Lately we have been thinking about how many amazing tools there are on GGE, and how much functionality there is. But we realized not all of it is immediately obvious. So we have decided to start handing out the lessons so that you might be able to learn some things that you perhaps didn’t know were possible on the site. Consider this a mini-tutorial. If, after you have read one of these tips, you still have questions, just respond in the comments and we will try and clarify. So here we go with the very first: How to have a feed showing only the friends you want it to.

Most people, I hope, have seen the feed in their account section. This feed lists everything you could possibly want to know about what is happening on the site. But what if you just want to know what certain people are doing? That is what the “My Friends” Module in the My Account page is for. You can add an ultra specific feed in just a few steps.

Step 1: Click on the my account tab and then on the right sidebar click “customize.” You should see a screen similar to that of editing a profile. This is where you can set up what you see when you click the my account tab. The same module system applies and you can move and edit just about everything.

Step 2: On the right sidebar in the “add a module” box, click “Friends” and then click “Add!.” This will place your new module in the inactive modules space, ready for editing.

Step 3: Click the edit icon towards the right hand side of the My Friends Module bar. you should then see the editing page that looks like this:

Step 4: Now you can change the title of this module, select which tags you would like to see, and select the number of items to display. The important part of this step is the tag selection. When you accept or invite someone as a friend you can choose preset tags such as “good profile” and “friend monger,” but you can also add your own tags from the “My Friends” page. So you might tag all of the people you went to school with as “school friends.” This tag could then be selected from the dropdown box, and you would only see the activity of your friends from school.

Step 5: Click “save changes” and then click and drag the inactive module up to the active modules and you are done. Simple

This feed is actually really useful. The main feed tells you all the information you could ever want to know. The friends module will tell you exactly what you want to know. You can add as many of these modules as you like. You could even have one feed for every single friend you have I suppose. So, that’s it, nice and simple. Enjoy!

I’m sure that many of you would love to add a game or two, but might not know which games to add. As the number of games on the site grows it gets harder and harder to find those games that have yet to be submitted. So, I thought I would help those of you who are looking to submit some games with a little old school inspiration: NES.

Currently, there are only around 70 NES games in the catalog. There are over 800 NES games that exist. If you do the math you will realize that we are missing a couple. That’s where you come in. Submit some of those classics that haven’t been seen here yet. Here are a couple that you might be interested in submitting:

The Karate Kid, T&C Surf Designs, and BombermanII are just 3 of the NES games you could submit. So all you die-hard NES fans and retro gamers, this is your chance to fill out the site with some of those titles that might have been overlooked thus far.

Not a lot of new features rolled out this week, but you may have noticed there has been a large number of new users.  And if you browse around some of the popular gaming blogs, i.e. Kotaku you may know why already. 

Anyway, I just wanted to welcome all these new users to the Great Games Experiment.  So you regular visitors to GGE please make them feel at home.

Since I don’t have much to write about I’ll talk about a fun little game called Shuffle.  In Shuffle you use your mouse to aim and shoot the red balls from the board before the opponent knocks all of them off.  As the feud for high scores continues between Dr Hendrickson and I, I recommend everyone else join in.  So far he’s touting his high score of 78070.  So start playing, beat his score and post it here so I can rub it in his face.

Anyway, have a good weekend everyone and I’m looking forward to all the new users, activity, and new games next week. 

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I am sure many of you are familiar with some of Google’s widgets, they have literally thousands of them. But did you know that all of them are compatible with your GGE profile page? They are so easy to add that I am surprised that more people haven’t added them. Many profiles embed video, or edit the text styles in the profiles, but there are so many more ways to customize your profile. I thought it would be worthwhile, at least, to alert you to the widgets that Google has to offer that may be of interest to the gaming community.

There are playable widgets for classic games such as Frogger, PacMan, and Asteroids, standard games like chess, checkers, and backgammon, and even some newer games like Bowman 2 and Gold Miner. You can find technology news, entertainment news, and even just regular news. Pretty much anything you can think of, there is a widget for it. There is even a Terramagnetoscope widget if you find yourself wondering about the Earth’s magnetic field status.

There are about 8000 widgets available, all of them can be added to your GGE profile in about two minutes using the [ggadget=”URL”] GGE code explained here and an uber module.

Don’t forget that you can also add slide.com slideshows and Xbox Live Gamer Cards to your profile. Check out the widget whitelist for more information.

So go and pimp your profiles, until they can be pimped no more.

To honor our rockin’ new orange GGE t-shirts, We’ve gone ahead and released our first GGE application on the new Facebook platform.

This app is true gamer bling, with quick and easy integration of our Gamelist Central into your Facebook profile

If you don’t have a Facebook profile yet, I strongly suggest you fire one up

Head here to add the GGE Gamelist application to your profile.

If you don’t have a GGE account yet, then I just died a little bit inside, but head here to get started

There’s plenty of cool stuff coming down the pipe so don’t miss the party!!!

–Sean

This Friday brings you a more simplistic Friday Round-Up. The number of games on GGE is growing steadily everyday along with the number of users. Keep submitting those games and further developing the GGE catalog. The real highlight of the week is the soon to be available facebook application.

The application itself is completed and ready for use and is just awaiting approval from facebook (however that works) before it is available to everyone. The application simply implants your gamelist(s) into your facebook profile and makes it easy for others to link directly to your GGE profile.

So keep an eye out and we will let you know when the application is readily available for everyone.

GreatGamesExperiment T-shirts!

Below you can see some beautiful photos of the GGE crew and some assorted GarageGames employees sporting the brand new, extremely comfortable GGE T-shirts. Like what you see? Let us know what you think, and you may be able to get your hands on one.

That’s all for this week. I would just like to add that great users make GGE a great site, and we have some great users.

Classic games have been imitated since Pong. Asteroids came only a few years later, but is constantly being retrofitted for new audiences. Look up Asteroids on GGE and you will receive no less than 25 results, from RoidRage to Rock Dodger. The following are just 2 unique adaptions of the classic space blaster:

Asteroid’s Revenge is played with literally the same graphics and art as the original. So what’s new about it? This time around you play as an asteroid, smashing into the evil spaceships that have decimated generations of innocent space rock. The idea alone makes this game worth playing. Combined with the tried and true gameplay (reversed, of course) of the original, there really is no reason to not spend a few minutes with this game.

Echoes certainly does echo the look and gameplay of the original Asteroids, but the adrenaline infusion of fast-paced confusion that this iteration inflicts on the player is something entirely new. Step 1 of the instructions let you know that the game is as straightforward as the original: “Shoot Stuff.” It’s step 2 of the instructions that makes you worry: “Die.” And that’s exactly what you’ll do; but not before you blast away and hordes of space debris is what can only be described as survival, rather than attack.

Memorial weekend is a great time to relax, enjoy the company of friends and family, and of course play games.  Gotta love the three day weekends!

New GGE Features:

This week we introduced the Anticipation Meter for games that are currently unreleased.  This way your friends can know how excited you are about the impending release of a game rather than rating a game you’ve never played.  That didn’t make much sense now did it?  We didn’t think so either.  So we’ve done something about it.

Look for this image when you are browsing around the games and show your anticipation!

Games on GGE:

Here on GGE you may have heard, seen or even played a little game called Space Trader.  Well they’ve undergone a complete makeover of their website and I must say it looks quite shiny.  I suggest you check out the demo and if you like it, pre-orders are available through their site.  Remember you’ve got at least 3 days this weekend to check it out. 

Site News:

As you have probably noticed, the Great Games Experiment is now well over 10,000 users.  iamthefox being the 10,000th person to create an account.  You can read more about the accomplishment here.  Thanks to everyone that has signed up and is helping to make GGE a success.

Keep a lookout next week for some new site features, I won’t tell you what it is yet, but it looks really cool so far. 

Have a great three day weekend everyone.

Earlier today, Iamthefox became the 10,000th user to sign up for the GreatGamesExperiment. To celebrate, we’ve decided to give Iamthefox his choice of any 2 games from the GarageGames Game Store!

Congrats to Iamthefox, and to the first 9,999 users, for helping make GGE a success! Along with 10,000+ users, GGE is also steadily closing in on 4,000 games. We’ll keep you updated on further milestones as the site and community continues to build.

Some of you may have noticed yesterday that a slight change was made to the game pages. Now, when you add a game, you are given the choice to enter a release year, or check that a game has not yet been released. If the game has not been released yet, you will see on the game page an anticipation meter instead of the standard rating. This is due in part to the Starcraft 2 page, and the discussion over rating games that you can’t even play yet. We thought it was a good idea to make this rating more applicable, and bam! Anticipation Meter.

The rating is as easy as ever, only with a new set of descriptions for each rating level: 1) Not interested; 2) Not Impressed; 3) Indifferent; 4) Pretty Excited; 5) Totally Psyched. Use these ratings to let every know how excited, or not excited you are about upcoming games. On a last note, don’t forget to change the game to released once it is published so that the ratings can really begin.