With the number of quality free-to-play 
online games growing almost daily, dropping $10-$15 per month in subscription fees is getting harder and harder to justify.
Walking away from a free online game, after all, is a pretty easy thing to do. There’s no nagging voice in the back of your head doing the math and informing you of how much money you’ve invested in a game you’re no longer obsessed with. When it’s free, the stakes are low, though often so is the payoff.
The NBA finals won’t be held until 
early next month, but Chicago Bulls fans might want to start stockpiling the bubbly right now.
Award-winning b-ball sim NBA 2K11 has come out with its annual prediction of who will emerge victorious from the finals, saying Chicago will beat the Dallas Mavericks in seven games. In addition, the game predicts Derrick Rose will take home MVP honors after a tremendous performance in the final three games.
Now that the PlayStation Network is 
back online after a three-and-a-half week outage, Sony is extending an olive branch to gamers to apologize for the inconvenience.
The company has detailed exactly what North American players will receive in their “Welcome Back” package – and it’s a pretty well stocked goodie bag. That’s not stopping some people from grumbling, though.
After being down for some 24 days, the 
PlayStation Network began welcoming players back to the game over the weekend.
Sony released a mandatory system software update Saturday night, adding new layers of security and forcing users to change their passwords after suffering one of the largest security breaches on record. Users are once again able to play multiplayer games, access their friends lists and use third-party services such as Netflix and Hulu Plus.
Most pirate-themed video games encourage 
players to strap a parrot to their shoulder and hoist the skull and crossbones. Now the Navy — yes, the U.S. Navy — is asking gamers to walk the other side of the plank.
Starting Monday, the naval branch of the military will launch an experimental online game that hopes to tap the collective intelligence of gamers to help combat real-world pirates terrorizing the waters off the Horn of Africa.
The Easter Bunny apparently stuffed a 
few baskets with video games this year. The late holiday and a strong slate of titles overcame gloomy headlines of data theft to boost April video game sales by 26 percent, according to the NPD Group.
Hardware sales were also impressive, climbing 12 percent overall, though Microsoft and Sony had a lot more to celebrate than Nintendo did.
As the PlayStation Network outage 
inches closer to the one-month mark, the extended downtime is testing more than just the patience of some players.
It’s testing their loyalty.
Not content being the queen of social 
media, Lady Gaga is now taking her act to social gaming.
The iconic pop star has teamed with social games maker Zynga to create GagaVille, a newly created FarmVille farm which will give her little monsters the chance to hear unreleased songs from her forthcoming album, “Born This Way,” before anyone else.
Scrabble, one of the last bastions of grammatical 
purism in a world overrun by cell phone text abbreviations, is capitulating to the times.
The board game plans to add 3,000 new words to its official dictionary, including several slang terms like “thang” (9 points) and “grrl” (5 points) as well as pop culture touchstones, like Facebook and MySpace.
Every day, the average Facebook user spends 
55 minutes clicking through the popular social networking site. That’s an impressive time sink — but players of Call of Duty: Black Ops have them beat.
Activision says since the First Strike downloadable content pack was released on February 1, players have averaged 58 minutes per day playing online. Given that the game itself is now over six months old, that’s a seriously dedicated fan base.
Chris Morris: Journalist 