I was reading a scathing review today about Area 51 (PC), a FPS from last year (one of the terrible 3 games that were supposed to blow up our systems, which included F.E.A.R. and Doom III as well). The review didn't have much good to say about the game, and maybe rightfully so - but what really burned my potatoe was the heavy slant of bias against the game due to it's omission of "multiplayer" mode.

This downgrading of games due to missing multiplayer or online mode has become "de facto" in just about every professionals review. I have to assume that a full point is taken away from a game whenever I see that it either is not multiplayer or if multiplayer is broken. The thing is - I could give a flying buttfish about multiplayer! I just want good games with decent campains, story, graphics, etc. If it has multiplayer, well that's fine - but that's not something I crave nor even judge a game by - unless it IS EXCLUSIVELY A MULTIPLAYER GAME.

I can't speak for everyone - so don't get the impression that I am trying to do so. This is just my opinion, but I do know that out of the hundreds of millions of game players around the world - only a fraction of us are online players. Why should we have to cater to the minority audience??? Why judge our games based on what the few desire. It isn't fair to us or the developers to judge our games based on something that most of the market isn't even interested in participating in.

What I feel is that there is an aggressive push to FORCE us all to be multi / online players. The only people who will benefit in that case is corporations in the industry. It's just another way for them to bleed our bank accounts on a consistant basis - and for us not to "own" what we are playing. And the media companies could care less - because they are slaves to the advertisement dollars.

Next time you see something being jammed down your throat, even if it's not very popular - think about it... who's really benefitting here?