knockknock.biz luggage tags. Photo courtesy of justinph. I guess it's finally time for me to level up. It was the summer of '99 when I convinced my then editor to send me on a tour of the U.S. videogame industry. When I finally returned three weeks later, my head was still spinning. I felt as though I'd seen the future of entertainment. It ...

 180 Degrees columnist Bill Harris and his son Eli playing Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii Last month, in his debut guest column for Level Up, Dubious Quality blogger Bill Harris combined an interview with Armageddon Empires creator Viv Davis with an analysis of sales its patterns to help understand how indie developers must market ...

180 Degrees columnist Bill Harris and his son Eli

 Diagram of the influenza virus, courtesy Chris Bickel/Science In Part I of Bill Harris' 180 Degrees column, he and Armageddon Empires' creator Vic Davis discussed how Davis got into game development, as well as the gamer interest and sales pattern for AE during its first three months of release. In today's second and final installment, ...

 Armageddon Empires, developed and published by Cryptic Comet It's been almost three weeks since we unveiled our plans to add a select group of columnists who would contribute monthly posts to Level Up. Today, we're pleased to introduce our third columnist: Bill Harris of the blog Dubious Quality. ''Smart and caustic'' is how we ...

  As we said in today's announcement, former guest poster Justin Blankenship has graciously agreed to join Level Up's select stable of monthly columnists. In his first post, he applied the insights he gained during his 2001-2004 tenure in the Federal Trade Commission's Mergers 2 division in Washington, D.C., to suss out the antitrust ...

 DVD cover for the 1995 film ''The Usual Suspects,'' courtesy MGM Over the Christmas break, we took some time to reflect on what changes or additions we could make to improve the blog. One of those concepts was Page 110, which debuted today. Another, which has also been some time in coming, was to add monthly columnists. We've always done ...

DVD cover for the 1995 film ''The Usual Suspects''

  Here at Level Up, our inbox is chock full of press releases, PR pitches, notes from my editors, a fan mail or two, and the occasional bit of Viagra spam that slips through our email filters. But every so often, something genuinely compelling comes across the transom--so compelling, in fact, that we have no choice to share it with you. ...

 Freelance journalist Evan Narcisse It goes without saying that when we play single-player games, we usually do so by ourselves. But while staying at a friend's in Los Angeles over the Thanksgiving break, we were introduced to the singular pleasures of passing the controller back and forth so that two players can, um, jointly ...