This guy pretty much defeats my efforts in every single way.

So here I am, on vacation in Virginia, and I decide to run out and get a PS3 so that I don't get bored. A smarter man would've brought along an Xbox 360 and maybe Saints Row or Dead Rising, but no; I decided to take advantage of the lower sales tax here and my Best Buy gift card I got for Christmas, and the 100 dollar fire sale, and managed to pick up a PS3 for 400 bucks and change. The only game I got was Ninja Gaiden Sigma, which isn't exactly next-gen, and I'm currently running it on an s-video connection to an SDTV, so nothing to get too excited about yet. But still, I'm not regretting the purchase or anything like that, although it will be interesting to fly back with it on the plane.

Impressions so far:

Best Buy's extended warranty on this thing is 100 bucks for two years. Insane!

Blockbuster might as well not rent any games for the system. I went to two nearby Blockbusters, and both of them only had a dozen games, with nothing really noteworthy or new. The newest game I saw was R6 Vegas, which was checked out at both locations. They didn't even have Madden!

Ninja Gaiden Sigma is hella fun. I'm disappointed that they seem to have removed the white ninjas outside of Han's Bar, which was where I farmed for tons of yellow orbs in the Xbox game. Those motorcycle guys are rough - just have to figure a way to get them down a bit more easily than I can now.

Maybe I'm just a usage stickler, but there's no censorship on display in the ESRB's rating of Manhunt 2 as AO. No one's telling Take Two that they have to edit the game or take out any content. They could even make it more violent if they wanted to, since there's no particular ceiling on violence in an AO game; it's not like it can be rated anything worse. No one's telling retailers that they can't stock the title, either. Adherence to the ESRB's rating system on the part of developers, publishers, and retailers is entirely voluntary; most of the cogs in the wheel go along with the system simply because they realize that the alternative, government oversight of the games industry, would be even worse. (Would you guys prefer to have Take-Two be fined by the FCC for indecency for each copy of the game sold?)

I don't actually care all that much about Manhunt 2, but the cries of "censorship! censorship!" do bug me. There's a lot of real censorship that goes on in this country (have you seen any photos of caskets coming back from Iraq lately?), and elsewhere, and using the term in regards to this kerfuffle is pretty much crying wolf. Save it for when it matters. You can argue that the economic ramifications of the AO rating equate to a kind of de facto censorship, but still, if Take-Two wants to keep the AO rating and sell Manhunt 2 on their website, no one's going to stop them. When you're talking about "censorship", an AO rating is about the same as me saying "Wow, that game's really violent!" Granted, the ESRB rating will have more of an impact on Take-Two's finances, but neither statement is going to prevent them from making the game as violent as they want it to be.

Note that I wrote this before Sony and Nintendo said that they wouldn't license an AO-rated game. That's another can of worms.

I've been thinking lately about playing more shooters. A bold position in these turbulent times, I know. I'll preface this by saying that I haven't actually been playing many games in my free time for the past year or so; I get my fill of gaming at the office, and unlike some of the reviewers here, I mostly get to play top-tier games. Sure, I occasionally have to write game guides for games that I don't particularly care for (*cough*spiderman3*cough*), but for the most part it's God of War 2 and Command and Conquer 3 and Crackdown and what have you. So I mostly play great games for work, but when I go to relax, I usually do it with a good DVD or book instead of yet more gaming.

But recently I've felt the hankering for some home gaming goodness, probably because I've been playing some games for non-guide purposes. Getting to play through Half-Life again for the Greatest Games writeup was a blast, although the game has definitely aged since it came out way back when. It spurred me to play through Half-Life 2 again, as well, which upon reflection is arguably the finest PC game to come along this decade. I'm going to try and get through Episode One for the third time at some point in the near future, as well.

On top of that, I've also been armoring up my computer with some new accessories. A new mouse and mousepad have eliminated most of the problems I had been having with my ancient Intellimouse Explorer 3.0. I got a 500 gig hard drive on sale for a hundred bucks at Frys, which doubles the amount of storage I have in my system up to a cool terabyte. (Anyone else remember when a 10-gig hard drive would cost upwards of 10 grand?)

Long story short, I want to play through some shooters again. I haven't played a lot of online deathmatch since Battlefield 2 came out. I used to play a crazy amount of deathmatch back in high school and college, mostly for Quake 1 and Quake III: Arena, but somewhere along the way I lost the spark of competitiveness that you really seem to need to put yourself in the line of fire night in and night out. The fact that I really hate to lose, especially in Battlefield-esque games, has generally dulled the fire a bit.

Another factor in my reclusion from shooters has been the plainly sorry state of the shooter genre on the PC over the last couple of years, which is the only platform I care to play them on. I've had some fun times with console shooters, but like most people who grew up playing the genre with a mouse and keyboard, I think that using a controller mostly feels limiting when I play them. Unfortunately a lot of the resources that are going towards shooters these days are going towards the console shooters, or at least towards shooters that are being codeveloped for the PC and 360 at the same time, which, if Prey is any indication, isn't necessarily the best sign that the PC part of that equation is going to be worthwhile. I don't begrudge companies the opportunity to make their cash, and it's pretty clear at this point that consoles is where the real money is to be made, but still, there's something to be said for a PC-exclusive experience.

That may sound snooty, but the games are few and far between that work equally well on a console and a PC. Take Oblivion, for instance; the PC version of that game required user-made mods just to un-nerf the huge fonts that were included in the game's menus. The large fonts were needed for the 360, but were awful on the PC. Little details like that are often telling indicators that a game was developed for consoles first and foremost. Another casualty in this little war between platforms was Deus Ex: Invisible War. The first Deus Ex was a fantastic, gripping game that was a PC exclusive. It got followed up with Invisible War, which was co-developed for the original Xbox, and which wound up being (to exercise a generally overused term) dumbed down considerably on both platforms. Had the game been developed exclusively for the PC, it might not have reached as wide an audience, but it also probably wouldn't have had loading screens every two minutes, and stupid universal ammo system probably wouldn't have been necessary, since it's a lot easier to shuffle your inventory with a mouse than it is with a controller. And that stupid-ass eye-shaped interface? Ugh.

Seriously, though, what decent FPS's have come out for the PC in the last year? Half-Life 2: Episode One was the obvious cream of the crop here, but apart from that there wasn't much that really caught my eye. STALKER was all right, especially in the shooting mechanics, but was buggy and conceptually flawed in a lot of ways. Dark Messiah was a fun time, but was more about melee combat than pure shooting.

Luckily, there appears to be some hope on the horizon, even if most of the games I'm looking forward to (BioShock, Enemy Territory, Half-Life 2: Episode 2) were all games that just a couple of years ago would've been exclusive to the PC. One can only hope that their development for consoles isn't nerfing the PC experience, which is always a depressing experience. I'm sure that Episode 2 will play better on the PC than it will on the consoles, although I certainly hope that the delays involved in its release aren't related to the effort involved in porting it to consoles. It sounds like Enemy Territory was in development for the PC for a long period of time before they decided to port it, so hopefully that'll work out as well.

I suppose it's BioShock that I'm most worried about. I have faith that Irrational is making an excellent game, but there's no working around the fact that System Shock 2, the game that it's a spiritual successor to, was a complicated game, even for PC gamers. I sincerely hope that Bioshock doesn't wind up being another Invisible War.

Although PC gaming still has some life left in it, it's hard to escape the feeling that it's past its peak. Now that BioWare, which used to be one of the most talented developer of PC games around, seems to be almost exclusively a console developer (though they can prove me wrong by eventually releasing Dragon Age), and id says that the 360 is their primary development platform, you can almost see physical lights permanently winking out in the sky above PC gaming. I suppose we still have Crysis to look forward to. But personally, being a pessimist at heart, I'm just waiting for Bethesda to release an Oblivion-esque Fallout 3 as a 360 exclusive, just to force most of us PC gaming grognards to commit mass seppuku.

Sure you can.

I guess no more hotlinks!

So last night I hear that Shivering Isles has come out for download on XBL. "Great," I think, "I can download it and bring it to work tomorrow and get started on a guide for it."

Not so fast.

First off, my XBL Gold membership had lapsed. I didn't care, because I never play anything on XBL. I barely ever have the 360 hooked up to the net, in fact. Come to think of it, I've owned my 360 since it came out, but only own two games for it: PGR3 and Oblivion. I've enjoyed the games I've played on there, but haven't been exactly been moved to buy many of them, is I guess my point. And I definitely didn't feel the need to reup my subscription to XBL; not in a world where I have Call of Duty 2 multiplayer for the PC and/or World of Warcraft to play.

So anyway, my subscription had run out. It should've automatically resubscribed me, but in the meantime I had cancelled the credit card I had used to pay for a year of service. Whenever I tried to log into XBL, then, it would boot me out and tell me that I needed to enter a new credit card. Well, I had called the XBL phone number a few weeks back to have the account cancelled outright, and was told that it would revert to a Silver membership, but no such luck; it still counted as a gold membership that had a bad payment option. Couldn't get into XBL at all. It told me that I needed to modify my membership, which is funny, since I selected that option only to be told in that past that my only membership option was a 12-month XBL Gold membership. Last night, though, even that wasn't available; all it said was "No memberships available at this time."

Fun. So, I couldn't get onto XBL at all with my account, since it was registered as being in arrears or whatever. Even if I wanted to add points and pay good money to download something, it would refuse to let me onto XBL Marketplace. Yay. So eventually I decided to just go ahead and resubscribe for another year of service, as I'm sure Microsoft intended in the first place. But then, after adding a new credit card with the 360's incredibly cumbersome typing interface, it errors out and refuses to accept the card.

Picture me getting wicked frustrated at this point. Eventually I decided to just make a new Silver Account (with the XBL-suggested nick of "SpooniestLamb", which is pretty cool) to download Shivering Isles with. So I had to enter my address and credit card info again, which took a number of minutes. After that got done, I threw down my virtual dollars and queued up the download, and took a nap while it came through the pipe.

(It was about this time when I got kind of paranoid about whether or not I would be able to use my save games with the old account with the new content on the new account. It turns out that this works fine, but I was pretty stressed out about wasting 30 bucks for a few minutes there).

So, long story short, I downloaded the thing, copied a savegame (out of the 440 some saves of Oblivion I have) to the new silver account, and everything appeared to work well, aside from my character falling off a foot-tall rock and instantly dying when he got to the Shivering Isles. So I detach the hard drive, pop out the game, and bring them both to work. Only, when I get here, I can't use the content I paid for. It's on my hard drive, but since it's not the same Xbox I used to buy it, it's locked until Xbox Live comes back online at 2:00, or whenever they decide to bring it back online.

I guess my point is this. I don't much care about achievement points or having the awesome privelege of having 12 year olds yelling into my ear when I'm playing online - personally I much prefer playing games online with a PC, but even that's not really much of an option, since so many shooters are heading towards console exclusitivity nowadays (What the ****, Call of Duty 3?), leaving us with plenty of crappy shooters that were developed in some shadowy corner of eastern Europe. What I do expect out of a console is for it to work. That's what consoles are all about. Whereas on my PC I have to put up with the endless BS of driver updates and shoddy hardware (remind me to write my epic thousand-word blog about how Creative's sound cards are forged in the fires of Mount Doom), I expect my consoles to work with a minimum of hassle. But now that they're getting all internetted up and made to function more and more like gimped PCs, I'm kind of wondering whether or not the hassles of dealing with them are worth it.

There's no moral to this story, I guess. I got upset at my console and wrote about it. But hey, it filled up a little time while I'm waiting to be able to play the content I actually paid for.