GameSpy Arcade

One of the joys of gaming is playing with your friends, either teaming up to batter the enemy or facing off against them in your favourite argument settler. GameSpy Arcade is a program that lets you organise a multitude of online gaming experiences, meet up with your friends and communicate with new ones.

Gamespy started life allowing Quake players to find multiplayer servers. It's since developed into a multi game platform that lets any number of game series fans find online servers for their chosen multiplayer experiences. Millions of people now use it to find and join multiplayer games as well as download free demos and free online multiplayer games. It's interface allows you to find friends and add new ones, giving you a range of options to communicate and meet up online.

Once you've installed it, Gamespy scans you computer for compatible games and adds them to it's library. From there you can log into the games via Gamespy and join your favourite servers. Using a system called Playerspy it collects together all of the people on you Buddylist who are playing similar games to you and makes their servers available to join.

One of it's most touted features is the server filter. You can use this to specify exactly what sort of server you want to join. This is hugely important and useful for gamers who are looking for specific gaming experiences and don't want to wade through reams of server lists from the most popular of games.

It's main down points would be the amount of advertising on the app as well as the resources it takes up on your computer. As it's a free service a certain amount of advertising is to be expected but there are a lot of adverts and it can get distracting at times. For such a seemingly simple service it also takes up a lot of system resources so be prepared to have your RAM gobbled up when you use it.

Pros

• Server Filters
• Huge Library of Compatible Games
• Great Buddylist Features

Cons

• Too Much Advertising
• Too Resource Heavy