so all these games these days are charging for access to their beta's or alpha's yet you come onto any review site and you cant find crap on the subject to help you with your descision.

Well i think that if that company can take my money, then they can take a review. Its bad enough the company itself is charging money now to alpha testers that traditionally had been free, but we are unable to give our thoughts on the matter potentially allowing bad companies to get away with things they wouldnt otherwise.

Just seems like another in a long list of scams to get our money that would have seemed almost unthinkable a few years ago yet nobody seems to complain.

A section dedicated to a games dlc's might be nice as well. Theres been many cases where ive been hovering over a product and just cant make up my mind and i wish we had some thing else to reference in that regard.

what does the word 'game' mean to you?

game/gam/

Noun:A form of play or sport, esp. a competitive one played according to rules and decided by skill, strength, or luck.Adjective:

1. Eager and willing to do something new or challenging: "they weregame foranything".
2. (of a person's leg) Permanently injured; lame.

im going to start going back and playing board games with people, and offer them to buy an extra queen or rook for $10-20. You think you could play cards if you had extra pay cards on the side you charged your opponent to buy before hand? and just how long would you enjoy even winnning if you did pay for these items in these conditions. Just what happened to competition? what happened to skill?

why do we even play games or sports to begin with?

the industry is down this year another 25% after last years major decline. and while there are factors like ageing console systems and other things can take part of the blame for the decline, i cant help but see the connection to actual content involved for the player base and lack of challenge. I also cant help but reference the same things happening in the video games crashes of the 80's again. All this has happened before.

Now all games are overly focused on things like loot which now you can buy/sell in things like diablo, but what do you do with this loot? kill bosses to get more loot. Your build options end up becoming very limited, and everyone is always after the same types of stuff. Theres no originality in your style, and replay value is limited due to being so similiar.

what do we want out of games, and is the industry really even attempting to meet our needs, or drive us further into these economic machine of a model for games?

support smaller game companies that actually have to do new ideas with their games, instead of these big companies that want to become a permanent line in your checkbook every month by basically updating a few graphics and handing you a stripped down version of one of their previous glories.

i remember an age where i used to compete against the nastiest players i could knowing full well i was going to lose (and badly in some cases) just cause i knew i could better myself by doing so and learn some new tricks. What kind of perspective is common today? munchkin your way to the top as fast as you can and by any means (usually cash, or abuse) so that you get to look cool.

I remember when you could actually be cool instead of just looking the parts. altho its starting to fade from my memory like with everyone else it seems...

so want something cool to listen to that you've never heard?

http://www.youtube.com/user/CrushProject

alright, so its been about a year, and i figured id give gamespot another chance seeing as they are about the only game in town anyways.

Ive played some cool stuff while away, and some 'almost' cool stuff. More to come.

EDIT: and when did they remove the cut and paste functions to this website? and was it always this glitchy/clunky? This round might not last as long as i anticipated...

So another one of these kindergarden level devs has deleted another of my posts and sent me threats again because i used vocabulary they woke up that day and judged was inapporpriate, but is 2nd grade class room level speech. Really every time you say anything thats not brown nosing something or someone they just delete the post, and threaten to ban you.

Well i think thats enough propaganda and strongarm censorship, im not an advertisement machine, and i wont be punished for having an opinion of my own directly from the sites people. Maybe ill be back, but i cant see the point to doing so with such a brutal policy. What is the point of a review site that you cant say anything negative about anything no matter how constructive?

Peace out.

So my buddy is bribing me to come back to play eve with him. I emo rage quit in epic fashion when i left, and abandoned a ridiculous amount of stuff when i left the game this last time that ill lose access to, but im coming back. Just how dumb am i? Eve is overcrowed, poverty stricken almost fuedal game now, and its hard to find your niche, but somehow im going back.

Why am i doing this? Cause i am too addicted to the politcal, territory, and player based economic system even after all this time away, despite knowing the stale gameplay and other short comings of the current system. I still wish they'd come out with eve 2 tho, as ive stated elsewhere, eve 1 was a great experiment, but its lived past its intended lifespan, and now is a game of kings and peasants, where im always going to be stuck in the middle, but this is one of those stupid games that you've invested in and its hard to walk away from, and theres still potential, even if its getting smaller every day.

So with billions of isk in ships structures and equipment abandoned in regions that now i dont even speak the language of behind me, i kick start the old jump drives on my dusty cap fleet, and set sail for vengeance, and to reclaim the lands that were wrongfully taken from us.

Internet spaceships is serious business folks :)

So i keep playing more games that keep surprising more and more in bad ways. Sure the games are getting simpler, and losing depth at every turn, but i keep noticing another bar that is sprinting backwards toward caveman stupidity.

The community.

In the last 5 years ive without a doubt run into some of the dumbest people ever to have picked up a controller and its getting worse. Im talking people who cant figure out their classes or what their intended roles are when the games simplified these jobs to kindergarten levels and these dumber then i thought humanly possibly people insult you for trying to discuss this with them no matter your approach if they feel you've identified something in them should obviously be doing.

Then assuming they could figure out their character classes, they have no grasp on tactics or positioning seemingly at all. Is this really that hard? I dont understand how we went from having the competitive gaming communities go from having the skill and numbers to support matches with tens of thousands show up for a single 2 man match of these games to watching new games top players of the world who have no more skill or methods then to run around and rely on muscle memory and jumping up and down like bunny rabbits (yes im referring to the Neanderthal fps community now).

The whole world is going backward, everyones getting dumber exponentially. People can no longer think for themselves at all. Its got to be tv or something in the water, but wtf happened to this planet? Im older and getting slower all the time, but instead of getting worse then my opposition, im getting better. People are falling for some of the most basic tactics i know. Im also literally finding some of these players sitting in a room by themselves facing a wall in the corner waiting to ambush someone whose virtually never gonig to come by and their backs are exposed to a large quarter of the level. This is becoming the norm. Every new title i see is going to shock me on a grand scale just how bad the majority of any community is able to grasp the mechanics, further forcing game makers to make games for more idiots.

Casual gaming and marketing are destroying your brains kids. you dont have to suck beyond words your whole life. At least we are quickly getting to the lowest point the industry can finally put us, but this is not encouraging. I dont want a tutorial to have to sound out the words for a command it wants me to preform. Try learning from your mistakes, or better yet emulate your betters. Try and actually improve yourself instead of just talking trash to anyone you cant beat or trying to hack to defeat them.

And to you idiot hackers who usually still die to your own stupidity, just what do you get out of the experience? You cheat to get what you have and nobody thinks your funny or cool for doing it, so why bother? Acheivements these days dont even give you rewards either these days, so really its doubly pointless of why you do this. Yet there are more hackers today and this number is growing everyday.

Just why do you people even bother to play games at all if your just going to lose the game for everyone else, or destroy the balance by exploiting or hacking? This is the new majority. No one wants to play games anymore, they either want a virtual movie with minor amounts of inconsequential player action, or they want to hack an cheat their way past it completely. Why do you people even bother to play games? go watch a movie ffs. Theres already a whole industry there that caters to the masses in a coma that cant think for themselves, so go back to your home.

So i occasionally like to search through peoples 'top 10' lists of varying kinds and tried doing a 'hardcore' games list with epically tragic results. Out of the 3 i had seen 2 included mmo's which had no real pvp in them at all or were ridiculously 'non-hardcore.' Only 1 of them included titles that where made before the 2000's which i feel is the biggest error, as 'hardcore games' mostly died about 10 years ago.

Well get ready bishes, because a real list is comin at ya!

10. Gran Turismo 3. So many cars, tracks, scenarios, classes, and everything else inbetween, that by the time you were towards the end of this game almost anyone would define you as 'hardcore' just for going the distance. Quite possibly the last real racing game ever made as well.

9. Contra. even with the world famous 30 lives codes this game was the very definition of hardcore. A long campaign that required perfection through its long arduous levels. Just one misplaced move and splat, your at the beginning again.

8. Final Fantasy 7. I almost didnt include this in the list at all, but remembering seeing dozens of my friends that all had hundreds of hours invested into the game that were still competing against each other verbally, and all but a handful failing to get the top end gear or kill the best bosses made me finally put the game on the list. I think everyone at the time was thoroughly impressed by what this game had to offer, even the hardest core guys of the age. Just how long did it take you to get your gold chocobo?

7. Red Orchestra. Just the maps, kits, and ballistics system set this game apart from all others. No other game has had gameplay that represented so many elements of combat like this game. It eventually was over run by hackers and cheats, but this game was THE game to play for serious gamers for a long time.

6. Bionic Commando. Another simple 2d side scroller from way back, but this game was just viscous. Grappling and swinging, possessing a gun and using the claw as a weapon were simple enough, but made for some super difficult sections that i know only a handful ever made it past.

5. The Arma Series. Personally i have my grudges against the games (as on the tech side its the crappiest game i think ive ever seen that didnt get sued for faulty products) but arma requires you to travel 20-30 km at a time either on foot, by car/vehicle or by air (or you can tow your ground vehicle to the location by tow hook), and find real ways to assault the objectives that you just wont find anywhere else. The raw skill involved in this game can be like no other fps ever before, and for the foreseeable future.

4. CounterStrike. I didnt get too much into these, as i had been too busy practicing my rts micro during its time, but counterstrike had a huge cult following of really serious gamers that would compete regularly like no other fps has done since. These guys took themselves fairly seriously and the world has not known a culture like it since, despite all following games trying to recreate its atmosphere and community while failing horribly.

3. Warcraft 3. Uber competitive, nonlinear gaming in a world of only linear games remaining. This game had an experience system, 3rd party npc's on about every map, and more balanced races and units plus in its day the best servers in the history of the genre. Its top end of gameplay is more in tune with the top end of chess players of the world, and was about as popular at its height.

2. Starcraft 1. The game that brought me over to the computer, the national sport of Korea, and still one of the fastest games and largely competed over game in history. Personally i moved over to and prefer wc3 but i still have to pay homage to the king.

1. Donkey Kong. Widely regarded as the most difficult game of all time with 99 levels of total insanity. They are still making movies about the top echelon of gamers playing this, and i dont think we'll ever see another game where everybody knew the title and everyone played it back in the day, but only a very small select few could beat it or even get toward the last 1/3rd of the game.

So what are you favorite hardcore games, and what does being 'hardcore' mean to you? Imo it means games that require something from you to play that the gamer next to you just might not have in them. It requires either tenacity or raw skill to complete that most people just dont have. Several other titles should probably have made the list like armoured core, or the galactic civs or even the common mario or sonic games but 10 is not a whole lot of space to work with. But what are some of your favorites and why? What games did you think required more thoughts or skill?

So i cant help but notice that 99% of gamespot people have only 5-10% of their game reviews list as having anything below 70% score. Does EVERYBODY really love EVERY game they play that much?

This really doesnt help to gauge your judgments in games if the worst game on your review list is a 7.5. If this was a school system that is still a very passing grade, so based on that you've never played a bad game or one you didnt like?

I also really dont understand how so many people (especially these days) can give so many 9 and 10 scores to so much. What is a 10 ranking mean to you? Doesnt that mean you cant do any better? Theres absolutely nothing you would improve on the game at all, and its the greatest game of all time? Theres no bugs whatsoever, the gameplay is the best you've ever encountered, and the system is balanced like nothing you've ever known? What about the storyline? or hackers?

I have several games that i personally like that have received lower scores due me feeling the product wasnt as competitive as its peers in some way or another. How do you rate games? Do you actually have an opinion or are you just an unofficial fanboi sales person for their company?

Cmon folks, i want to see some criticism on even your favorite of games. Just because you have something you think could be improved does not necessarily mean you dont endorse the product.

Also how many of you guys play through the games, THEN review them. I cant help but wonder how many people get into the game after a few hours and write their reviews at that time without a larger idea as to the bulk of the games actual content.

Who among you actually have something to say?

Ever since i was a kid i always talked about how cool it would be to see things like a warhammer 40k mmo, a fallout game made by the original folks (vegas/obsidian), a fallout mmo (interplay) and many more atm. I always though how cool it would be to play a fps that coincided with the mmo i was playing in the case of dust 514 and Eve online, and obviously starcraft is one of those games you've been waiting for since forever.

These are just a few of the examples of titles and projects that we can expect this year. These are titles i grew up on, and have always had a place in my heart and are some of the most looked foward to games of all time.

So why am i writing this?

Because i cant get excited about any of them.

The industry is just so bad that i know all these games are going to have a fraction of the content of games of the past. They are going to include a few gimicky features and other inconsequential functions in their place. Their most certainly going to add dialog options that dont matter and write ai scripts that ive been ranting about for years. The mmos will continue to copy wow, and rts's will continue to become more automated and more detached to community wants.

They say the greatest tradgedy in life is not getting what you wanted, the only thing worse is actually getting it.

As teh quality of games decreases, and games get easier and easier/more simplified, and the problem solving abilities of the community diminish, so do our games. Idiocracy is not the future. It is now.

Another example of this is lets take an old shooter like contra. You had 3 lives, and you got hit once and you were dead. Period. Now you get shot in most games, you just run away for a second or two and come back. Old rts's like warcraft you have to micromanage everything you want to do from keeping your units alive to using special abilities. Rts of today autocast ablities and come with auto-runaway buttons. Id really like to see the old guys that made the game Donkey Kong (the most difficult game ever made) and see what they think of fallout 3's ubernoob V.A.T.S pausing system.

Games used to take skill. Now they just provide the illusion thus. Games used to have content. Content like hidden levels. Extra campaigns. New characters, new abilities etc. Now we get achievements unlocks, and these little kids that think they know how to play games crying at you over a microphone that you cant shut off. What a great idea that was :(

Id get started ranting on the new hardware or interface accesorries that are going to fail again this year, but i complain too much already. :) At least the crap musical instument gaming fad seems to finally be dieing out. And none of those people still know anything about music lol.