Ringing Your Bell -- Taking Credit for your Gaming Prowess
Each of the services (except for Nintendo, which does not have an official gamer card for its Wii Console) has a Gamer Card that you can use to show off your accomplishments either on the web, or more often as the signature you use on the chat boards you are active upon. Doing this may be bragging, true, but it is not the sort of bragging that other gamers look down upon, and it has a very useful and functional side to it -- as it allows other gamers to see what games you play and, as a result, which games that they can invite you to play with them online.
While you can use the official gamer cards from the various services, the utilitarian and often very plain appearance of these is less than inspiring, so we thought we would share some examples of third-party gamer cards you can obtain free from the web that you may like to use instead!
A Free Gamer Card created by Exophase whose special feature is that it displays the data from two different platform communities in one gamer card! As you can see in the example above I am showing off my Xbox Live and PSN status on the one card, and how cool is that?
The Exophase Gamer Card includes several different "skins" -- a skin is a graphical layout -- for example the version below uses their 'Dual X' skin in place of the default skin above. When you create a gamer card on their site they provide you two sets of code to use -- one is standard HTML that you can use on your personal home/web page, while the other uses the standard markup codes for chat boards.
The Your Gamer Card Website offers free versions for PS3 gamers that include some interesting skins -- the example below uses the '100 Yen Trash Can' skin.
The Playfire Website and Gamer Community -- an official Microsoft Community Developer -- offers some interesting gamer cards that are not simply what they appear to be, but include a plethora of statistics as they are backed up by your Playfire Profile, which keeps track of all sorts of game information across multiple platforms, including Xbox, PlayStation, and Steam. The Playfire community includes Community Buzz -- gossip and posts about games and gaming -- and a community chat environment that is game-centric!
Unlike the sites that simply provide a gamer card service, you will need to open a free account at Playfire, but in addition to your free gamer card over at Playfire, your account includes tracking of an incredible amount of information like your personal game timeline that tells you what games you played and when, your recent game activity that includes what games you played and for how long as well as the dates and times for the last three Achievements unlocked for each of the games listed.
On the Achievement side, your Playfire Profile tracks your completion percentages for each game, as well as some nice recognition elements that are specific to Playfire, including its own system of badges and accolades, a summary of the totals for Achievements and Gamer Score across all of the games you played through the life of your Gamertag, and it breaks down the Achievements you have already unlocked by their rarity -- including Ultra Rare, Very Rare, Rare, Uncommon, and Common -- which nicely adds a scale for which you can judge your personal accomplishments.
Playfire was one of those little instances of serendipity in which discovering it while researching this article was an unexpected but very welcome bonus!
The Xbox Gamer Tag Website includes a selection of custom tags as well as a version of the traditional tag from Live providing the usual board code as well as HTML for use on websites, but also an Image URL and a Wiki Markup for your use when you post to Wiki's (which we have to admit is particularly cool!).
In the process of researching this article we looked at a lot of sites offering Gamer Card Services and a lot of Gamer Cards, and the 'cool factor' is pretty high for their gamer cards, so we have included an example of each of the cards that are available below:
The website over at Gamer Handles features Gamer Cards that are theme based on specific iconic video games, which is not really unusual, but the fact that it includes support for Wii games is very unusual indeed! In fact the Gamer Cards from Gamer Handles allow you to show off your Xbox, PlayStation AND your Wii activities on a single Gamer Card!
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