In 2005 i decided that EA was evil. Pure evil. They'd swallowed whole my two favourite game development companies as a child, Bullfrog and Westwood Studios, denying me Dungeon Keeper 3 and maybe a few more games from the Theme or Populous series. From then on i'd avoided EA's games where i could and since Medal of Honor took a nose dive i became a Call of Duty fan boy and then a Warcraft fan boy (after being introduced to the series by my brother).
  
Needless to say, as everyone knows, Activision's mask slipped and Bobby Kotick drove Activision into EA's parking spot which was clearly labelled "reserved for bastards and greedy scumlickers", which opened my eyes.

Due to this whole vissage of EA previously being the most hated company in the games industry, i'd always disregarded alot of games which they'd published simply because it had the EA logo on the front apart from the Battlefield series; what a totally ignorant thing of me to do i know, but i feel i have missed out on quite a few games since 2005. At the beginning of this year i opened up and purchased Mass Effect 2 and Dragon's Age and it hit me that just because the publisher was previously an ass, it didn't automatically make the developers asses aswell.
 
So thanks for being a dick Bobby Kotick and educating me in the ways of the world and how a seemingly nice company can turn into a money-hungry monster at the click of a finger.

Anyhow, what games may i have missed which were published by EA which were actually of very good quality? I was looking at grabbing Burnout Paradise but... what about Need for Speed... and everything else?

So cutting this short, it's a minor niggle for the European client as the majority of Europe use the Day/Month/Year format (note I said majority, considering a small few in the former Eastern Bloc and northern countries use Year/Month/Day) and Blizzard should have at least provided us the option to change to date format to our preferred one.   

  I was one of those few members of the gaming community who stuck to their guns and didn't buy Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2; the lack of dedicated servers was a spit in the face of the PC gaming community and the fact that this was simply Bobby Kotick milking an already long dead cash cow put me off completely, I went back to World at War or Call of Duty 2 like others did.  
 
 But your average casual gamer doesn't care what they're doing to the franchise nor do they care about the quality of the game, if it's what their friends are playing or if it's popular they will buy it, with a similar mentality to that of a sheep. 
The majority of my friends purchased it and yes I did feel left out while they sat there yelling about "dual shotties" and gunships, it made me question whether I myself should really care about the quality of the games I purchase anymore considering aslong as the mainstream of people keep buying tripe, companies will keep making tripe. 
 
Should i just fall in line and accept it that in this world the quantity (of units sold) is more important than quality in terms of products?

This is pure speculation at its best, I’m not saying Brink has any political message it wants to put across nor am I saying it doesn’t, but the first thing I thought after viewing the trailer and realising it was made by Splash Damage, was that this seems very similar to our current situation in the UK; immigrants/refugees (the Resistance) living in make-shift slums such as The Jungle Refugee Camp in Calais (Container City) while they attempt to make it across to overcrowded Britain (The Ark), usually being stopped and sent back on their journey over or being deported back to their country of origin if they do make it across the English Channel by the UK Border Agency (Ark Security, minus the use of guns...yet). 
 
Due to Splash Damage being a British games development company I’d really like to know where their inspirations from the game come from and if it was indeed this conundrum that the country finds itself in.

 I've been playing a lot of Starcraft 2 recently alongside posting frequently on the lawless Starcraft 2 EU forums and this is where my problem begins: I went to the forums. 

 
I should have learned to stay away from such things after viewing the World of Warcraft forums but I thought to myself merrily "this'll be different, it's an RTS not an MMO, these are skilful players, not casual MMO players who do everything with the mouse" ...boy I couldn't be more wrong. It seems Blizzard advertising Starcraft 2 on the World of Warcraft websites has had a major negative effect on the forums, as the World of Warcraft players had dragged themselves out of those raids to come and have a try at Blizzard's new game, finding it wasn't like Warcraft at all as Blizzard didn't hold their hand throughout the whole of it. So what do they do? They do what they always do and proceed to make at least 40 threads a day on the same topics about how they should be able to gain achievements on Casual difficulty or that Blizzard ripped them off or that macros are too hard. These are continuously piled up next to the streams of posts about balancing, the lack of chat channels and features which are missing or they would like implemented.
 
I was previously content with the game until these people made me realise what was missing or what could have been and I have now been brainwashed and accepted into their whining-cult, complaining about how terrible the custom game system is or how "Blizzard only wants money!!!!!11111"
 
Next time I get a new game it'll be different, next time I’ll ignore the community forums.... I hope.