My two new favorite things. OnLive and Bing.

First off, I am a gamer.  I am a competitive gamer.  I play mainly first person shooters such as the Call of Duty series and Halo series.  I started out as a competitive gamer in 2005 when I got Xbox LIVE for Halo 2 for the original Xbox.  I quickly became one of the better players, racking in win after win.  Eventually the competition was little to nothing so I became an exploit gamer.  An exploit gamer is someone who relies heavily on exploits in the game and uses them as part of their tactics. 

After playing on Halo 2 for a few years I eventually had to get an Xbox 360 to keep up with the crowd.  I got a Xbox 360 with Halo 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.  I quickly rose to the top of the leaderboard in Call of Duty, being ranked within the top 10,000 out of more than 30 million players.

I have played many other games since then, ranking high in them. At one point I was ranked in the top 100 for a very popular game called Battlefield: Bad Company and within the top 1,000 in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

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Lately, my urge to game competitively has died.  That was until I found this.

The service is called OnLive. OnLive is revolutionary way to game.  You can play many high quality games without the need to install them.  How does this work?

Cloud computing.  The only requirement to play high quality games is a mouse, keyboard, screen and a good internet connection (10-15 Mbps.)  OnLive keeps all their games stored on their server and all you get is the video.  When you input a command it will forward it instantly to their servers and execute it.  There is virtually no delay between you hitting the button and the server receiving and executing it.  What this means is that you can easily play a game like Crysis (unfortunately they do not offer it yet) on a low powered system such as a netbook without the lag you would receive if you were to try to install it and run it on your netbook.

Unfortunately, OnLive has been speculated not to survive.  Many people and companies see OnLive not being around for too long.  That being said, I will still continue to use it while it is around.

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Now being an Xbox 360 gamer I use things called Microsoft Points.  What these let me do is purchase things such as bonus content and additional maps. 

I lately have ran into a lack of money so I haven't been buying any Microsoft Points lately.  But I have found out that Microsoft's search engine Bing.  One thing that Bing offers is something called the Bing Bar.  When  you install it (Internet Explorer and Firefox only, sorry Chrome users) it adds a new menu on to your browser. 

With the bar, you can perform searches and complete offers (clicking on links).  When you do these tasks you are awarded Points.  With these points you can purchase multiple things (Microsoft Points, air miles, USB sticks, ect.)  But for me the most interesting thing is the Microsoft Points.  For every point you earn you can buy one Microsoft Point (in multiples of 100.)

At first, I thought that this would go slow since they only allow you to earn 20 points through searching a day, but in a matter of less than two week, I have earned over 500 points. 

I recommend this not only to Xbox players, but to anyone that constantly searches. Trust me, it will pay off.