Ironically, a role-playing game inspired me to write this entry.  I won’t tackle it until Dragon Age is an afterthought, but the reviews suggest the soon-to-be-legendary Mass Effect 2 is akin to “Borderlands, this is how you do a role-playing shooter.”  However, I had an allergic reaction to one review snippet:

Gears of War fans should feel right at home with the cover mechanics and controls. Thankfully, there is still a huge emphasis on tactics and RPG stats – Modern Warfare 3 this is most definitely not.

Four years since Gears of War popularized cover mechanics, and as good as Uncharted 2 worked the flavor, I’m already sick of hiding behind walls.

It’s been a decade since Unreal Tournament and Quake III Arena were the creative heights of twitch shooting.  Since then, developers have gone out of their way to prevent pinball wizards from permeating the new pay-to-play shooter culture of X-Box Live and beyond.

I’ve come to tolerate it.  Twitch shooters didn’t die because they were an inferior format; the business of gaming changed.  My problem?  We’re still hailing and deriding “Doom clones” that embodied nothing Doom and its successors were about.

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Continuing my quest to never get laid, I spent a Saturday cross-checking GameRankings review scores against VGChartz sales numbers.  As of January 15th, 213 games have sold one-million copies on the three seventh-generation consoles, reception ranging from dreadful to legendary.  Armed with this data, I ask: What can we learn about the seventh generation of video games with this data?

Bad games can be purchased for any console.  Many sell.  But never have so many sold irrespectively of “quality”.  And the majority of this business is taking place on the Nintendo Wii.

Yeah, reviewers have biases.  They enjoy Microsoft’s wallet.  They would have married Grand Theft Auto IV if they were allowed to.  But on a “compiling thousands of reviews for hundreds of games” basis, I’m willing to hear the opinion of those who enjoy the medium for a living.

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I blew a gasket during E3 because Microsoft tried to convince me the X-Box was a revolution in graphics and online play that hadn’t already occurred.  I lamented that the era of PC gaming that built the modern video game industry was in the process of being forgotten.

If you’re looking inward at the PC gaming community, you’d have the perception that I’m a crazy internet nergin who can’t stop living in 1997.  You know, when PC gaming meant something.  This is why I act that way.

The following is our list of the top 10 innovations in console video games that [emphasis mine] revolutionized the industry within the past 10 years.

And the author lists away: Storage capacity that computer game makers have exploited since the advent of the hard drive.  Physics that pushed the limits of the first video cards.  Downloadable content conveniently monopolized by console game developers.  And most importantly: Online, head-to-head competitive play over the internet.

Thank our gaming overlords.  Without the video game console, we may be doing things the personal computer pioneered in the decade before this one.

The PC iteration of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will not feature support for dedicated servers.

In a webcast [Saturday], Robert Bowling revealed the existence of IWNet, a matchmaking service Infinity Ward will operate beginning with Modern Warfare 2. But it ends dedicated servers, and fundamentally changes the culture of the game’s PC community.

Bowling, the Infinity Ward community manager, said IWNet makes multiplayer more accessible to the PC community on Modern Warfare 2, replacing the need for dedicated servers that are hosted and managed by players. But the hardcore PC crowd to whom he was talking, on BASHandSlash.com’s webcast, did not take the news in a completely positive light.

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Here’s the score: by building up its own matchmaking service riding shotgun with Steam, “you can get in and play with players your same rank,” Bowling said. However, “You’re completely reliant on IWNet and there is no dedicated server or server list. You rely on IW Net for matchmaking and your games, but you still have your private matches.”

I dismissed Starcraft II’s lack of a true LAN component.  Long ago, CD-Keys established a doctrine of “one copy per computer” (hence why I’m opposed to the decision of “one username per account”).  I scoffed at the Left 4 Dead 2 Boycott, a community rejecting the sequel to a game they thoroughly enjoyed.  This is not one of those situations.

Game developers want to kill retailers.  They want a society that accepts digital distribution as the standard.  Following this, they will attempt to kill the video game console.  OnLive represents the endgame for this industry.  They do not want video games to be a manufactured good.  They want them to be a service.

Beyond the latency issues that plague first-person shooter matchmaking, beyond the fatal blow to the competitive gaming community, beyond the restrictions on modmaking that creates an artificial market for “premium content” and its developer-held monopoly, the elimination of dedicated servers is a step towards “service”.

Similar situations have proven roadblocks, torn asunder by protest piracy.  The reality is that Infinity Ward is backed by Activision.  They undoubtedly had a say in this decision.  That is, a company powerful enough, headed by a big enough asshole, to risk setting precedent that would create their vision for video gaming.

Why not?  As vocal as computer games have proven, their money is competing against the console gaming juggernaut.  And in the eyes of that console gaming community, computer gamers are the boy that cried wolf.  They cried about SecuROM.  They cried about StarForce.  They cried about Spore.  They cried about Left 4 Dead.  They cried about Starcraft II.  In the eyes of the console gaming community, we’re just a bunch of nerds and we need to stop whining.

In the meantime, make some popcorn. Three weeks until the release of Modern Warfare 2, and this is only the beginning of a battle that may prove one of the most important moments in video game history.

The new revolution in vaporware occurred right before my “vacation”, so I’d like to like to jump back a week and talk about it.

OnLive, which launched at the Game Developer Conference, promises to deliver on-demand video games via the cloud to the PC, Mac or TV.

The company said it could provide high quality gaming on low end machines.

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The innovation behind OnLive rests in its video compression technology which instantly streams video via the internet so that it appears “effectively instantaneously”.

“Perpetually, it appears the game is playing locally.”

The reality is that all the heavy lifting is done by remote data centres that can be up to a thousand miles away while players use a simple PC or TV hooked up to a broadband connection.

This removes the need for paying hundreds of dollars for traditional disc-based consoles made by the likes of Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony.

For this to happen, internet technology would need to progress exponentially versus computer processing power.  “Crappy internet” is a dark horse on the list of insults people use to make fun of the States, and we can barely get a lag-free game with the computer in front of us.  Now, I need a 1.5-megabyte internet connection to achieve an output resolution achievable by the Playstation 2?  Companies sold high-definition graphics as a necessity.  Even with the dominance of the Nintendo Wii, fifty-one percent of the current-gen market share is inhabited by high-definition consoles.  You want the next generation to take a colossal step back?  Not happening.

Even beyond logistics, assume that OnLive becomes the most important gaming tech since Atari popularized the purchasable, interchangeable cartridge.  “A library of games with no installation and no hassle!  Just turn on the television and have a blast!”  You bet your ass that terrifies me.

For all the clamor about digital downloads, I will always buy the physical media if I have the option.  In a world where the internet has wrecked the newspaper business, many people want the news in their hands.  It’s a feeling of comfort.  For me, buying the box is a feeling of ownership.  Technically, I’m only paying to license the product.  But as a gamer, I enjoy having two decades of gaming history on the top of my hutch. You’re now telling me that I need to pay a monthly subscription to play my games, and if you decide to remove a game from the service, there’s a chance I will never see it again.  What an awesome concept to sell to the fascists: They can now pretend certain video games never happened.

I went to school to learn about history, so it’s little surprise I have a soft side for protecting it.  That includes an urge to slap the fuck out of every person who gets butthurt by telling history as it was.  Remember when Osama bin Laden was the obvious choice for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, and the subscribers threw a hissy fit, and Rudy Giuliani got the nod?  You may not want to tell them Hitler won the honor, and Stalin got it twice.  The award was designed to recognize the person that had the greatest impact on the course of human events in that year.  Hating the outcome of an historical event does not give you the right to pretend it never happened, no matter how many times a star athlete is charged with murder, or how pedo-riffic a politician’s hard drive was.

Every time German parents fail to do their job, and their kid takes it out on a school, the German media has a field day with killerspiele.  (At this point, you can make a drinking game out of the German infatuation with blaming video games for this shit.)  It has nothing to do with a social recluse engrossing himself in a medium that appeals to social recluses, Counter-Strike killed those defenseless children, and it needs to be done away with.  With a centralized outlet whose content can be policed, you can theoretically make that happen.   They could now decide which video games are appropriate, as opposed to a combination of education, moral values, and the economic constructs of capitalism.  In this day and age, it is still a financial deathknell for a game to receive an Adults Only rating.  Should that cease at some point, and shooters are supplanted by tentacle hentai as the dominant game genre, too fucking bad.  In the opinion of this nutjob with a web site, it would be a greater crime for somebody to press the magic button and pretend it never happened.