Read this new world media types and weep in despair as the corporate dragons feast on your hard earned dollars:
http://www.tomsguide.com/us/ea-sports-project-ten-dollar-used-games-tiger-woods-gamestop,news-6756.html
 
I will give the cliffnotes version:  EA will start charging to play Sports games online over both the major online networks (PSN & xbox live).  For those who purchase the game brand new, meaning they shell out the entire retail price for the product, they will receive a one use code that allows them to play the games online.  For all those who buy the game second hand or rent the game (via gamefly for example) they will have to pay 10 dollars to play the game online.
 
Rent: realize that that 10 dollars is per game.  Not for all EA titles.  You better take a good look at your que, your 19 dollar a month access to gamefly might suddenly become a 50+ dollar a month access.

Of course, EA and gamestop LOVE this idea.  After all both those greedy assh*les will increase their sale of new titles.  
 
It absolutely sucks for the consumer of course, because the value of your purchased games immediately decreases by at least 10 dollars.  
 
Let's do the math...shall we. 

A new title will cost about 60 dollars.  I keep that game for six months, play it thoroughly and decide to trade it in at those vampires at gamestop for .95 cents.  Gamestop of course resales the title for 19.99 and some sucker purchases it. He gets home and has to pay another 10 dollars to play it online.  Now, you say, I won't work through those parasites at gamestop and sell the titles on ebay.  You post your used title for 30 dollars on ebay, trying to recoup at least 50% of the titles value, but of course, the end buyer knows he's going to have to pay another 10 dollars to play it, and 40 dollars for a six month old game is probably what those retail assshanks are charging for a new copy.  Why then would anyone purchase it second hand, when a new copy, with a real online access code will cost them the same money?  So the seller has to lower his price to something that would seem reasonable to the buyer...for me 'reasonable' would be a total of 30 dollars...meaning that the seller would have lower the price to 20 bucks.
 
In the end the retail guys and the game distributor make out because they increase the sale of their product while at the same time, decreasing the value of the already purchased product, thus ensuring that consumers will increase direct new product purchase over second hand product.   Hum... I think this is illegal in other product selling arenas.
 
I will no longer be purchasing EA titles and will be cleansing my gamefly que of any possible offenders.  
 
Personally, I believe that once I purchase the title its value should remain relative to the surrounding titles and quality of the game, similar to re-selling a vehicle.  I understand that the product will depreciate as newer, better versions are released but I assume that the investment is my responsibility to foster and not the greedy corporate morons.  To me, this is not any different that price fixing or short selling or any of the other dirty tricks played out against investors on wall street.   Of course the difference is that those wall street crooks get hung because they steal millions from millionaires, while, stealing from the dirty peasants is still considered okay. 

There are certain things that I just can’t stand in video games.   Some of which are just plain the prevalence of the entire video game design system, the game-think as it were, that you simply have to go with the flow and accept that they exist because, like all other systems, the idea of introducing new avenues of thought gets more difficult the larger and system.   Then there are those things that are just ridiculous.   Things that make my blood boil and keep me from actually enjoying the game.   Here are a few:

1.        Game progression means less cooperative environment. Grand Theft Auto / Prototype are excellent examples of this.   At the beginning of these games you see little resistance to your actions in the environment.    If, for example, in GTA you drive your car into a police cruiser, the police will pursue you with one star, and assuming you don’t slip away quickly the star increase will be gradual and you will have plenty of time to actually elude the police.   Later in the game, as you progress, getting into that same ‘accident’ with a police cruiser will immediately call out the national guard, as the star will almost jump to three or four.   Apparently your ‘rep’ is such that the minute you put a toe over the line you get a beat down.   Sure they are trying to keep the excitement and challenge available, but come on.   In the end it only distracts from the rest of the game as you must spend lengthy time trying to do the opposite of the games design, that is: stay out of trouble just so you can progress the story.

2.        From out of the woodwork.   Another aspect of the first issue, is that once you do something that draws out the authorities they seemingly appear out of nowhere as if all of them were disguised or hiding in buildings, or were using magic.   In Prototype, you could spend the first hour or so of the game barely seeing any official military, and eluding them is pretty easy.   Yet, later in the game you could attempt to hijack what appears to be a lone tank, but the minute you climb on it suddenly there are twenty guys with machine guns, a helicopter, and two other tanks on scene.    Entire countries have few soldiers than one has to kill in order to get away from this and it happens every time.   Where the hell did they come from?  Are they cloning these guys on a ship off shore somewhere?   If the idea is to make the game challenging, then this act of allowing the AI to seemingly teleport into a location to counter the player only distracts and after a few times of fighting what amounts to an entire countries military might stop you trying to even get involved with this aspect of the game and dread having to deal with them when the story drives you to it.   I don’t know about you, but dread is a word I don’t like to spend 50 dollars on let alone a few hours of my life.  I have a day job and was married once...dread is already well versed in my vocab.

3.        The Demigods of Boss fights / or they move just as fast as my character.   Some games throttle back your character’s movements and skills at the beginning of the game and give you the ability to unlock powers over the course of the game.   They also, tend to change the actual clock of the character so that you can move faster in relative comparison to the AI.   This is cool in and of itself, but at some point the clock is at a hyper speed which is great for the player but makes the boss fights a series of jerky screams and tear riddled prayers, “Jesus, just let me hit the guy!”   you scream as you mash the jump button or the fire button or both, hoping that somewhere in those finite clock cycles you get to have a say in the actual playing of the game.   What’s worse is that games are so predictable that you actually need boss fights.   I know, plenty of people swear by them, and in fact they feel a game that doesn’t include boss fights is missing something.   I don’t completely disagree with this sentiment, but I find that the current game design system of bosses isn’t about giving the player anything but a serious challenge and not about progressing the gaming experience.   It’s almost like the designer said, “Let’s make this hard” not “How will this progress the value of the experience.”

4.        AI leveling?   In games like Oblivion, you level up, increase your stats, become a stronger SOB.   But so what, every other character, including the rats, do the same right along with you.   In fact, games like this (by the way this game is a huge offender of number three) it’s better to level up only when you have too.   To simply stay at level 1 until you meet a creature that requires you to level up.   In the old roll playing days of D&D a good DM would make the game interesting through the story and challenging through the battles, and his thirty skeletons wouldn’t be two levels about the players in the game.   They would simply be skeletons.   Instead the DM would introduce new monsters that were just more powerful, new NPC that complicated the player quest.

5.        Terrible targeting systems… I think that’s pretty self explanatory.   There is nothing more frustrating than a targeting system that uses your movement system  as part of its set up.   Move, stop, aim, move, stop, aim....wash rinse repeat.   Or a targeting system that changes your orientation, One second you’re facing north, pretty sure you’re pointed at enemies down range, only to select the targeting system and find yourself turned one hundred eight the other way.   Genius, I hope they gave that guy a promotion!

6.        Multiple button combination strings so complicated that you need a degree in large number theory to remember them and the speed and dexterity of superman to actually perform them.   The worst part of these is that the enemy doesn’t stop to let you string this thing together and you can’t start the button combo from six feet away.   You have to be right on top of the enemy who is trying to pummel you at the same time.   If he knocks you down the combo gets reset.   What use is the combo then?   In the end you spend more time mashing the attack buttons in hopes that you stumble into a combo.

Frankly all the things I mentioned are just signs of lazy programming and rudimentary concepts.    It’s easier to have the AI level up than design new ways of progressing the leveling system.   It’s easier to throttle down the player’s clock speed so that bosses move faster or slower than giving the player character better skills to work the battle.   It’s easier to all the AI to come out of no where to attack the player than to write a system that changes an outdated model of attack.   It’s easier.   Sigh. Just like it’s easier for me to write this.

Most of the time I find reviewing anything, movies, games, cd's to be a Freudian endeavor into my ego. 

I read other people's reviews and find them well detailed.  Often times full of praise.  Other times, out and out vehemence.    Then I look at the score they give the game and my mind does a double take.   They hated the game, but gave it 4 stars?   4 stars?   Doesn’t four stars mean I thought this game was better than average?   I see this so often in inet-reviews all over that I tend to ignore the star system (or 10 system, which ever it may be).     I wonder what the hell people are really thinking.   Is the star system just to complicated?   Sigh.   I guess it would be great if someone with great programming skills could write an app that read the user’s review and assessed a star value based on the actual text.   The tech is there, I should look at such a thing.

But this leaves me to wonder, should I even bother?   Truly.   For, let’s face it.   I’m hard on games and movies.   Not so much on music, but I was a rock snob for my younger years, now I’m just trying to be fair and spread it around to other fields.   I find that many games lake the actual value that was invested in them.   … hum.   That gives a good review standpoint.   I know now how I’m going to review games.

I’ll   start with the retail cost and work through the process of the game to arrive at an actual cost…a cost that the game becomes just as worth it’s actual value.   If for example, the game costs 59.99 but in reality the game play, graphics, re-play-ability make it’s true value 9.99…then wait until it’s in that bin of used crap at game stop…or better put it at the bottom of your rental list.