art in creating storylines. The convergence of art, technology, and space is what’s making experiential events more engaging than just throwing a brand name on anything in sight — today’s consumer won’t go for it, and they certainly won't share it.

"Social media is predominantly visual, and when a brand invests in a meaningful artistic component, it resonates because the art seems to eclipse the product."

It will be interesting to see how credible artists and brands interact on commissioned work in the future, as both parties give each other more leeway.

Looking for more helpful content? Click below to subscribe to the Bizzabo blog and stay updated on the latest posts. 

    from Cameron Jones Updates https://blog.bizzabo.com/2018-event-trends-predictions

[photoboothcity12]

The Ultimate Guide to Buying a 360 Photo Booth: What to Look For

Shopping for a photo booth? You know there are tons of options out there. You can pick from old-school setups to cutting-edge digital ones. It’s easy to get lost in all the choices. But if you want to make a splash and give people an experience they won’t forget, you should check out the 360 photo booth. This guide will tell you everything you need to know about buying a 360 photo booth. We’ll show you where to find the best deals and which features matter. Let’s get started!

Why Should You Choose a 360 Photo Booth?

The 360 photo booth is the hot new thing in event entertainment. It gives guests a complete all-around experience that pulls them in and lets them have a blast. Regular photo booths just take still pictures from one angle. But the 360 booth makes lively shareable videos that catch every side of the moment. If you want to take your event to the next level or start your own photo booth business, this could be just the thing you need to invest in.

What to Look For in a 360 Photo Booth

When looking for a 360 photo booth, there are numerous important elements to consider:

1. Quality & Features Ensure the booth has a high-resolution camera to capture good photographs and movies. Good lighting is essential for achieving high-quality results. Look for a booth that has changeable LED lighting to accommodate varied surroundings. Check if the booth has customizable software, including branding, video effects, and interactive features.

2. Ease of Transport and Setup: When purchasing a portable photo booth, consider its portability and setup time. Look for versions that are lightweight and have a carrying case or cart for convenience.

Support and Warranty: Ensure the seller provides dependable customer support and a comprehensive warranty. This can save you headaches if you run into any problems in the future.

4. Price and deal: Compare prices to get the best deal. Keep an eye out for promotional offers and savings. A smart place to start is by searching for “360 photo booth for sale” and comparing the possibilities.

Where to Find the Best Deals

When looking for a 360 photo booth, it’s critical to consider all of your alternatives. Here’s how to get the greatest deal:

1. Online Marketplaces: Amazon and eBay provide a variety of models, including fantastic deals. Look for “photo booths for sale” and narrow your results to include 360 models.

2. Contact specialised merchants for a more personalised experience. PhotoBoothCity is a well-known name in the business, selling a wide range of 360 picture booths. Their competence and customer service make them an excellent choice for both first-time consumers and experienced professionals.

3. Local Listings: Search “photo booth for sale near me” to uncover sellers with reasonable prices or second-hand possibilities.

4. Trade Shows and Expos: Attending industry events can provide insight into other models and allow for direct negotiations with suppliers.

Tips for a Successful Purchase

Tips for a Successful Purchase: 1. Conduct thorough research by reading reviews, comparing features, and asking for recommendations. Checking out photo booth-related forums and social media groups can provide useful information. 2. Test Before Buying: Test the booth to ensure it matches your needs. This is especially critical if you are investing a large sum of money. 3. Consider the Long Term: Consider how the booth will integrate with your business model or event planning strategy. A high-quality, adaptable booth can provide increased value over time. 4. Look for packages: Some vendors provide packages with additional accessories or services. This can be an affordable method to obtain everything you need in one package.

Why Choose a 360 Photo Booth?

Investing in a 360 photo booth means providing an interactive, memorable experience that your guests will brag about. Whether you’re looking to buy a photo booth machine for a new business or looking for the best photo booth to buy for personal use, the 360 photo booth stands out for its unique approach to event entertainment. With so many alternatives available, like portable photo booths for sale and digital photo booths for sale, it’s easier than ever to choose a model that meets your requirements. For the greatest outcomes, keep crucial features in mind, check rates, and work with a trustworthy provider like PhotoBoothCity. To summarise, the 360 photo booth is more than simply a trend; it is an investment in generating unforgettable memories. Start your search today and elevate your events with the ultimate photo booth experience!

[calaycay]

Calay Hong Kong Trip

October 13-16, 2017

I promised myself that I should be able to travel outside the country within 5 years after I started working. So when I got the chance – by chance I meant having friends to travel with – I took it. So that’s the primary reason why I decided to go to Hong Kong. Second, of course is to have fun.

DAY 0

Before our flight, I went to FedEx to change my peso to HKD. I know that we will arrive at Hong Kong late and the money changers there are closed by that time (check Money Changers with best exchange rate here: travelvui.com ), plus according to the blogs that I read, Money Changer in Hong Kong airport has really poor rate, and it is true. But then, when my friend changed his peso to HKD in NAIA, it is cheaper by ₱0.08. So I suggest, you exchange enough money that you will use for your Day 1 in NAIA. In our case, we booked 3 nights in City Econo Guesthouse via booking.com , they accept cash only. So we really need to have HKD on hand and pay them upon checking in. We arrived at Hong Kong pass 10PM, October 13, Friday.

Upon arrival at Hong Kong airport, make sure to follow the signs going to the bus station. Don’t forget to buy an octopus card. You can buy it for 150HKD (100HKD will be your load; 50HKD card deposit). And you can use this everywhere! Buses, 7/11, restaurants, trains, malls, etc. – I admire Hong Kong’s system. So I suggest you load your money here. But of course, you need to be careful, you don’t want to lose your card if you load most of your money here. Good thing also about the octopus card, is when you return it, you will get your 50HKD deposit  plus the balance of your cards less their 9HKD return fee.

Do your research on your transportation guide. For us, since we are staying in City Econo Guesthouse which is located at Nathan Road, near Jordan Station, we ride an A21 bus and we alight at the 11th bus stop (Prudential Center / Jordan Station Stop ) from the airport. Then just across the street is the City Econo Guesthouse. They have two entrances, I suggest you use the back entrance. Do not bother to ask the Chinese people. You will have hard time communicating with them. You are just lucky if you find one that can really point you to the right direction. Google Maps is very helpful.

We didn’t have the time to eat dinner because we are so tired. I just ate my biscuits and drunk milk, then sleep.

City Econo Guesthouse it is just few (literally) steps away from the Jordan Station so transportation is very easy. It is also surrounded by restaurants. 7/11 and Temple Market are near from this guesthouse. The owners are very friendly, the can understand and speak English. They also sell attraction tickets. They also give you a bottle of water as a welcome gift. ☺️ On the down side, the room is small, well I expected this already because upon searching for a place to stay in, all of the room for rent in Hong Kong just ranges from 8 sqm to 12 sqm. The CR is small also. But I’m not really sensitive with these things since I’m a cute little girl HAHA. So I can still move just as fine. What’s important for me is the cleanliness of the room. The room and the CR are clean. They also have hot water for your shower. They also provide and change the towels, and throw your trashes everyday. Drinking hot water and blower are available in the common area. I think I will give them a 9 /10. ☺️

DAY 1

They say that Disneyland is the happiest place on earth. I’ll agree. But, I say that if you want to be the happiest person in the happiest place on earth, you should go with the one you love. You should go there with the most especial person in your life (aside from your parents, siblings, relatives). Going there with your friends is ok. But going there with the one you love is perfect. I don’t need to write a review for Disneyland, everybody knows that this place is really magical and fun. You can hear songs everywhere. You can see everybody enjoying. Rides are fun. There are some that are extremes, there also rides for us cowards. HAHA! I suggest you download the Disneyland app that my friend downloaded. It gives you guide for the parade schedules, Princesses photo-ops, maps, everything! Just download it so that you will not miss any fun. We watched The Lion King and Mickey Mystery Book shows. Then we tried rides in Toy Story Land. Ow! Don’t miss the Iron Man experience! Keep your attention to the schedule of the parades, they are so fun and lively, very musical! ❤️ And most importantly, you should not miss the magic of the fireworks, it was freaking amazing and magical! Ow! BTW, we bought Disney tickets in Klook . They really offer cheaper ticket prices.

//I’ll come back in Hong Kong Disneyland. This time, it is gonna be with you.//

Fireworks video:

 Later that night, we experienced Hong Kong night life!

Jollibee Burger Steak in Hong Kong! Haha.

DAY 2

Our Day 2 supposed to be in Macau, it is just sad that typhoon signal no. 8 struck at Hong Kong that day. There are no ferry schedule going to Macau. Everything is closed, from Museums to Malls! The advice is to just stay in the hotel. It’s pouring cats and dogs that day. The wind is strong. I just really can’t stand the fact that I will be wasting one day in Hong Kong by just staying in our room. And since I’m hard-headed, I went to the public market, at least it is open. For a Filipino like me, it wows me to see clams in the public market. I bet here in the Philippines, they are so expensive and you cannot just find in a normal public market. But in Hong Kong clams are just like fishes, they are for sale in every corner in the public market. They also sell different kinds of dried foods. I don’t even know what some of those are. For an introvert like me, it’s fine to go alone, I really enjoyed my own personal free time spent in the market during signal no. 8 typhoon, without an umbrella, just with my thin rain coat. HAHA! During this me-time, I also tried their siomai! It is tasty, I just had the hard time picking which sauce will complement the most with my siomai because we Filipinos used soy sauce, but there is no soy sauce in the option, and the vendor is not that friendly. She can barely understand English, she can’t answer me properly to which sauce should I pour to my siomai. I regret not trying their tofu. They say Hong Kong has the best tofu. You should try it for me. ☺️ For dinner, again alone, I ate egg waffles. They are like eggnogs stuck together. They are delicious when hot. I also tried their local milk tea. They are tasty also but a little bit bitter, so you might want to add extra sugar. I also bought pasalubongs! Actually, I spent more money for my pasalubongs than my expenses in Hong Kong. So if you are not going to buy any pasalubong, ₱15,000 is enough, well, if you are a budget traveler like me.

DAY 3

Our Day 3 is like hitting three birds in one stone. We went to three Hong Kong attractions on this day. This is very exhausting because we are carrying our baggage the whole day. But if you have check in baggage, I think there’s an option for you to check in your baggage in an MTR Station then they will send it straight to the airport. Just research for that. In our case, we only have hand carries so we need to endure the pain. First, from Jordan Station, we took the train and alight at the Central Station, from there, we walked to The Peak Tram. There is an option for you to just ride the peak tram and look for The Lion’s head, for you to see the view of entire Hong Kong; or you can buy ticket with Sky Terrace combo, in the Sky Terrace, you can get to see Hong Kong in 360 degrees view. Your choice. We picked just the tram ride, and we did took great photos in The Lion Head. There is also a souvenir shop at The Peak, I bought keychains, coin purses, ref magnets, and a T-shirt there. We rode a bus going back to Central Station. I bought Giordano Tshirt and blouse at the mall in the Central Station. Giordano and some other brands are really cheap in Hong Kong. So don’t let go of the chance and shop. HAHA! We rode the train to Tung Chung Station. Just a little walk from the exit and there’s the Ngong Ping Cable Car. We only bought one way ticket, again using Klook. When we are redeeming our ticket, the seller in the ticketing booth is insisting that we should buy two-way ticket because it will take us two hours if we ride the bus from Ngong Ping Village back to Tung Chung Station. But based on our experience, it just took us an hour. So if you are a budget traveler like me (us), better to just buy the one way ticket. The end line of the Ngong Ping Cable Car is the Ngong Ping Village. This is a small village with Monks, dogs, cows, temple and some residents. There is a lot of souvenir shops in the area. The village is very clean and very peaceful, the dogs are harmless – you will just see them lying on the ground, sleeping. And how can I miss the Tian Tan Buddha (The Big Buddha)? People walk 268 steps to see The Big Buddha in closer look. In my case, I didn’t, because my luggage is very heavy. Plus we are running out of time because we still have the flight later that day. So as an advice, don’t go to Ngong Ping Village if you are carrying your heavy things. It is better to go there with just your small kit. Don’t miss the Po Lin Monastery. You can go there but you cannot enter. There is a show from time to time and you can watch it from the door. Light some incense also and offer it to the Buddha and pray for your own intensions.

Out of all the attractions we went to see/experience, Ngong Ping Village is my favorite. I just love how peaceful the place is. It also showcases their culture. I really love it.

So there, that’s my Hong Kong experience! ☺️

BUDGET AND ITINERARY

[talesfromafork]

This post is part of a five part City Guide series as I explore Europe as a brand ambassador for Bonwi. It has affiliate links to things I genuinely like.

After I moved to Amsterdam, I traveled to many European cities and thought, “There’s no better city to call home than Amsterdam.” That is, until I went to Berlin. I fell in love with this city immediately! I loved that it felt as big as Paris, was as chill as Amsterdam, and had a raw and gritty charm like New York. Best of all, it had great tasting inexpensive food in every neighborhood– something I sorely miss out on living in Amsterdam. Read on to find out everything I loved about Berlin and that you should check out in this complete city guide.

Click on a section to jump down the page.

How to Get to Berlin

How to Get to Your Hotel From the Airport 

Where to Stay

How to Get Around

What to Do

Where to Eat

What to Pack

How to Get to Berlin

There are lots of ways to get to Berlin since it’s a popular international city. I personally like to fly there from Amsterdam because it only takes an hour and a half to get there, and since it’s just a short flight, I’ll get the cheapest flight available even if it’s a budget airline.

If you’re doing a big Euro trip and will be visiting lots of countries, then I’d recommend looking into getting a Eurail pass, which allows you unlimited train travel within a specified number of countries.

Blablacar is a carpooling site that lets you hop into someone’s car if there’s space! From experience, the prices are better than flying or riding the train, but keep in mind, you may encounter traffic and other unexpected delays from driving.

How to Get to Your Hotel From the Berlin Airports

I’ve flown into both Berlin airports and have found using transportation to be fairly easy.

To get from Schönefeld Airport to city centre, it takes about 30 minutes on the regional trains, RE7 or RB14. You can also take S-bahn (S9) and transfer at Ostkreuz to where you need to go.

To get from Tegel airport to city centre, there are various ways you can go, but the shortest way to reach an U-bahn station is to take the 109 or 128 bus to Kurt-Schumacher-Platz (U6) or Jakob-Kaiser-Platz (U7) stations. You can also try the JetExpressBus TXL or Expressbus X9 for quicker rides into the city.

The best way to figure out which mode of public transportation you should take, use Google Maps. If you won’t have data upon arrival, look it up on Google Maps beforehand, and take a screenshot of the directions. Also make sure to download an offline map of Berlin on Google Maps, and save the location of your hotel in it so that once you get off your S-bahn, U-bahn, or bus stop, you’ll have a map to show you where to walk to.

Berlin’s transportation fare varies by zone. Since the airports are in Zone C, you will need a ticket that covers Zones A, B, and C, which you can buy at a yellow ticket machine. A single ticket costs €3,40 as of 03/30/16 but you can check the VBB site for updated fares.

Tip: After you get a ticket, make sure to validate it by popping it into a validation/time-stamp machine. Also, some doors on public transportation do not open automatically. You will have to press a button or pull a lever to open the door.

Where to Stay in Berlin

Taken with a Sony A6000

Neighborhoods

If it’s your first time in Berlin, you may want to stay in the heart of Berlin, Mitte. This neighborhood has many of the city’s popular tourist sights and has great access to public transportation. If you want to be near the sights but still want to experience a less touristy but still trendy neighborhood, stay in Prenzlauer Berg right next to it. I stayed in this neighborhood the first time I went to Berlin and loved it because of its endless number of restaurants, bars, cafés, and people watching opportunities! Another neighborhood close to Mitte is Kreuzberg, which I explored the last time I went to Berlin. It’s a gentrifying neighborhood with immigrant roots, a lot of character, and a good mix of underground clubs.

I Booked a Hotel With Bonwi and Got Back $275 in Rewards

Whichever neighborhood you choose to stay in, I recommend booking through Bonwi because they give you the most amount of rewards back than any other online hotel booking site. For example, last time I went to Berlin, I stayed at the Sofitel Berlin Kurfürstendamm for 3 nights, and I got back $275 in rewards. The room cost $1,310, which means I got back 21% of it in rewards that I can use on hotels, flights, Visa or Amazon cards, and more. 

If $1,310 for 3 nights sounds like a bit much to you, then check out the site anyways because they have great rewards for all budgets from hostels to 5-star hotels. For example, when I went to Bruges, I got 3 nights for $690 and got back $250 in rewards, which is 40% of the hotel costs right back into my pocket! For both Bruges and Berlin, I checked rates on other sites like Expedia and Hotels.com and booked with Bonwi because I got the most rewards back. Add the 20-40% to how much your credit card gives you for travel (about 1-2%), and you’ll be ready to take another trip in no time!

Tip: Get $15 of rewards on Bonwi asap just for signing up.

How to Get Around Berlin

Public Transportation

Taking public transportation such as the U-bahn, bus, or tram is really easy and effective. Pull up directions on Google Maps for transit directions. Of course, pull them up beforehand if you don’t have data on your phone.

A single ticket on public transportation is €2,80 within Zones A&B and an unlimited day ticket is €7,00 as of 03/30/17.Whatever ticket you get, you can use it on all the public transportation within the specified zone. Check out the VBB Site for current fares and other options for tickets.

Walk

Once you’re in the neighborhood you want to be in, walk around! It’s one of the best ways to take in Berlin with its mix of old and new buildings and diverse population. I’m sure you’ll discover lots of hidden gems by poking your nose in and around streets that public transportation doesn’t take you on.

Bike

Berlin is a great city to bike in and quite easy to. There are clear bike lanes, and a lot of locals bike so cars and people are aware of bikers. 

I rented both an electric bike and regular bike from Fat Tire Tours, which is located next to the TV Tower in Berlin making it a super convenient location to grab a bike from. If you want to know what biking around in Berlin was like for me, check out this post, or if you don’t want to bike around on your own and want to learn more about the city, book a bike tour.

myTaxi or Taxi

If you’re an Uber fan, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s no Uber in Germany. Instead, there’s this app myTaxi (iPhone, Android). I like this app because you can pre-book a taxi, something you can’t do on Uber.

If you don’t have data, then keep an eye out on taxi stands around the city, or head into a hotel to ask them to get you a taxi. 

What to Do in Berlin

Both times I went to Berlin, there was an endless number of things to do. Here are my favorite sights to see.

The Reichstag Building

My #1 recommendation is to visit the Reichstag Building. The building itself is an amazing piece of architecture, but the real cherry on top of this site is that you will have great views of the city when you reach the time.

People argue when the best time to go is. I went at nighttime and saw a  beautifully lit-up cityscape of Berlin, but others say to go during the daytime so you can take full advantage of the free audio tour that points out surrounding historical buildings. Either way, you can’t go wrong.

Tip: Tickets to the Reichstag are free, but you must register prior to going. You can register here.

Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

This free Holocaust Memorial does a fantastic job in detailing out exactly what happened from 1933 to 1945. If you’re sensitive like me, plan to go here when you’ll have time shake off the heavy material after. One of the most intimate and touching parts of the museum was the exhibit showing photos of the family who were killed in the Holocaust and what their lives were like before it.

Note: You might be tempted to jump around the memorial columns outside, especially when seeing others. I personally find it disrespectful that people are jumping around on this commemorative memorial like a playground, but a Jewish blogger said that it’s more than ok because those who suffered through the Holocaust would want people to be joyous now. However you view the memorial, note that you’re technically not allowed to as noted by a sign.

Nature-Park Schöneberger Südgelände

I went to a few parks in Berlin including the popular Tiergarten, and Nature-Park Schöneberger Südgelände was my favorite! It’s an old rail yard that was converted into a park and space for art events. I loved seeing this old train inside, and foliage growing wild over old railroad tracks and alongside the brick buildings.

Tip: Entry fee is €1. It’s an honor system where you drop a coin into a box so remember to bring a coin.

Berlin Wall Walking Trail

Berlin’s recent history is quite fascinating, and the city does a great job of sharing intimate information about the wall along its walking trail. I stumbled upon the start of the trail in Mitte and was sucked into the personal stories the information booths shared as it transported me back into time with a telling of what exactly happened on the spot I was standing at. Whether it’s walking the full 3.5 miles (5.7km) of the wall or just a section of it, I highly recommend visiting the wall, which starts out in Mitte and ends up at the East Side Gallery. Check out this map provided by Visit Berlin’s site.

Note: The beginning of the walk is right near Vietnam Village. I suggest eating lunch there before this walk!

East Side Gallery

Taken with a Ricoh Theta 360S

The East Side Gallery is an iconic memorial for freedom painted by 118 artists from 21 countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Artists painted the wall with various commentary on political events following the fall. In 2009, 40 of the murals were restored, but vibrantly shining or fading away, this wall has a rich history that shouldn’t be missed!

Graffiti

There’s ton of graffiti all over Berlin that you’ll stumble upon time and time again, but if you do a bit of planning, you can spot the best graffiti murals or head to the general areas where a bunch are.

Underground Clubs

Berlin may be the most well-known city in the world for its nightlife and club so it’s worth checking out the underground club scene as it’s basically the lifeline of this city. One of the most famous underground clubs in the world there is Berghain, although it’s notoriously hard to get into. You can find events for Tresor, Kater Blau, and other clubs on Resident Advisor, my go-to site for electronic events.

Tip: Don’t wear heels or flashy clothes to these clubs. They are underground clubs so wear sneakers and preferably black.

Where to Eat in Berlin

Perhaps the reason why I fell in love with Berlin is because of the inexpensive but extremely tasty variety of cuisines everywhere. I especially love that any given neighborhood will have a handful of Vietnamese pho places! #dreamcometrue Anyways, here are my favorite places in Berlin to eat.

Vietnam Village

I’ve been to four pho places in Berlin over my two trips there, and my ultimate favorite spot is Vietnam Village. The pho broth is flavorful and satisfying, and they use the right noodle thickness (yes, noodle thickness in pho can make or break the dish for me). Also, everything else they make is so good because they have great ingredients. The veggies are so fresh and tasty and cooked al denté.

Tip: If you can eat as much as me, get the appetizer size pho*, mango salad with chicken or shrimp, and the crispy duck entrée. 

*I think I fell in love with Berlin because this restaurant has an appetizer size pho. It totally solves my dilemma of wanting both a pho and an entrée but not being able to eat both in one sitting!

Vietnam Village Oderberger Str. 7

Meyan Berlin

For great Mediterranean food with a near perfect 4.9 stars on Google, Meyan Berlin is the place to go. You can’t go wrong with anything you order, but if you don’t know what to get, ask! They recommended the stuffed peppers to me, which were delicious. It also has a really cute ambiance so it’s a good place to chill out in, read a book, or even work from your laptop. 

Meyan Berlin Goltzstraße 36 www.meyan-berlin.de

Zeit für Brot

Forget Cinnabon and everything you’ve ever known about cinnamon rolls. Zeit für Brot is the bakery to go to for fluffy but dense cinnamon rolls with various toppings like nuts and a cream cheese frosting. They’re freshly baked in house! They also have great sandwiches with high quality ingredients that you can grab for take-away to eat while exploring the city.

Zeit für Brot Alte Schönhauser Str. 4 http://www.zeitfuerbrot.com/

Ottenthal

I haven’t been here, but a colleague of mine who’s been going to Berlin yearly for 19 years says that this place has the best Austrian schnitzel in town. Someone on Yelp says that this schnitzel is even better that schnitzel he’s tried at Michelin star restaurants! I didn’t get a chance to go on my last trip, but it’s on my list of places to eat so it was worth mentioning– right? Overall, it’s an elegant restaurant that puts a lot of love into their ingredients and even tells you on their menu which allergens are in each dish.

Ottenthal Kantstraße 153 www.ottenthal.com

What to Pack for Berlin

Before you even think about what to pack for Berlin, make sure to download the offline version of Google Maps so that even without data, you’ll always have a map handy. For most of the year, here are the staples that I bring with me to Berlin. Since Berlin is a big city, you’ll:

be walking a lot so wear [amazon_textlink asin=’B00XWPXR5K’ text=’sneakers’ template=’ProductLink’ store=’tafrafo-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’058b07ba-16f7-11e7-9fd4-21ac0badb158′],

be out for most of the day so bring[amazon_textlink asin=’B01CU1EC6Y’ text=’ a portable charger’ template=’ProductLink’ store=’tafrafo-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’68be89c3-16f7-11e7-b5ad-dbe3b3bf85da’] the size of a lipstick case and fits easily in a pocket or purse and a wire for your phone,

needing directions so bring [amazon_textlink asin=’B00YD548Q0′ text=’your phone’ template=’ProductLink’ store=’tafrafo-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’82b9d7a0-16f7-11e7-b0c4-b5056013861d’] with an offline Google Maps on it,

needing to charge your phone, camera, and other electronics so an [amazon_textlink asin=’B00HVKR92Y’ text=’EU charging station with four USB ports’ template=’ProductLink’ store=’tafrafo-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’dcac9368-16f7-11e7-87a4-497a778f639e’] is really handy,

be taking lots of photos so bring one that takes great photos and is light to carry like the Sony A6000 I have,

possibly want to look your best so check out this post to find out if you need a converter or adapter for your hair straightener or curling, or if you need to buy a new one,

and depending on the weather, you’ll want to bring a poncho, umbrella, or a winter coat with winter accessories. Both times I went in the Fall and Winter were gray, rainy, and cold!

Here are photos of the products I named above and other ones you might find helpful for your trip.

[amazon_link asins=’B01CU1EC6Y,B00HVKR92Y,B00I8BICB2,B005H92I6S,B01N6EGXUB,B00WQNMGII’ template=’ProductCarousel’ store=’tafrafo-20′ marketplace=’US’ link_id=’1d8ddd43-1723-11e7-a657-2f2e19d94191′]

Ready to go to Berlin? Book a hotel with Bonwi, and build up rewards quickly like you’ve never done before.

Thanks for stopping by! xo.

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City Guide: Everything You Need to Know About Berlin, Germany #travel #berlin This post is part of a five part City Guide series as I explore Europe as a brand ambassador for…