Xfire

Tom Andrade, California Highway Patrol officer in San Francisco, talks about why he can't live without Xfire.

I’m a PC gamer, and I love to play online. Xfire allows me to communicate with and join other gamers online. I can message or have a voice chat with them. What sets Xfire apart from a regular instant messaging program is its in-game feature, which allows gamers to message each other without minimizing the window their game is on. With other IM clients, the messaging goes on in a separate window. With Xfire, you don’t have to leave the game. Xfire supports more than 1,000 games -- every game I own and play is supported. It’s really cool because you can see who’s on, what they’re playing, what servers they’re on, even what level they’re playing on. Based on that information, you can decide whether to join them, sometimes without messaging them so you won’t break their concentration.

I’ve been using Xfire probably since 2004 or 2005 -- a fellow geek told me about it. I run it on my PC whenever I’m gaming but not all the time, because my friends on Xfire would probably coax me into playing more than I should. I have 10 friends on Xfire, six of whom I know personally. One person on my friends list -- which you set up like a buddy list on an IM application like AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Messenger or Google Talk -- I think he’s from Germany. When I chat with him, he has an Eastern European accent. You can ask people you’ve played with before to be on your buddy list, so you can play with people from all over.

Xfire isn’t perfect. Its voice chat isn’t the best out there, and sometimes if you try to use all its features at once, they don’t all work. But it’s free, and I don’t know of anything else out there that does the same thing. If you like to play games on your computer, it’s awesome.