I jumped onto the bandwagon today and downloaded a little program called Raptr. No, that isn't a typo, it really is called Raptr, minus the "o." What this thing is, is some sort of instant messenger/social networking device for gamers. It'll track what you're playing, so it can tell all your friends on facebook and twitter the moment it happens unless you're thoughtful enough to check off the option to only track daily games. Otherwise, you pretty much run the risk of having all your friends unfollowing you or sending you angry tweets about how you're clogging up their friends list with your hobby.
Anyway, onto the meat of the program. You can link several messengers together, such as MSN, AIM, Google Chat, even Xfire. I was surprised about the Xfire bit, since this seems a lot like their competition, but hey I guess it works. Now instead of having several different chat clients up at one time, I can have them all under Raptr and talk to my friends and family while displaying what I'm playing, as if they care how many hours of video games I am stuffing into my afternoon...right?
On the website, you can search for friends you may already have on Raptr, or find some new ones. You can write reviews about a game, and it'll even mimic netflix and start suggesting some games for you to play. Right now it's recommending Halo 3 to me, which just goes to show that Raptr doesn't know me at all because I already own Halo 3 and I hated it.
Been there, done that, Raptr. If we're going to be friends, you should start paying attention to my tastes, geez.
That's another thing: Raptr is in beta, so things aren't going to go as smoothly as one would hope. Upon installing Raptr, it asked me to select my "top 8 gaming friends." I clicked on the "next" button and I had a feeling this was going to happen - it spammed all those friends with a message telling them that I added them to my top 8 and that they should get Raptr so they can do the same thing! I have a feeling this program could make me very unpopular if I make a habit of shuffling people around.
Sure enough, two seconds later a couple of my friends sent me messages going, "Uh, did you get hacked? You're spamming things at me." Face. Palm.
It'll also share your xbox live achievements, your playstation trophies, whether you dinged in WoW or something... I don't get why it's only WoW. Probably has something to do with the fact that Blizzard's behemoth is well...a behemoth. So, it's fairly intrusive and mimics facebook in the "hey pay attention to me! LOOK AT ME!" department.
If you don't like people and would rather just play your games solo, skip Raptr.
If you are addicted to social networking sites such as myspace, facebook and twitter and you're also a gamer, get Raptr. Pretty simple.
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