Because I can, here is my list of the games that left the most positive and lasting impression on me:

5. Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 and 2 (I consider this to be a two-part game)

This may be a strange choice for many, as many will consider these to be forgettable titles, but there are a number of elements that made me really like GRAW: 1 The open spaces, or at least the illusion thereof. Running from cover to cover down a large highway in Mexico city felt very real 2. The AI got some complaints at the time and yet I remember it being one of the best AIs I've experienced in a game. They were taking cover, leaning to fire around corners. 3 The whole game had a realistic feel to it. Also it did not rush me and allowed me to choose the best way to tackle a situation. It was the most satisfying 1st person shooter single-player experience I've ever had since the previous Ghost Recon games. Multiplayer did not suck either.

4. Metal Gear Solid (Playstation 1)

This is the 1st and only game that brought tears to my eyes. I sometime hear that Metal Gear games have bad convoluted story writing. Maybe subsiquent games do, I don't know, but I know MGS had a great story for me as a kid and the music from the credits of that game is still on my mp3 player.

3. Freelancer

I love space "sims". Even after I lost much of my interest in cosmology (having found out how little people know about space but pretend to know) I still love the fantasy of space - the colorful auroras, the unknown and the bright future of humanity where we don't have all our bets put on one planet that can be blown up at any moment. Freelancer had good graphics at the time, good sandbox gameplay and a modding community that made the game trully fun.

2. Elder Scrolls Skyrim

It is better than 1st game on this list in almost every way...except the impression that it left on me is not as magical.

1. Elder Scrolls Morrowind

There is something magical about that game. The lore, the rpg elements, the music and the sandbox gameplay comes together beautifully and all the mods for the game made it 10 times better than it would have been otherwise. For the 1st time I felt like I could trully be myself. The Morrowind theme still makes my soul hold its breath every time I hear it.

After my contract with myself stating that I will limit my gaming to those few games that are realistic enough to actually be useful to me as a source of learning, I realized that games aren't the problem. No doubt, the agreement I made with myself helped, but now I'm typing this blog and participate in myspace conversations and play bass guitar and walk to the store instead of taking a tram.My mindturned out to be extremely good at finding ways to kill time to compensate for the time I used to spend on games.

And now I'm thinking. I used to waste a lot of time on games but the times I had within those games are imbedded in my memoy forever. The dark journey I took across the mountain and through the dust storm to finish my great quest in Morrowind; the fires I sat near my buddies who were playing guitar in the wasteland of STALKER; the conspiracies I solved with a cold blooded shot from the darkness in Splinter Cell; the beautiful treasures of the unknown I found in the nebula clouds of Freelancer...These things make my stomach feel funny even when I just think of them. Now I have nothing to release my stress, and yet I'm still wasting my time almost as much as before.

The solution: find in your life a goal the way to which will be pleasant enough, so you don't have to look for ways to waste your time, all for the purpose of not doing what you're supposed to at school.

I have always been in an unusual position. I once heard that a Japanese professor of some kind was convinced of drugs being as bad of a thing as games. I happen to agree with him. In fact, I would go further. Another person, someone's father, stated that he'd rather have his son take heroin than play games because at least heroin takers move around and do things. Although, as a father I'd rather have my child happy and lazy due to games than mentally damaged and broke due to drugs, I can't say that the man didn't have a bit of truth in his argument. In short, I hate the concept of games. These virtual simulations destroy real lives, and I if they were banned alike like heavy drugs, I wouldn't find it a harsh decision.

Yet...I am a gamer. In fact, I am one of the more hardcore gamers out there. With a history of different consoles, finally ending with the entrance of the good old all-round PC, I had played almost every acceptable game ever to be put on the market...until recently, when I signed a contract with myself. Yes, as crazy (or pathetic) as it sounds, I actually typed a friggin contract for myself and signed it. Therein I declared no longer to play games, with several exceptions.

The exceptions consisted of games where a certain skill is to be gained (or improved), games that are close enough to reality so they can basically be cinsidered to be training simulators. I left out these exceptions for two reasons. One reason is that I could not help but leave the door slightly opened for the drugs to return to me in small portions. Second reason has to do with why I think banning games would be impractical. That reason is that governments would have a hard time banning something that they themselves use to train their soldiers, mostly pilots. The line between a simulator and a game-simulator is too vague to see. Whether people want to admit it or not, but games can teach. Tactical shooters teach movement tactics, teamwork and firefight tricks. Total War series teach Medieval battlefield tactics, which, although aren't too useful today, do enrich your mind. Flight Simulator teaches, at least partially, to control an airplane.

Now I only write a review or two on a game a year, as I've decided to cut dramatically the time I devote to games. I need to help my light addiction while I still can. A single game can still wipe out your life (World of Warcraft anyone?), but I take little steps at a time, taking only the most useful out of the gaming indsustry, even if it is still combined with a lot of fun.

Recently I played Prince Of Persia Two Thrones where the prince gets a split personality and his second half is kind of his bad side...or is it? I thought of this many times when seeing bad guys in movies and games. They weren't all that bad. The makers would add an evil tone to them which made no sense. However their reasons are often justifiable. They are also lot smarter and more experienced than the good guys. Yet when the second Prince of Persia came out, the fans were disapointed because of the darker and as they called him "arrogant" prince. So I'd like to criticize some of the criticism on the last bad guy.

Kids, the evil prince is not evil. He’s just smart and not as naïve as the good prince. The prince goes, “Oh what happened to my city, the children and the blah blah blah….” And the dark prince goes, “Pay attention! Down there.” Even I wanted to slap the good prince from time to time. The dark prince’s mind might be fainted by vengeance but at least his mind is not in his balls. How dare the upcoming king risk his whole kingdom for one little group of people on the way or even worse: just one woman?! He never succeeded in keeping his women alive for long enough to create offspring. If prince were to fall into a trap and die, the empire would fall apart as the civil war would completely swallow it. Remember Alexander..?

If this was a real life story, only that dark prince would be able to hold on to his kingdom, and in fact, if he was in charge from the beginning, did you think that maybe the whole Sands of Time thing wouldn’t happen in the first place and we wouldn’t have the problem? Actually ideal it would be for the two brain parts of the prince to get together to form a balance. 

The whole dark prince character and his voice btw extremely remind me someone from the late stages of a Japanese cartoon show that’s quite popular in the US as well. Some of you might remember the guy, Vegeta. Another example of a smart guy turned bad by the writers to create a bad guy. They would make him conduct senseless violence and say bad things for no reason so the kid's psychology. 

Maybe we shouldn't learn kids that naive is good and cunning is bad. It feels like a part of that whole politically correct cr*p and transformation of children in to weak and blind machines. So remember kids, look beyond the childish good motives of simpleton heroes.

Lately I got one of my posts deleted where I joked how the guy should be shot for giving us hopes about another GTA release. The one who reported me got points and I assume that I lost some.

Now just for the fun of it I decided to check if I can do the same and finding useless or offensive posts didn't prove to be a challenge. One thread just said "I'm bored what should I do?" . The other one was the kind of spam you get in your hotmail inbox advertising a free xbox (or something along those lines) if you visit a certain website.

There were also some less annoying posts, that while offended someone, were in general just a part of the forum traffic and had no potential danger. Naturally I didn't have the honor to report those even though I wanted to know how far will the forum moderators go.

"What an interesting way to receive free points" , I thought to myself. However the reply back on my reports (of the serious looking spam) was that the moderators found no violations. That came to me as an absolute bang. While it didn't exactly upset me, it did put me to thinking.

What does it take to make a spam-free forum and how far should a moderator go? Are kids who visit these forums made into communist whistle blowers by granting them a reward for reporting a fellow user on the first sign of a bad word used in posting? How quick are some moderators to ban a person or delete his message just because they read somewhere else that the user is an ATI fan and the moderator in question is a GeForce fan? Even more importantly, how are we to know what kinds of moderators we got?

Try giving everyone a chance to say what they want and the forum will be spammed to death. Enforce plenty of rules and keep everything under control and soon the forum will turn into a police state. Where does the balance lye?

Maybe we need some democracy? Maybe users themselves should choose people out of general public to moderate the forums and every year or so those people have to be replaced with other users. Anual moderator elections :) How's that?

Maybe there should be rules or other control tricks like a moderator that must never check the abuse reports on his own?

Maybe in order to select better users not everyone can just join the forum but must first invest some effort like filling out a very long form about gaming or something else that will keep away the children who join just because they have nothing better to do and just want to annoy someone. In the world of today where internet has become big enough for many people to get lost in it (voluntarily as well as involuntarily) maybe forums can not be free for everyone.

Before my blog turns into a huge article I'm pulling away....

I had to accustom to them. I didn't like WW2 sims to begin with but they just kept coming through every hole possible so I had to start tolerating them. I didn't like the retarted weapons off WW2 to begin with. It's like a kid in development. It's not a sword and it's not an advanced firearm but a metamorphose. I have a lot more respect for those weapons now though.

And another small complain I had has to do with a reality touch. Germans lost 11 million people in the war and the allies (consisting out of many many countries) something like 44 million! About 3.500.000 from the 11 mil were actual German military losses (with a slightly bigger number for the civilian side). Not that I find these to be happy statistics but that is the truth and the ever growing amount of American/English game-heroes, who kill hoards of Germans and complete all objectives seemingly winning the war in the process, somewhat annoys me.

Too many WWII themed games don't annoy me on their own. Their narrow-mindness does. NOT JUST GERMANS fought in the WWII and not just the English-US-Russian alliance either. There was some heavy fighting in many parts of the world with participants like Italians, French, Indus, Polish and even Chinese. Ok maybe their fighting was not as exciting since they were too often retreating and loosing a great amount of people.

I guess the idea is that you can fit a bunch of action in the largest war of all times. If you only look at English VS German losses you got yourself a Rambo game.

What about the civil war? What about the current war theaters. I only know 2 or 3 games that jumped up lately  covering the Middle-Eastern activities. What about all those small conflicts with countries like Argentina. And whatever happend to the Bosnian conflicts...what, Operation Flashpoint with Operation Flashpoint 2 still hanging in the air and that's it? As players got somewhat annoyed by WWII, the developers started throwing the Vietnam war into the stew. Is that the best they can think of?!

How about making an "FPS" in the times when there were no guns? There are plenty of RPGs but how about a 16 century battle in first person view? 1 dagger, a couple of swords as a secondary weapon, a bow, a crossbow, an axe, flails, maces, a black powder grenade to top it all...There was no shortage of weapons back then.

Common fact it is. There are games now that on full video settings can not be run on any computer....well at least it was the case with Doom 3 when it came out. Then again you have to rethink the words "any computer" . There are flight simulators that use a huge amount of processing power and yet they do exist and pilots use them. It comes down to your budget. If you get yourselves some Alienware PC with dual core 4Ghz and 2 GeForce 7800 GTX in SLI then you can run pretty much anything. However if your PC costs more than your car something's definately wrong. I recently was carefully shopping for prices on my new PC and it all came down to 1300 euro and a broken motherboard. And that's just for a system that barely scratches the high-end standard. When will it be the other way around? When will the average Joe be able to buy a PC for around $700 and play the best looking game on the market without any twitching? Businessmen, hellooo! Stop making so much money of us poor people!