Halo, MMO’s, and mobile gaming
My opinion on Halo is pretty much a minority opinion. Halo is overrated, Halo 2 was more of the overrated same, Halo 3 was even more of the overrated same … and I swore off Halo altogether. I skipped ODST …
I’ll be waiting in line for Reach tonight. Don’t ask me why, but I am excited about this game. I’ve been left behind for lack of participation in the console shoot ‘em up world over the last few years, but I am going to give Reach a good effort and try to get my feet wet again. That should hold me over until Fallout New Vegas and Force Unleashed rock my world next month. So look for Sente KM on Xbox Live and try not to embarrass me too much!
I’ve been toying with EVE Online, but I think I am going to cancel my subscription. As intriguing as that game is, and as enjoyable as it can be at times, I question what it can do for me and the answers are not convincing. I cannot grind to get ahead and establish myself as a top player faster than the average player, and because of that it will literally take me 6 months to over a year before I can play at the level that I like to play MMO’s. I am not certain I want to put that time commitment in, when I have no certainty whether there will even be a hard core player base still paying to play the game at that time.
That makes me ask myself what the future holds for me in MMOs. I love not being tied to my computer, but I miss the times I had playing EverQuest and World of Warcraft at a high level. To this day, nothing beats building my EQ guild Infinite Alliance into something special and later raiding Plane of Time and flagging for the Gates of Discord and Omens of War expansions before I quit to play EQ2 and then WoW. WoW was incredible to me early on getting Molten Core and Blackwing Lair on farm status, then after losing my place in my server’s top guild Sunder after a long hiatus, having to hustle to re-establish my reputation as one of the top players on my server during the later time frame of The Burning Crusade and on into Wrath of the Lich King where I was able to prove myself once again with the guild Cataclysm. I am done with WoW and how their bean counters have ruined what was once an incredible game.
Final Fantasy XIV looks outstanding. The Old Republic looks great and shiny, but my gut is telling me that it has letdown written all over it. Kingdom of Amalur: Reckoning has a ton of promise but the MMO version won’t be a reality for a long, long time.
In the meantime, I have real life things that need to get done. It amazes me that people accomplish things in real life while playing MMOs hardcore. That is something that to this day I have never been able to really claim, so my future in MMOs is cloudy. I love playing MMOs at a high level … so who knows?
The last thing on my mind in terms of gaming is mobile gaming, namely mobile device gaming on stuff like iPhone, Android, etc. Lately I have read so many articles stating sales numbers of casual mobile games compared to stuff like PSP and Nintendo DS games and take the opportunity to declare the death of those platforms. I think that’s stupid. Hot shit consoles have not killed PC gaming, nor will bite sized mobile games kill PSP and the DS. To think that sales numbers alone should dictate where investment and developer focus should go is just ridiculous … just because you can sell a million copies of a casual game on the iOS platform (or Android, or Windows Phone 7 or whatever) at a low development cost and a low retail cost doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for high production value games on more powerful platforms. The PSP does things that the iPhone or iPod Touch can’t do. The high end PC does things that the consoles cannot do. I wish the tech geek press would get that through their heads.
Three hours until Halo: Reach hits the east coast and I’ll get to work being a baddy that gets killed by everybody. Cheers.
