Female Protagonists in games.

I'm a bit late typing this up as I drafted it out a few days ago and have been busy doing other stuff I can't really remember. Anyway I had seen a couple of articles kicking up a fuss about the new Grand Theft Auto. Believe it or not, it's not the usual this game is corrupting our children which it's violence and all that bull that subject is a story for another day. This complaint, as you might have guessed from the title, is about the lack of a playable female character.

My little rant about this matter, is does it really matter? Surely you play games like Grand Theft Auto to steal cars, cause mayhem, randomly kill people and when you get bored play through the story. I couldn't care less about what gender the playable characters are. So long as I get to play the bad guy (sorry, I mean bad person to be politically correct). Which at the end of the day is exactly what this game is about. It is Rockstars choice what gender they want the protagonists to be, not ours. Should we get offended when they don't do something we want with the game. I'd say no, it is there game, they can make it however they want to. If you don't like it, don't buy it. It's simple enough. 

I get there isn't too many female protagonists out there, the only ones I can think of is Tomb Raiders Lara Croft, Chell from Portal and Kate from Hydrophobia: Prophecy. Most people won't know of Kate as it is a pretty small game that has been over looked by a lot of people. I believe it was meant to be the first game of a few, but never got enough funding to carry on the series, check it out anyway you can pick it up fairly cheap on Steam and probably some other places as well, I generally buy everything on Steam so I wouldn't know. Anyway tangent aside all of these games, never got complained about because the protagonists are female. So why should we complain about when you play as a guy. It does not matter, some games have male players some have female. It is entirely up to the developer to choose what they believe would suit the game better.

Origin Humble Bundle

I have returned once again to bring you news (I say news damn near every other website will tell u before me lol) of the Humble Origin Bundle.

After reading a few articles and the comments that were bound to come along with a lot of them came with their hatred to Origin (as did PewDiePew bundle they have going at the moment, never watched him dunno anything about him so I staying away from commenting about that.). At the end of the day, yes Origin are blatantly trying to pick up business for their DD service as it business putting the amount they have into Origin they are hardly going to turn round and say to the guys in the office 'Hey you guys just want to fuck off out system, instead of work we can go get drunk and eat pizza instead'. However if they can get away doing that props to them I'd love to get drunk and eat pizza for a living, anyway before I get too distracted I'll get to my point.

The point is EA and the Origin guys have taken it upon themselves to give you this deal in the name of charity. Whether you like EA/Origin at all is irrelevant as it is for a Charity. If you don't like EA you can give all your money to charity, If you don't like Origin, all the games are available on Steam with the exception of Dead Space 3, Battlefield 3 and The Sims 3 starter set. But at the end of the day whether you like it or not EA are in fact doing this for charity. Yes, extra promotion will be a reason in there some where, does that really matter though. You can get 8 pretty awesome games for as little as a fiver can you really argue at that price. And I know there will be "but Origin is terrible and Steam is much better" comments out there.

However if we take a trip down memory lane, everyone hated Valve and Steam when it first came onto the scene way back when. It took them years of trust building and listening to what people what in the service to get where it is today. By all means Steam isn't perfect by any matters there a number of things that could and hopefully will be implemented in the future. I am giving Origin the benefit of the doubt as at least EA are doing better than Microsoft with the joke that is GFWL. Origin is still playing catch up as Valve has many years on them in the digital distribution field. The fact they are giving a lot of their best games away in the name of charity, I am going to give them Kudos for it. Granted I haven't used Origin for a while, not since I went through my Sim City phase I had no problems with it really, well except you can't auto update Sim City and have to open the log in to the game screen (and I'm assuming the rest of the games until you load up the game. That may have been fixed by now but don't quote me on that as I haven't checked.) I give it a year or 2 and see what they have done from here, these clients constantly get updated so I'm looking to see what they do. EA does need to knock down the prices on Origin though as they are more expensive that buying in an actual shop. But my dig at prices of digital download games is a complete story.

Anyway I've feed what ever trolls my come my way; now on to the bundle itself.

As always with the Humble Bundle it is a pay what you want scheme, the average purchase is around $5 at the moment and consists of:

• Dead Space
• Burnout Paradise
• Crysis 2
• Mirror's Edge
• Dead Space 3
• Medal of Honour
• Battlefield 3
• The Sims 3 + Starter Pack (which consists of Late Night Expansion Park and High-End Loft Stuff Expansion

Both Battlefield and The Sims require you to pay above the average to unlock. Are you really going to turn down this standard of games for such a low price. You are frankly an idiot if you do to be honest.

Anyways you have just under 12 days left to take advantage of this frankly amazing deal

The future of Origin

I came across an interview with head of Origin, David Demartini on Games Industry about what the future holds for EAs digital distribution service, it's an interesting read. They want Origin to be 'the hub' for gamers and goes on to talk about cross platform though it does sound like they want to be something like Raptr which allows you to see acheivements, game collections, what you've been playing etc and rank you against friends. We seen cross platform gaming done, quite successfully may I add, with Valve and Portal 2 between PC and PS3. Hopefully this is a sign of things, I have been wanting this to happen since GFWL started (which I am still hoping will happen but I'm not holding my breath), cross platform gaming could and should have happened back then but alas Microsoft never followed through with what could have brought Xbox and PC gamers closer together, but I'm not going to get in to that rant now. EA are definitely big enough to fund this sort project, so maybe in the not to distant future we will see EA dabbling in cross platform games. I'm sure if one company sets the ground work for something like this others will follow suite. It needs to be done.

He also discusses Steam, talking about Valves raping of wallets... I mean sales and discounts and how Origin won't be going down this road. Saying how it cheapens your intellectual property. While I can see where he's coming from on the matter, I disagree with the fact it cheapens your ip, the fact of the matter is due to the fact that you are buying from a digital distributor the games shouldn't be the same price as they are if you are buying a hard copy. You have no case, instruction books or discs to make therefore no manufactor costs only those of for the upkeep of servers. I don't see how you can justify £40 for a downloadable copy of a game when it you pay the exact same amount for everything that comes with a hard copy. Then there is also the fact that we are in a recession and everyone can't afford to buy every single title that comes out at 40 quid a pop. Which is why I am yet to buy a single new AAA title this year. Purely because I can't afford to, along with the fact that if I wait a couple months it will be half the price, which points to his earlier comment about cheapening ips, but this is how businesses work. You set a price, if it doesn't sell well enough, you cut the price to increase sales, which is exactly what Valve do with Steam. Not every sale they do is ridiculously discounted they generally range from 10% and upwards, if we take the lowest discount thats only 3-4 quid off a new game. Then there is the fact these sales can rejuvinise games vastly increasing their popularity and even extending the life span of games.

Anyway I have rambled on enough for now, I am interested to see what Origin do in the future, I've never really used it so can't comment on how good or bad I think it is, however they are the new kids on the block and have to prove themselves and it would seem they are attempting to do that as it has had multiple updates during it's first year and looks like they are going to continue to do so.

Should used games be abolished?

I was reading an article on Gamerant about how Crytek developers are in favour of the next generation consoles blocking of used games. While I understand why developers would want this to happen and would obviously be in favour of this: It could potentially lead to more sales of new games making them more money.

This has happened already on the PC side of gaming with the majority of PC games these days having some sort of DRM, be it Steam, Origin or Ubisofts always online DRM system which everyone loves to hate. The Point I'm getting to is that it seems that consoles may be taking a page out of the PCs side of the industry should rumours be true.

Since this has already happened over with the PC community and me primarily being a PC gamer, I am used to this anyway and it isn't as big of a deal to me as it is to a lot of console gamers. But due to the fact I can't buy used games on PC any more, places like Steam have realised this and took advantage with all there constant sales, now instead of buying used games I just wait until they go on sale and buy them cheap. My theory is if these rumours are true, consoles and developers should take a page out of Valves book and do something similar sale wise to keep customers happy.

At the end of the day though, I don't agree with this business practice. I'm all for companies trying to up sell their products it is a business after all and of course they need to make money. But to me this logic is ridiculous. Let's put this mentality into perspective shall we? Say I buy a brand new car, then after a while of using it I decide to sell it for whatever reason; to buy a better one, because I need the money or I just plain don't want it any more. Should the car manufacturer get a cut of my sale of a product which is rightfully mine now? No, of course they shouldn't, they set a price that they thought reasonable to make back the money the initially spent building it. Therefore after I paid said initial price the car would be mine to do whatever I please with. If I want to sell it on, destroy it, keep it forever and add to my collection, it is might right to have a choice in what I do with it as it now belongs to me. 

This logic is the same for the likes of books, dvds, furniture and damn near everything that you can physically buy. There are many places that have made businesses out of selling used goods, look at Gamestop, Love Film (renting by post, not the online version), used car lots, Blockbuster (not sure if they are in business anymore but you get my point), charity shops, eBay and the list goes on, that's just a few off the top of my head. But if you stop used goods from being sold you will destroy many businesses and cause job loses for even more people, which is exactly what we need right now (going to stop here or I will get in to a rant about politics and I can't be arsed with it). The fact of the matter is this does not happen in any other industry why should the gaming industry be the exception.

Theme Hospital

I recently bought this of GOG.com as it was only about $6 and I loved playing it as a kid. I dunno why but it seems a hell of a lot easier than I remember it being. I used to struggle to get past the first level with earthquakes but I've beat that one and got a fair few levels higher than that just since yesterday and I haven't even done the money cheat either, which used to get used a lot back in the day. There aren't enough games like this these days, the closest we have today is the bullshittery that are facebook games. I want a proper game not one I have to be friends with so many people to achieve the next level. Tycoon games are in quite a lul at the moment, sure we had the announcement of Sim City 5 recently but except that what have we had, Rollercoaster Tycoon was about 7 years ago, Hospital Tycoon was 5, Sim City 4 was about 9 and we haven't seen anything Bullfrog in over a decade. I want someone, I don't care who, to bring out a series of new Theme games with fancy new graphics. This was meant to be reminiscing about the awesomeness that was Theme Hospital, but I kind of went on a tangent. Long story short people should go buy Theme Hospital it's a great little game.

I want some Battlefield with my Mass Effect

Back on Valentines day, EA made lonely gamers day (probably gamers that arn't lonely aswell) by not only releasing the Mass Effect 3 demo (which I happened to enjoy except for everything being bound to one key which you couldn't change but I've already had a little rant about that) they also announced that upon pre-ordering Mass Effect 3 through their Origin service they would get a free downloadable copy of Battlefield 3. This offer was supposed to last until the 5th of March, but 2 days after announcing this they decide to pull the offer without a explanation in site. As you may have guessed this has pissed off a lot of punters. The deal was frankly amazing and no doubt would have dragged a lot of new clients over to their Origin service, which if they want to catch up with Steam and for it to be successful they will need to play hard ball which they seemed to be doing with this offer. But for them to suddenly pull it as I said before will piss people off. It's a bad move on their part. What ever the reason behind, this is unacceptable really, it's bad business offering something, getting peoples hopes up then taking it away just because you can. While they obviously have a reason behind doing this, it yet to be announced to the public. If you did happen to get in on this deal during the two days it was available you will still get your code by the 8th of March. Below are a couple tweets for the Origin account pretty much saying what I just did, minus me ranting of course.

PC Version of Mass Effect 3 Will Not Support Controllers

Mass Effect 3 on PC will not have controller support. While this won't phase most pc gamers at all as they are happy enough with there keyboard and mouse to play. Despite this Biowares senior designer Manveer Heir explained why this is on twitter.

“There is a development cost in terms of time/effort to get all the graphical user interfaces so 360 buttons show up on PC. It may seem minor, but our GUI team was already stretched thin, and things were coming in at the last minute, so we couldn’t add more work.”

This seems like a pretty legit reason for it and I believe the previous games in the series didn't support gamepads on PC either (don't quote me on that though). While there are third party programs out there which will allow you to play on PC with your controller if you wish to do so, I still believe in this day and age all games should be compatible with both, regardless of platform. Of course you will get those that think playing on PC with a controller is blastphemy, you will find these morons everywhere that allows you to post a comment who say things such as "I'm glad it doesn't support gamepads. Keeps console noobs from screwing their teammates over in multiplayer. Mouse + keyboard = best shooter controls". Just because you prefer a certain type of controls doesn't give you the right to be a complete asshat.

If you are a gamer it shouldn't matter about your choice in peripheral. Everyone knows aiming with a mouse is much more accurate than thumbsticks, therefore making them better for games such as shooters and RTS games. On the other side of the coin you have fighting games, driving games and the majority of sport games which gamepad controls have the edge over keyboard and mouse. I am primarily a PC gamer and do prefer using keyboard and mouse for most games. But sometime I just want to sit back with my feet up on the desk and play a game, you can't really do that with a keyboard and mouse, at least not with my desk setup. So I occasionally break out the Xbox controller and use that instead. Due to me not wanting to sit up at my desk that makes me a 'console noob' according to the muppet who I quoted above. All this makes me is lazy. Sure it's less accurate than aiming with a mouse, does that mean I can't play game? No of course it doesn't, it just means I have to spend an extra half a second aiming.

Blizzard Vs Valve over DotA trademark

Vs

It would seem that Blizzard are appealing against Valve and there attempt to tradement DotA 2. I can see why as the original DotA game was a mod for Warcraft 3 and has had the Blizzard name behind it over all these years. However it is just that a mod, a fan made game and we all know Valve are famous for taking mods and making them full fledged games with the likes of your Counter Strike, Team Fortress and Day of Defeat. However I'm sick of frivolous lawsuits popping up every which way.

I still think every quarrel in the gaming industry should be solved by playing games. Notch mentioned about playing Quake to determine the outcome of the whole "Scrolls" thing with Bethesda a few months back. Shit like that should be the way forward. Best of Valve vs the best of Blizzard in a winner takes all DotA tournament. If Blizzard win Valve changes the name. If Valve wins they get to keep it.

You could take this principle in to other mediums as well. Take the music industry for instance, the amount of people that bitch and whine about how "this band stole my riff" or "that band is using the same chord progression as my song" bull shit (I'm looking at you Joe Satriani, yup as much as I dislike coldplay, them using as tune similar to one of your riffs is hardly worth a law suit, there are more examples but I can't think right now). Anyway crap like that could be easily sorted that out with a guitar battle.

Anyway I'm getting slightly off topic but if you want to have a read through of the appeal you can here. From the law side of things I would probably be on Blizzards side as the name has always been associated with them and they have accepted the mod as one of there own. I can't see it going anywhere as it was a fan built project and not actually owned by Blizzard.

From a gamers perspective however, I couldn't honestly give a shit what the game is called so long as it's a decent game. So my message to all those throwing lawsuits about in the gaming industry is fuck off and get back to developing video games. At the end of the day Valve could just easily change the name and this could all be over saving people a lot of time and money. The game would still be exactly the same except they'd have to think of a new name and logo. But as I said before I honestly couldn't give a crap about the name, it doesn't matter.

Ubisoft Strike Again

Ubisoft, the company PC gamers love to hate, are once again interrupting gamers ability to play their game due to their "successful" always online DRM. This time it is due to a server switch which will cause disruption to their DRM servers.

According to Eurogamer games such as Tom Clancy's HAWX 2, Might and Magic: Heroes 6 and The Settlers 7, along with a number of other Mac ports will become completely unplayable. So if you do plan on playing these games during the server switch, which starts on the 7th February until a currently unknown date I suggest you go to your favourite download site and get a patch allowing you to play the game you rightfully own.

Once again because of this fantastic DRM policy in place. They are going to be pissing off actual customers while pirates would be able to play their games without any problem at all. I don't own any of the games in question not being available so it doesn't affect me personally, that is irrelevant though. If I did own the games in question and wanted to play through the single player campaign I wouldn't be able to. I would be fine if only the multi-player portion of the game went down as that is perfectly understandable. But the fact you can not play the single player due to online servers being down is frankly ridiculous.

DRM "costs money and makes you lose money"

So says Paradox CEO Fred Wester in an interview with Gamespy, it's actually a good read. I would totally agree with this. If you take a look at damn near every game with DRM, then look at torrent sites a number of days after you will usually fine a patch to bypass the DRM in question. At best you will stop your game getting pirated for the first couple weeks or so while a crack is being worked on. 

I have always seen games as a long term investment, which is of the reasons I don't like games such as Call of Duty, they focus on sales until the next rendition of the game comes out which is when they generally stop supporting the game. Good games should be supported for years to come, look at the likes of Counter Strike, Team Fortress and Left 4 Dead those games are what about 5 years old? and they still get constant updates from the developers which is why to this day people still buy these games. Anyway getting back to my point, If a game is a long term investment and DRM is a short term solution, surely you would be better off investing the money spent on DRM (which I'm guessing isn't that cheap, especially if you use a third party solution, I really don't know how much these things cost tbh) on developing the game further. At the end of the day if release good quality goods at a reasonable price people will buy it. Like it or not piracy isn't going any where and pirates will always find a loophole in whatever system you put in place. So focus more on putting out better quality things than worrying about keeping pirates at bay (see what I did there) for a couple of weeks.

If DRM intrudes on my gaming I'm not going to play those games (I'm looking at you Ubisoft). If it comes out in the form of say Steam for example, which actually benefits me (cheap games, library of my games to download at my leisure, social features) I'm okay with it. DRM isn't necessarily a bad thing but you have to make it worth putting up with.

Ubisoft are at it again.

As we all know. PC gamers aren't exactly the biggest fan of Ubisoft due to the likes of their restrictive DRM, but I'm not here to bitch and moan about that. I'm going to bitch and moan about a new (and frankly stupid) policy they have implemented. It would seem that they do not allow more than three separate installs.

There have been many games I have installed more than that over the years. I buy a game I play it for awhile either finish the game or get bored with it. I then uninstall it to make space for some other crap. A few months later I want to play the game, so I reinstall. It's fine I can still install it once more. Let's see I decide to buy a new computer and sell the old one. It's still fine I'm on my final install now. Wait, no... it gets a virus or the hard drive dies, or even you have to much crap on your computer again and need more space, can't afford a new hard drive so we'll just uninstall it. Now my game is useless. Ubisoft you useless bunch of *insert word of choice here*. I buy a game I expect to be able to use it whenever I want.

That's not the best bit yet, according to a article at Rock, Paper, Shogun, just swapping graphics cards will use up one of your three installs. So this DRM monitors hardware changes and apparently can't tell the difference between you upgrading hardware to the game actually being freshly installed. It's like they want people to hate them and not buy their games, I wasn't the greatest fan of their DRM on PC but I still buy their games if they are cheap on Steam. From now on I am completely avoiding them and I hope everyone else does too.

I'm sorry but what they fuck are they thinking. Surely they realise people upgrade their computer. They must realise that people are not going to buy their games if they can not choose where and when to play their own games. It amazes me how Ubisoft can actually be in business with this frankly retarded frame of mind. Hell I just reinstalled Red Alert 2 the other week for about the 20th time. If it just stopped working because I installed it too many times I would be extremely pissed. Anyway I'm going to stop ranting now as I'm going to start going round in circles now.

Long story short Ubisoft can fuck off and we should all boycott their PC games. They do make decent console games but when it comes to the PC side of things they haven't got a clue.

Mass Effect 3 will require Origin

News has it that Mass Effect 3 will require Origin for both physical and digital copies. So for those not a fan of Origin you may want to give this a miss.

Biowares Chris Priestly has come out to say quite obvious things related to the games connection to EAs digital distribution system like both digital and physical copies will require "a one time, single authorisation for the for the single player" and that "there is no limit to the number of installs. Playing Mass Effect 3 multi-player will require will require a constant connection". 

Who would have thought playing multi-player would require an online connection. You know because we haven't been playing multiplayer games online for years now have we. Why he even mentioned the limit on the amount you can install a game you have rightly purchased I don't even know. I install games I own on a number of different computers and have uninstalled and reinstalled games numerous times. I don't need someone to tell me I can install my game where ever and when I want, I already know that. 

According to IGNs piece on this he has mentioned it not being on Steam due to their "restrictive terms of service", the exact phrase that was used last time Valve and EA had problems, I think with Battlefield along with some other games getting pulled. We can sit and debate all day long about the reasoning behind it whether you think Steam have got restrictive ToS or it's EAs way to narrow the competition a little. The thing that annoys me most is the fact that neither side have actually came out and said exactly what these terms are. Every bit of news about this is vague, "it limits how developers interact with customers to sell downloadable content". That doesn't explain anything. How does it do that? It can't be about only selling DLC through Steam as many GFWL games do exactly that, Bioshock 2 being a prime example as I have bought DLC through the GFWL store for my Steam copy of Bioshock 2, I'm sure many other games apply to my theory here as well. I would be less annoyed if they just came out and said we don't like it due to this, this and these parts of your terms and actually provide these terms for people so they actually understand what is going on, rather than sitting behind vague and blatantly prepared comments on the matter. I want actual answers, not pish (I'm bringing pish back it's not used enough) people will be "yeah, okay, whatever" then forget about.

Anyway I digress, long story short if you were hoping on picking up the latest installment of Mass Effect on Steam, think again. Just remember you have an unlimited amount of installs when you get it.......

EA ban SWTOR players for 'Exploit'

It seems EA are wielding the ban hammer in their new Star Wars mmo. The reason? Design flaws. Apparently low level characters can do a chest run in a 40+ area resulting in loot for those that dare it. So instead of doing the reasonable thing and patching this flaw out. You know like most other mmos would do. Put some enemies near the chests which would kill them or lock the area for lower levels, they throw around bans and warnings. Most game have or have had design flaws which allow people who find them to exploit them. But in this day and age we have the ability to easily distribute patches to the masses that play these game. Patches with could easily solve this problem and not make people lose out on the money they pay to play this game. I don't agree with this at all. Welcome to the world of mmos, if people find flaws in designs and take advantage of it while they can before it's patched, it's happened in many well known ones such as WoW and Guild Wars, the game ecomony all ways balances its self out over time as the players control it.

By the logic they are using there power levelling should be a bannable offence as well as the low levels will be in high level areas getting you guessed it high level loot. Meh I don't really care anyway as the next MMO I am getting is Guild Wars 2. But is finding flaws really a bannable offense? I wouldn't say so. If people find out about them, the developers will as well. Which leads to them patching it which leads to less flaws which leads to a better game in general. So does it matter that a few people get a little extra from this? No. Ecomonys in mmos always fluctuate. The sooner they learn that the better. The loot in the chests will be quite high in price at the moment but as more and more people get to that stage in the game it will cancel it out. It's how these things work ffs.

Are gamers too cynical and unforgiving these days?

Over the past few months we have seen a number of new games out, I mean actual new games rather than sequels to older games, such as Homefront, Bulletstorm, Dead Island and Rage. I can't talk for Rage as I have yet to play it but will do in the near future (probably christmas). Anyway even though each one of these games had rocky launches and lack luster reviews, they are pretty decent games. But as these are unknown titles the majority are more willing to automatically shun these games, while the likes of your CoDs and Battlefields among other well known titles I can't think of right now can get away with not so brilliant launches.

This mentality among gamers is wrong. If you are going to shun a game for a crappy launch, it should be done for every game. While I'm not saying everyone does this of course, there are a lot that do. I believe in the fact that not every game is going to have that perfect launch that they planned as mistakes happen, there's hardware issues, the list could go on. Dead Island is a perfect example of this, they had a terrible launch, especially their Steam launch (I'm still not sure how they ended up releasing the completely wrong version of the game but I'm not going to get in to that rant) but behind this crappy launch was infact a pretty awesome game. The point I'm getting to is you have to put faith in developers to fix problems when they occur, this is the exact reason patching of games was invented (along with with adding new content of course).

Along with that people these days seem a lot less forgiving with new titles than franchises. My theory on this is if we keep shunning new games the market won't change and get stale and we will be left with nothing but the same old generic game over and over. It is getting to that stage with shooters right now. There are many decent shooters out their but because they aren't Call of Duty they get completely over shadowed by months of advertising for the same game. Homefront is a prime example of this, the game in itself was a good game in it's own right and yes it had a bad start MP wise with server issues. But tell me other well known shooter franchises have never had problems at release. At the end of the day, they worked on it and sorted it out. The single player on the game was pretty good, the ending was a bit disapointing as it could have went on a bit longer, but it had an interesting storyline and decent gameplay.

Bulletstorm while it got over looked some what, it did have some momentum behind it but the hype about the game lasted ... well it didn't last. I'm sorry but that game put fun back in to games. Far to many games are trying to go all hollywood with their almost life like graphics and serious storylines. This game gave you guns put a load of enemies in your way and told you to go nuts. You could sit and complain about the storyline which I think was fairly decent, but it didn't really matter. The game focused on gameplay and I believe it truely pulled it off. Bulletstorm to me was a warm up for DNF. The only thing I didn't really like in the new Duke game was the fact you only got 2 weapons. Duke is supposed to have a massive arsenal of weapons. Putting that aside the game was fun.

It just seems people are far too cynical and unforgiving when it comes to games these days. If you don't get what I'm on about go read comments on damn near any review site and look at the amount of fanboys ripping on shit and abusive flame wars. There's always going to be the 'my dads harder than your dad' kind of flaming but people are generally full blown dicks these days. I am getting to the stage where I'm almost ashamed to call myself a gamer these days. Which is why I have moved away from the mainstream side of things and started to show smaller and indie games a lot more love. I for one would rather support developers with new original ideas even if they don't come across perfect over the franchises that chun out slightly tweaked games year after year. If you are going to update a game do it on your current game we don't need a yearly update for £40. Take Valve or Blizzard most of their games are old as balls but because of the support they have given their games over the years. People love them.

At the end of the day this industry needs innovation not repetition. Innovative ideas are rarely perfect on their first attempt which is why it keeps the industry moving. Games are supposed to be an investment, some thing that you can go back and play in a few months, years or even decades. There are games I still play from the days of early Nintendo and Sega, because they are good games. Will I be playing Black Ops 20 years from now? Probably not. I can't say for sure but I pretty certain I won't be. Half Life, Doom, Red Faction, Painkiller, Command & Conquer, all these games have been out for year yet I keep going back to them. Was it because they kept releasing pretty much the same games over and over? Hell no it wasn't. It was because they were creative and innovative would I enjoy them as much now if they were just a carbon copy of some other game? No. These games were not perfect, but they are great games so the flaws get over looked.

My top 10 games of all time.

This list is in no particular order, it is just 10 of my favourite games some are newer than others.

Guild Wars

I shall start the list with a MMO under the name of Guild Wars, I believe this game has been the under dog in the MMO market especially compared to the likes of WoW. Yes it does have quite the core fan base. But any casual gamer if they have heard of it and a lot of them will tell you no. The game is getting on a bit now as it was released mid 2000's, 05 if memory serves me correctly as of probably beginning of this year I finally escaped it's grasp on me, yeah I do have a few titles left to grind away at before I can say I have absolutely nothing left to do in game, to be honest I can live with my legacy left behind in the Guild Wars world and until Guild Wars 2 comes out I probably won't be getting back in to it. I have dabbled in a number of other MMO's but Guild Wars was the only one that took hundreds of hours of my life from me. I still to this day don't know why I was so addicted to this game but it does hold a special place in my heart.

Half-Life
The game that started Valves journey in to the hearts of many, many gamers. This game was probably the first game I played that had quite an in depth story behind it. Everything I had played before this game shooter wise, the story was 'There's the bad guy go kill him. Why? Because he's the bad guy.' While I still love those kind of games that essentially just give you a gun and tell you to go nuts, this game changed that. There was a lot of thought effort and time put in to the story, not saying it was the first one to do that of course it was my first story telling shooter game. I am much more of a fan of this game than the sequel. Half-Life 2 I still love that game to bits but there is far to many holes in the gap between Half-Life and Half-Life 2. Valve totally could of done other games to fill in the missing pieces. Even if they had done a sequel to Blue Shift and Opposing Force that would have been more than enough game to explain a little more. I still think they should do a Blue Shift 2 with Barney and the events running up to Half-Life 2. You start off and he is undercover with the combine. You could have easily made a game with Barney and his time under cover with the combine, watch him make choices he later regrets so he doesn't blow his cover. I could sit down and come up with many situations you could make a story for a new Blue Shift or Opposing Force game. It has so many missing links you could fill in and you know from Valves huge fan base that people would be all over the games should they be released. I'm gonna stop my little rant there anyway and go play through Half Life up to Episode 2 as soon as I'm done writing this.

Road Rash 2
Now I am going back even further in time to one of the games from my childhood which I used to play the crap out of. Road Rash 2 for my Sega Mega Drive. I loved this game, it's racing motor bikes while trying to beat your opponent with bats and chains what is not to like. My only gripe at this game is the lack of save ability, but that's more at the console than the game it's self. Saying that though if I was able to save my game and beat it, the replay value probably wouldn't be as high as it was. Saving on this game involved leaving the console on with the game paused. All that time spent playing this game just so I could get the best bike available, I believe I got it about 4 times but because it took me so long to save up for it, I never got that used to the bike and crashed a lot due me not being used to the handling and speed of the bike usually ending up in me getting game over.

Final Fantasy IX
That's right Final Fantasy 9 not 7. Not to say 7 isn't a good game but it's not my favourite. I was a little late to jump on the Final Fantasy bandwagon getting into it with the release of the 9th in the series. But it is my favourite of all the Final Fantasy games. I have played it through so many times I could probably sit down and tell you the entire story start to finish.

Burnout Series

Burnout is probably my all time favourite racing game. Probably Burnout 3 being favourite of the lot. It's the most fun you can have crashing cars without being hospital bound.

Deathspank

It is a small(ish) game from developers Hothead Games. I am including all three games as this entry as well. I fricking love Deathspank and his random humour, abuse of orphans and just the generally weird ass hack and slash adventure. If you haven't heard or played any of the Deathspank games, be it the original, Thongs of Virtue or the latest adventure with our random hero, The Baconing. I suggest go invest in one of them, I believe they cost round about a tenner for each game. It's definitely worth the money.

Team Fortress 2

I have been a fan of Team Fortress since the days of TFC, never did play the quake mod though. I have only one gripe again TF2 and believe it or not it's not about hats. It's about how escort maps such as Hunted were never brought along with all the other game modes. For those of you unaware of this map type. Basically one person was a VIP which one team had to protect while getting them to a certain area to win the game while the other team had to assassinate them. I spent more time playing escort maps than any other type. I should really go look see if modders have made custom maps with escort objectives. I realise we have payload which is technically an escort type game but it's not the same. Anyway rant aside, this game is well it's fun as hell whether you enjoy using the variety of weapons available or just using the stock loadouts through one of the many vanilla servers which don't allow anything but stock weapons.

Left 4 Dead

Third entry in my list from Valve. This doesn't really much explanation why it was put in my list. It's killing zombies with your buddies. How can you not like it.

Unreal Tournament

This game was probably the first multiplayer competitive shooter I played. Epic totally need to revive this game and when they do they need to make it just a tournament, no storys like UT3, just pure good old fashion killing the other guy purely for the fact that you want to be better than them. They have Unreal if they want to put a story behind the game, Unreal Tournament should be kept as a Tournment nothing more nothing less. Anyway before I get in to a full blown rant I have to admit this game is fantastic, and whether you pick up the original or any other version of the game it doesn't matter.

Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 - Yuri's Revenge

While this is technically an expansion pack, one which I dub greatest expansion in existence, you can argue with me all you want you will never change my mind on the matter, I believe this game could have easily stood by itself without a problem. This game along with with Unreal Tournament was one of the games that got me into lan gaming, primarily with my brothers, while I haven't been to a lan for ages as it's a lot easier just to play online, I used to love sitting in playing over lans trying to out do one another. Though I hated playing my younger brother as he was always Yuri and made sure he was near enough to both Allied and Soviet bases so he could just send in Yuri to get their construction yard and get the best of each faction. I always swayed away from Yuri and went either Allied or Soviet, had a solid plan for each team though. If I was Allied it was simple as getting a shed load of rocketeers and prism tanks. If I was Soviet I just defended my base until I had a ridiculous amount of Mammoth Tanks, I would go for a minimum of 50, this would be followed by the complete and utter destruction of anything that got in my way, while this massacrer was in progress I would be preparing a second wave of Mammoth Tanks to join them.

The state of the gaming industry these days.

So I have read a few articles lately advertising downloadable content for games which aren't even out yet, this mentality seems to be spreading throughout a whole bunch of developers as of late. I for one hate the whole 'we have content prepared the which we could quite easily just throw in to the game for release day but we are not going to' frame of mind far to many developers are getting these days. So due to the likes of Batman AC and Battlefield (the latest games I have noticed doing this), I decided I am going to sit here and rant about why I do not like the state of the gaming industry today.

While I agree DLC has the potential to do great things and extend the replay value of a game. DLC should be something worth while. This should be the new aged equivalent of expansion packs of yester year. Take a look at Yuri's Revenge for Red Alert 2, to this day I would have to say that is one of the greatest expansion packs of all time, then you have Blue Shift and Opposing Force as expansions for Half-Life, which I still think they should of done the same with Half-Life 2 would of loved to play as Barney through that game but I digress. That is what DLC should be, not this whole 4 new maps for £15, or with the likes of Mortal Kombat where you pay them for new characters, that should be unlockable stuff in game, and the worst of all of this is Homefront when they released a shotgun, that's right a single shotgun as DLC for their game.

With the map packs while it is a good thing and it proves the developers still support the game and get new content out. The fact is that you get 3 or 4 new over priced levels  I truley believe that every game should have the option of using mod tools provided by the developers so people can create their own maps, thus prolonging the games life span due to constant new features and levels. Many companies have done this and still have people playing them to this day, a prime example of this is Valve. People are still playing Counter Strike and that game is getting quite old now, it's 12? if we go back to the pre Valve version of the game. Anyway my point is they got the gaming community to do half there work for them and when something caught their eye, they snapped it up and continued to support it along side the community.

At the end of the day video games are a long term investment, you shouldn't be sat there making them to try and get a quick buck. There are loads of games I buy from years ago purely because they are good games and I never got round to it first time round. Which is why I laugh at the likes of THQ and the latest Red Faction game; Armageddon, when they wiped their hands clean of the franchise when it didn't turn instant profit. They are a big company and have a number of other games on the go such at Saints Row, Metro and yearly renditions of WWE games to help subsidise. I am still going to get Red Faction: Armageddon, but due to me being skint and me getting another couple of games, it's still on the list. But now it's nearer the top of the list and will probably be bought at christmas. They have to remember we are in a global recession and not everyone can afford to go out and buy every single game as a day one purchase.

Talking of day one purchases as of late it doesn't seem like you can really trust them. With the likes of Rage, Dead Island, Homefront and numerous other titles being buggy as sin upon release. The bugs in the fore mentioned games were quite substantial though, if they were small glitches which could of easily been missed that is fair enough. The reasoning behind this, I don't know. The fact of the matter is this should not be happening. I would rather see a game delayed than developers throwing out half finished buggy products. This is another reason I wait before buying games normally a couple months or so after release, just in case if it is released buggy, it would more than likely be sorted by then. Games like Dead Island and Homefront (can't say for Rage as I haven't play it yet) are good games, but the majority of people are put off by the initial problems, and word of mouth spreads and you end up not getting the sales you wanted because you didn't push back the game a couple weeks to finalise the game and rid it of problem that shouldn't be there.

Gaming Etiquette: Playing your part

I have noticed a few things that have been annoying me recently mainly in Team Fortress but I'll talk about Left 4 Dead first. Basically it is just the amount of times I have been teamed with people that do not help you when you get incapacitated or in trouble with hordes when you are near a safe house. Instead of coming out to give you a hand they just let you fight your way out of it or die. I'm sorry but it's a co-op game, therefore aren't you meant to help out your team mates when they get in trouble. Yes, this will guarantee that you make it to the next part of the campaign, but it annoys the crap out of me. You are supposed to help out and get the entire team to the end not just one person. Along with this I have had a number of games where team mates have just been pure ass holes and shooting you, by this I don't mean accidentally shooting you while you are surrounded by a horde and they shoot you while thinning out the zombies attacking you, that, while it is slightly annoying especially if you have low health, is acceptable as they were just trying to help out and I will be the first to admit I have done this on a number of occasions as some times you aim is having an off day or whatever. My point is recently I have had people coming in the safe room while preparing and just shooting you quite blatantly, I'm sorry but wtf. If you are going to play games where you need to rely on team mates don't be a dick and team kill.

Now we will get on to the matter of Team Fortress. There are 3 classes I am going to complain about and I shall start with the Engineer, the amount of people that walk idly by damaged and or sapped buildings and don't even think about repairing it, I play engineer quite often and at the start of maps if there is another engineer on my team I will always build up their buildings before even thinking of setting up mine, I think it is better to have one fully upgraded sentry rather than 2 or 3 level one sentries, along with teleporters as well. While I am not saying you have to do this and by all means get your stuff up first, but when you have give others a hand with theirs. Hell even if it is just upgrading a tele entrance which hasn't yet got exit so when it does go up it will be level 3 and much more helpful. If you do choose to play engineer don't be that guy who does nothing but sits hidden behind his sentry constantly hitting it, I have seen people sat constantly wrench a sentry even when there are absolutely no enemy in site. This isn't any help at all, if anything do some defensive scouting, and patrol your base and see where the enemies are coming possibly weaken them before they even get to your sentry making them easier to kill.

Next we have the medics. If played right they are the most useful of all the classes. If not like in damn near every game the healer will get blamed. My main beef with medics is pocket medics for heavies and while this is fine even when you are playing pocket medic, you should still heal people near by that need healing. There has been a couple incidents lately which is why I am bringing this up where a medic has been healing a heavy while in cover and I am retreating to get out of the line of fire and get some health and ammo back, I call for the medic as I am practically dead and does he heal me? No he doesn't, he sits there continuing to heal this heavy that hasn't even ventured out into the war zone yet. If you are going to play medic, heal the people that need healing most. Sure heavy medics are a great combination and can kick some serious ass but for the love of god they have 300 health they can hold their own for a few seconds while you heal other people that need it.

And last but not least we have the Pyro they have annoyed me for years. The main dig I am having a go them for is the severe lack of spy checks they do, this is especially annoying when I am engineering it up. All it takes is a little puff of fire on your way to doing what ever it is you are going to do. While of course it is every ones job to spy check, it is a hell of a lot easier for pyros as they just set them on fire for everyone to see. Another thing that bugs me about them is the fact that very few of them realise that with a lot of the flame throwers you have secondary fire that is a burst of air which allows you to put out fires. The amount of times I ran towards pyros on my team whilst on fire hoping to be extinguished and died because they didn't is ridiculous.

I think that will do for todays rant, and I will return with another when something else pisses me off while I'm playing something. Thank you and good night.

Battlefield is picking on Call of Duty

So EA has been trash talking about the Call of Duty predicting the game will collapse in 2-3 years and saying they hope CoD will rot from the core. (which probably has been taken out of context). Anyway the CoD guys don't seem to happy about this. I agree with this to a certain extent, from what I got from these comments is that EA is being a bit of a twat. Friendly competition is fine and good for businesses and should push them to be better, look at ATI (sorry AMD) and Nvidia they constantly are trying to out do each other. But they seem to be wishing failure on the Activision product.

At the end of the day Call of Duty isn't all that bad of a game, more than likely why it is been about for like 8 years now. It's one of those games that doesn't take long to get used to, one you can just pick up and play. It is a game for the casual masses I would say. That's right I said it's a casual game, and it is. It is a casual shooter, (granted it does have a competitive side with MLG and all that kinda shibbang), my point being it's one of those games you can kill half an hour before going down the pub or whatever else you may have planned. It is alot easier to get into than say Battlefield. I am talking of my experience of Bad Company 2 here, that game took me ages to get into the multiplayer. Battlefield is a more technical, more realistic game, it's got alot more to it than you just foot soldiering around like CoD, which is why alot of people say BF is a better game than CoD. I can see the reasoning behind that but it's all preference isn't it.

One thing that does annoy me is the amount of flaming and trash talking between gamers, it's not like it used to be alot of it is purely insults and nothing else. Banter is one thing but being a dick is another. You then get all the people who say CoD is killing creativity etc in the industry. Why do they make yearly releases of a game? First off because people buy them, just like they have done with many other, damn near every sport game you can think of, if sports games can throw out a new game every year only with a few minor tweaks why can't other games. And it's not like Cod is the only military shooter out there if you dont like it you have, Battlefield, Red Orchestra, Homefront, ARMA, Americas Army and Ghost Recon to name a few, all of which are good games in there own right. I frankly am sick of seeing reviews of new shooters coming out pretty much saying its not CoD so it must suck. Homefront is an especially good case for this. Yes it had some technical difficulties with the multiplayer on release, (because that never happens with more well known franchises does it now. I do love sarcasm). The game it self was quite good. A slightly futuristic military shooter with a decent story (albeit a bit short). But until the ending of the game I thoroughly enjoyed it and do hope they make another Homefront game. Hopefully they will learn from the mistakes of the first game and improve on it if/when they do make a sequel. The game was decent but because everyone compared it to Call of Duty, it kinda flopped on the review side of things making people not want to play it. I bought it purely because of these reviews, if someone says a game is crap I will purposely go out and find some good in it.

Anyway back to my original point: EA are being a dick, like I said before competition and banter is fine being a bonafide twat isn't.

The Origin Matter

EA have annoyed alot of folk recently with the whole pulling their games from Steam. The few games they have removed I'm not to fussed about anyway so makes no difference to me anyway. There seems to be much debate on the actual reasons behind this, they are essentially just doing what Valve did all those years ago with Half Life 2. Everyone hated Steam when it first came out now 5 years later they seemed to have fought there way into the majority of PC gamers hearts. EA seem to be doing the same thing granted a few years to late. While it is easy to point out the flaws in a system, which I have quite a list of. I am writing a pros and cons list I will actually post it later when I've used Origin properly, ie bought games, got friends etc on there, most of the cons so far are pretty much layout of the whole thing. I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and give them time to sort stuff out considering they are still just in a beta at the moment. One thing that has been mentioned though is the bit in the Terms of Service about how if you haven't used your account/games for over 2 years you may lose. That is the same principle of me going out buying a Dvd for example then me not watching it for a couple years and the producers coming into my living room and taking it off my shelf and telling me if you aren't going to watch it regularly you can't have it at all. Now you have to go buy another copy. It's not right.

A Proper Introduction.

And i'm back, with a proper introduction instead of me rambling endlessly looking for a point to talk about. It will happen again though, I know exactly what I'm like. I am Craig, I use Player One as my online name for pretty much every game. I did start off with whatever default name games used to give me, ie Player, Default Player etc... which evolved at some point to Player One. Yup I've quite the creative one I know.
Most of the games I do play are mainly single player, at the moment I have a few games on the go as I'm trying polish off my frankly quite large backlog of games. I blame steam and there constant deals and cheapness. At the moment I'm playing GTA4 many doing that to build up a little gamer score as I don't have an xbox. I will get some more Windows Live games some point down the line, I reckon batman AA and Gears are probably next no the list to get. I started play Metro aswell, I did start playing it awhile back but got stuck at some point quite nearish the start and never ended up playing it for awhile, so it's yet another game I have on the list.
What little multiplayer I do play is generally anything Valve and old halflife mods.

At the minute one mod I'm getting proper into again is Science and Industry, It's an under rated halflife 1 mod. Basically you play a a security guy of a science company and your main objective is to research better weapons, armour, and other upgrades and devices. You can do this quicker by stealing the other teams scientists, along with secondary objectives like sabotage and stealing the other teams weapons which you don't have yet. Even after all these years the SI guys still have there weekly gathering on sunday nights (9 gmt).