I was noticing the ranks of games in the vital stats section on the right, No. X of XXXX, and I got curious, so I went searching for the number of games each system has to its credit. While the console fanboys duke it out (and waste a lot of time doing so when they could be actually playing), it looks like the PC wins for sheer numbers on one platform and for continuity. PC gamers have far less concern with backward compatibility, proprietary software, etc., and the like. We do have to upgrade our hardware, but it's still easier to buy a video card than a whole new console and related accessories. I got more interested in this after I got my 360 (for Forza, Mass Effect, and Wet, mostly, although a lot of coolness is on or headed to the Xbox).

Numbers using GameSpot tallies current as of 21 Sept 2007; I do not know if those numbers are complete and comprehensive.

PC: 8,814

Xbox 360: 578 Xbox: 1181

PS3: 381 PS2: 2,974 PS1: 2,141

Wii: 592 Gamecube: 704 SNES: 1,027 NES: 1,326

Sega Dreamcast: 449 Genesis: 826

Atari 2600: 480

My conclusions: Sony really is sucking eggs on PS3, because they did so much whopping better turning out or licencing titles for its ancestors. Xbox titles surpassed most Nintendo machines (we are not discussing quality or sentimental favorites, here, as, given a console choice, I have always been a Nintendo girl at heart, and I will be getting a Wii next year), and the other sentimental favorite, the 2600, lodged its memorable place in our hearts and collective gaming consciousness with a mere 480 titles (some of which are even compilations, not original titles), so size doesn't necessarily matter. Please note I make no judgements about quality vs. quantity, nor about console brand; that depends on taste, ratings, genre, price, availability...

So instead of going to work, I took the day off to hang out with my surprise guest star and after a 3-margarita lunch, we staggered across the parking lot to shop until we could drive, and I bought an Xbox 360 and 4 games: Forza Motorsport (the first one, because it was $7.99); Buffy the Vampire Slayer (because that's just funny), Perfect Dark Zero (loved the first one, and I always encourage female action heroes, particularly in video games); and, of course, Halo (I may be the last person on earth to play it, but better late than never). I got it home and realized I can't hook it up through the DirectTV DVR box, and the TV is so old it doesn't have the tri-color inputs, so I have to get one of those box things, so I'm annoyed. I may just complete my financial ruin with a new TV. Ok, no, I'll get a switch box thingie or put it in the living room and commute down the hall. Really, I don't much care until Wet, Mass Effect, Banjo-Kazooie, and Saboteur come out, but I am going to use the interim to learn the controls and that Live thing, if I decide to care.

What's cool about this thing is, I registered online, came up with a gamertag thingie, then plugged the same one into the Xbox when I turned it on. The Xbox is currently in the living room on the TV made in this century, and the PC/DSL are in the office--with a wireless router for the laptop. So the Xbox picked up my gamertag thingie from the wireless. I don't have to have it connected to the DSL with the RJ-45; I can have it anywhere in the house. Who knew!? Now I can race cars. And the controller is wireless. I cannot tell you how pleased I am with that. No more dogs tripping over my cords on the way to the yard, unplugging my controller and getting me killed. I am beyond thrilled. So off I go to the living room (forgot what it looked like) to play with my new toy. Now I have something to do while my PC games load. hahahaha I'm sure I'll be Gamefly-ing in short order. Meanwhile, Forza, here I come.

So my best friend flew in from LA for a couple days, just because. I was planning on playing the Tabula Rasa beta for the rest of the week with a little Bon Voyage thrown in, but instead, I'll be off stuffing my face full of appetizers and drinking beer. All in all, this is better, and I can play next week. Beer--it's what's for dinner. Surprises like this don't come often enough, so I'm going to let my mouse arm rest and go hang with the girls. (Of course, if I had a handheld, I could take it to work...no! no! we're going to enjoy real people and get out of the house!)

I've been playing the Tabula Rasa beta test, and I am enjoying the game. It is very pretty: the detail and art are incredible, the world is vast, the storyline is intriguing. (I cannot give any more info because I signed an NDA; the testing phase is confidential.) The game itself is cool, and I had a preorder in, but I canceled it, because I don't seem to want to or know how to play with others. I'm not used to the idea, and I've never done it. This beta test, for me, is less about the game and much more about the format to see if I want to go live online instead of just in my own PC.

I have friends. I like people. I am generally sociable. But from a real-world perspective, I am still weirded out by the idea of playing games online, let alone chatting, with people I don't know. Plus, I can't see myself sitting in front of the computer with a headset on. I'm pretty sure I won't feel like Rambo so much as Julie, the Time-Life Operator.

In-game, I worry that if I'm not good enough, fast on the trigger, confuse my flanks, or my connection isn't fast enough, that I will lag and suck and let down a team. As a kid I was always one of the first picked for kickball. I do not want to become, at this late date, the loser whose hails nobody answers online because they suck and get everyone else killed. So even though I own standalone games with multiplayer function and servers, I've never done it because I want to get really good at the game first. I don't know how much patience people have for a learning curve, but I cannot imagine it's too high in certain quarters. Plus, I have no idea how the whole multiplayer thing works. I cannot for the life of me figure out the chat window thing to answer calls for reinforcements anyway, another clue this genre may not be for me. I mean, duh. I type something in, and it appears on 'local' rather than 'global,' so nobody hears me.

And how do you go about picking a team, anyway? In the beta forums I found a group of adults who understand having lives and other responsibilities and don't expect you to be online 24/7, so I thought during the beta test, they would be a good bunch to work with. No foul-mouthed teenagers in my headset, thank you very much (bringing whole new meaning to Halo Wars). But now I'm housesitting for the weekend and can't get online to play! Talk about RL interference...

I know these MMOs are incredibly popular these days, but I've never cared. I'm not even sure why. Tabula Rasa, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and the promised, forthcoming Star Trek Online are the first to look interesting to me. I love The Elder Scrolls, but Warcraft and neverending orcs do not appeal to me. I play video games for fun, for personal challenge, not for competition. Maybe that's it. I don't have any burning need to be better than someone else, to 'pwn' somebody (that is the stupidest term I've ever seen; it originated from a typo, and I'm a copyeditor, so I find it offensive that a typo is now netspeak, which I also abhor, but I'll rant about that some other time). And what is the point of PvP? If we're supposed to be repelling alien invaders, why fight each other? It seems pointless and counterproductive in an RPG, and contrary to the storyline. After running around the countryside trying to improve my character, I don't want her to die, and I don't want to kill somebody else's, either.

I suppose my big problem with MMO is time. I have a life, a dog, a job, and 39 other games I'm trying to find time to play (the installed ones, anyway). I never seem to finish them because I hop from game to game like a flea, trying to eat my cake and have it, too. An open-ended game that perpetuates, that they keep adding worlds to, missions, objectives, bonuses--a game that never ends? I imagine spiraling into an existential abyss. Where/when is a good stopping point? Is there one? And then there's the subscription (and we don't know yet how much that will be, either). I overeat at buffets because I want to get my money's worth and then bloat the night away. I can already see myself developing a love/hate relationship with an MMO because I want to feel like I've used my subscription, but getting tired of it and wanting to go play something else. I think, for the time being, until subscriptions lower and chat interfaces are more user-friendly with GUIs instead of key commands to remember, I will stick with my standalones. I might try the multiplayer components, even. But for now, my PC games and my contacts at GameSpot get all the time I have for gaming.

Tabula Rasa is an amazing, beautiful game, and I liked it enough to preorder, but MMO play seems a little...aimless, and a mite overwhelming, like I'm out there alone, with an army around me, but no organization, and all these people I can't quite reach. It's frustrating, and in some ways, more distancing than just playing alone.

I would love to hear other people's perspectives on MMO play and how they came to it, likes, dislikes, drawbacks, advantages, how you juggle them with other games and RL. Maybe I just need convincing. Maybe I need to stop thinking of MMO as a separate entity from other games. After all, I still have a few weeks to preorder again.

...Bioshock. It's not perfect, but thanks to GameSpot's Bioshock Hardware Performance Guide, I'm finally en-Raptured. FINALLY.

Since first installing the game, I've been desperately trying to play it, but the mouse/frame lag is killing me. The 2K forums kicked me out for some weird reason; maybe because I changed e-mails in my profile or something, who knows. (My whopping 2 posts there were factual and polite, so it wasn't that.) The Bioshock board here collectively was having trouble nailing down solutions, too, because we all have different systems, and so many variables take longer to track down. In the guide, GS did screen caps with various settings enabled or disabled, and you just mouse over the photos to see the difference. I learned quickly and visually which settings to alter and which I could live with and without, then overclocked my GPU (still running at 60C, too) and closed Logitech Setpoint, and voila, I'm in.

The movement is much less jerky, and with the mouse sensitivity at 2, seems almost fluid in comparison to what it has been. My GeForce 7300 isn't an 8800, of course, but I figured it should hold up another year until I can build a new rig. The only real problem I still have, and partly this is just me learning my environment ("That's a bad newbie!"--hey, smadiso1, waddaya know, it's in my head now, too), is getting walloped by thuggish splicers because I'm clicking my little monkey wrench off and I'm still a few milliseconds behind. I swear this is the sign from above I've been waiting for to justify getting a new widescreen flat-panel...

So anyhow, I'm going to see how I do. I might have to turn off more stuff, or lower a few more settings, depending on how intense the combat gets (and I hear it does, but I'm trying to be good and avoid spoilers), or just be willing to sacrifice a few hypos, but I'm hoping to get through now. Woo hoo! Tomorrow, however, because now I'm old and have to go to bed. But if you're having trouble running BS, as I now affectionately call it, there is hope. Read the hardware guide, and feel free to PM me. I certainly know which threads to send you to!

I have been actually pondering posting about what I have taken to thinking of as the Bioshock Disaster of 2007. Bozanimal posted this blog, which inspired me to make a lengthy response that I thought I'd repost here, because frankly, I'm having a Howard Beale moment over my inability to play a game I eagerly anticipated and have now spent 4 days attempting to run. Heaven only knows what I've done to my poor beleaguered PC while attempting to manipulate its settings to accommodate Bioshock's twitchiness.

Bozanimal's blog was about his boycott of Bioshock because of the copyright protection software (aka Securerom, DRM, crapware) the game secretly installs on your PC in an attempt to thwart pirates and limit the number of installations the rightful owner who paid for the game may undertake.

(And do kindly spare me the lectures on console fanboyism. I have heard the debates. I'll save that one for another day. And read on, because it's not just about games anymore.)

My response to Boz's insightful and righteous post went thusly:

PC developers for all software, not just games, have spent years trying to make discs that you can't copy or pirate somehow in order to protect and control their intellectual property, business interests, economic profit margins, etc. They should absolutely do that and have the right to do so. By the same token, however, they do not have the right to secretly install crapware on my machine--then tell me I can't install it but once more ever. Horsepuckey.

I installed Bioshock, retail edition, on a hard drive in an enclosure, and was wondering if maybe it would run better (I suffer from crappy framerates and severe mouse lag) if I reinstalled it on the totally internal drive. After haunting GS and 2K forums for tech support because the game is bloody unplayable (and I got it on release date, so that's 4 days of this now), I found out about the rootkit thing and the installation limit, which, according to 2K, will be eliminated in a forthcoming patch.

I'm hoping 2K, the Take-Two empire, and the entire gaming industry at large come away from the high-profile Bioshock disaster (because it really is, however potentially salvageable) with a lesson in ethics, as well as a mandate to improve and collaborate upon new and better ways to protect their IPs while not violating public trust. Meanwhile, grand sentiments aside, I also hope they all stop rushing potentially great games to market to meet esoteric, self-imposed deadlines--before they're playable. I actually beat a splicer to death with the wrench and missed the whole damn thing because it took that long for my mouse/screen/framerate/whatever to catch up. I am hugely disappointed because I've been looking forward to this game for ages--I even preordered--and I can't play it. I'm now crossing my fingers for a useful patch so I can play it before Crysis arrives.

------

The other disturbing thing is, not everyone has or even wants Internet access. Some people surf on one computer and game on another so the gaming computer doesn't have to run virus protection background processes that interferes with running a game. So you now are required to have internet access? Suppose you get it free at school or work or a library, where you research games. Requiring net activation is a bit premature, even for 2007. Hello, Big Brother.

And if EA starts this copyright crapware too, I'll probably have a Crysis. I spent years enforcing copyright laws and regs in a research library, so I understand that part of it, but protecting the developer's rights should not and cannot (ethically, legally, and perhaps constitutionally) come at the expense of the consumer's.

But honestly, principle aside, I am right at this moment mostly annoyed about Securerom because if I have to uninstall the game in order to reinstall clean to fix it at some point so it's playable, I may use up its pitiful two lives and render it useless anyhow. Biosucks is more like it. If I ever get to actually play it, I'm sure I'll change my mind. But that's looking like a big if.

So I went to check out 1Up's Bioshock review while waiting for my copy to arrive, and I found this feature:

Hey Covers, You Suck! 3: More of the Very Worst Game Cover Art

With a title like that, it was a must-read.

I laughed, I cried, I snorted, I fell over on my desk unable to breathe at cover "art" that lives in infamy. So of course I had to go read installments 1 and 2 and then share with the GameSpot fellowship. I tell you, if anyone at the office still considers me to be a professional, it's a bleeding miracle.

Hey Covers, You Suck! : 15 of the Worst First Impressions The original. "Considering how the whole purpose of those covers was to convince us that the game inside was the most awesomest thing in the history of ever, it's a little weird that so many of them looked about as exciting and radical as a pile of crap with a hair in it. We thought we'd take a little romp through history and share a few of our favorites."

Hey Covers, You Suck! 2: More of the Worstest Cover Art (wherein the paragraph on Miracle Warriors is by far the funniest thing I may ever have read, except for the one three pages later that I can't even put here)

Excerpt from the intro: "...[T]our with me through time and space to uncover some of the more exotic examples of this enduring plague on humanity, and learn how regardless of age, sex, or nationality, we are united in the face of adversity.

Or you could just look at all the silly pictures and giggle. That works too."

Go now. Read all three. Encounter explosive flatulence and demon boobs. Make sure you are alone and soundproof. Because, after all...

"Bad covers are like cockroaches. For each one you actually see there are a dozen more hiding in a bargain bin, waiting to crap on your food as soon as the lights go out."

Collecting them here because my bookmarks are so cluttered. Besides, after all the searching I did, maybe I can save you five minutes.

HDD Temperature from PalickSoft. A small, free download that monitors the temperature of your hard drive and alerts you if it goes over the heat limit you determine. The Pro version costs US$25 but will monitor two hard drives.

Power Supply Calculator Find out how much power your power supply uses... and how much you have left to hook up yet another fan.

3D Mark Benchmarking software for your rig.

Can You Run It? I got tired of trying to find this by searching through GameSpot for games I knew had the link.

Hardware Monitor Get diagnostics and temperatures for all your components and parts.

So I'm playing Oblivion, and my fingers are trying to learn the game and that corner of the keyboard. I am not real graceful or coordinated, which is why I usually playaction or fps on a console. But my PC is my main source of entertainment, so I'm branching out. My keyboard, however, needed to as well.

The Cyber Snipa (dumb name, but whatever) gamepad kicks. It has big buttons that are customizable/mappable within the game just like a regular keyboard; it has blue LEDs on top and on the side for atmosphere in a dark room; and, best of all, the pad requires no software. It plugs and plays into a USB port with no installation. I have mine in the front port for easy removal etc. when the cord or the pad is in my way for non-gaming purposes.

It's an inexpensive alternative to some of the PC gamepads I researched and priced. The low price and big buttons made this one a winner, and I love it. Even in my warm little room in the middle of a giant battle, if my hands sweat, the non-skid rubber (did I mention conveniently large?) buttons keep me from getting killed (at least, not though technical difficulty!).

Bought at Coolerguys.com for $26--unbeatable price. Amazon, Buy.com, Newegg, and TigerDirect were all more expensive or only had the V2, and I didn't need all those extra function keys. If you do, you'll still only spend about $33-35.

Check it out at Coolerguys.com