I've been sitting here at the computer, going back and forth with Blizzard tech support trying to get Starcraft running on a laptop running Windows 7 (a taxing challenge in and of itself), and looking at various posts on various boards here on GS. One thing I've noticed ever since I regularly began posting on these boards is the monstrous amounts of hate given to popular, well known games such as Call of Duty, Halo, and the recently released Batman: Arkham Asylum. I'm currently playing through Arkham & am (still) on my Veteran run through CoD4, and I would have no problem if I were forced to stay on a desert island for a year with only access to these games. Now I'm not so stupid as to believe that these games do not have flaws. CoD takes a good long time to learn, and a day or two away from it and I'm off my game to a miserable degree. As for Arkham, it does tease you with various characters who would make amazing boss fights SPOILERSPOILERSPOILER like Harley Quinn, yet it has made me fight Scarecrow twice now SPOILERISOVER but that doesn't make it a bad game, nor does it deserve the things I've heard people say about it. I live next door to a friend of mine who thinks like this. Any time I make mention of Call of Duty, he does what I can only describe as the sound a pitbull would make if you trained it to bark "COD4" over and over again. You'd be surprised how annoying that gets after about a week of AAAH COD4 COD4 COD4 COD4!!!! in your ear every ten minutes, but this is neither here nor there. I've learned to ignore his opinions about any game made after 1997, as his gaming tastes consist of anything with nostalgia value or Resident Evil (including the prettied up version of 4 moved to Africa to upset the lawsuit types & get them free publicity) but I can't seem to get away from those who think like him on GS forums. All I ever see anymore on Xbox 360 is about how bad Call of Duty or Halo or Oblivion or Fallout or any other game with a decent sized fanbase is, as if they think hating these games will give them some form of cred with their fellow gamer. And in 30 minutes of browsing, I cannot find one concrete reason that any of these games are bad other than they didn't like something that someone else could like. And I don't mean how someone could like how you could glitch all over the place for easy kills, I mean how you pick off henchman in Batman rather than attack them directly when you've got a cape and a mask and they have automatic weapons. You're Batman, messing with them from the shadows where you can't be seen is what Batman does. If you'd rather run up to hordes of enemies and kill them all with little to no fuss, then you're playing the wrong game, and the fault is on you. All I'm saying here is, before you complain about how bad something is, think if someone if what you don't like is what makes the game unique (Fallout's setting & Karma system, Batman's stealthy gameplay, etc.) if the answer is yes, quit complaining and go buy an Atari 2600 & play a "good" game like River Raid. Alone.

Just a thought