Gamespot is one of the top computer game news and reviews sites on the net, and I make sure to check the news daily to keep up to date, perhaps this is sad, but what can I say, I enjoy my hobby greatly. The news articles are fair and balanced, and the reviews are most often very accurate and not willing to follow hype and review trends that other sites fall prey too. However there is a blight on this shrine of computer games, a dark fissure widening to encompass every news post and every review. While the very utterance of their name brings a chill to my spine, I will put aside my personal discomfort and say it but once; Fan boys.

Why anyone would forbid themselves good games because of the platform they appear on is a mystery to me. I can only assume that this strange need to ally themselves with one console manufacturer over all others comes from a simple lack of funds. When I was younger, I had a SNES and loved it to bits, I also wanted a Mega Drive (Genesis for any American readers) but there was no way that my mother would buy me two games consoles, so I convinced myself that I had the superior platform and engaged in friendly banter with my Mega Drive owning friends. However I never pretended that I didn't want a Mega Drive, and that is where me and the un-named ones differ.

Now before I continue I would like to say that I don't own a PS3. This is mainly due to the fact that at the moment, there are not really enough games that interest me on the platform, and so I can't justify the cost to myself. However I fully intend to own a PS3 at some point in this cycle of consoles, and I look forward to both Metal Gear Solid 4 and some of the unique features that the console itself provides. I feel that I needed this to be known before I started talking examples, as some of them look at the PS3 in a negative light, and I would hate to be lumped in with those who may not be named.

Recently, two games have been getting much attention from the "intense" PS3 fan-base, Heavenly Sword and Lair. Both games have been very highly hyped, and some have even labeled Heavenly Sword as a "Killer App" for the PS3, a term which is a very lofty role for any game, and something that very few games ever live up too. Examples of killer apps in the past include the first Halo for the Xbox and Brain Training for the Nintendo DS games which, as suggested have greatly boosted the sales of their platforms. However it turns out, that Heavenly Sword has not lived up to expectations, getting a metacritic.com score of 80, with Lair being even more widely disliked with a score of 55. But rather than accepting that the games are actually not all that good, the troops start marching to battle. Suddenly every website which gives an honest, but bad review is called biased, and the drums of war start beating.

In situations such as this, reason is of no use. If someone is dead set on liking a game, they will often convince themselves that it is good. I have no doubt that there are people out there forcing themselves to enjoy Lair, and telling themselves that a game that takes 5 hours from start to finish like Heavenly Sword is fine. However if the games were on the opposite platform, they would be the first to laugh at them. The most confusing part of the "Console War" is when a game goes from exclusive to multi platform. You could almost hear the PS3 troops interest in GTA:IV drop when it was announced it would launch on the 360 on the same day. I have subjected myself of baffling posts where people have said Sony has "betrayed their fans by letting [Devil May Cry 4] be released on the 360″. Now when it comes to posts like that, it is all to easy to spot the zealotry at work, and I often wonder if the people posting these things truly believe what they are saying or if it is simply a game they are playing to wind up others. Either way, I have decided to avoid such things all together and instead stick to reading only news posts and reviews, and then scrolling down no further, it is the only way to stop my sanity from shattering.

PC's have long been the choice of platform for the discerning gamer, the games industry was born on such a platform, and many people see it as the be all and end all of gaming entertainment. However in recent years we have witnessed a mass exodus of PC gamers in favor of dedicated games consoles, and that has caused some people to classify the PC games industry as "on the way out".

Such a view can be supported by looking at sales figures. The sales charts for the US, UK and Japan are all dominated by console and hand held games sales, with only the biggest games, such as World of Warcraft and The Sims expansions, making the number one spot. On occasions where games are released on both the PC and a console on the same day, the console version can make its way to the number one spot, without the PC's offering even making it into the top ten. Such an example is Bioshock, a game which came out on both the PC and the Xbox 360 on the same day, and yet only the 360 version has been seen anywhere in sales charts.

Such a trend is telling, however not universal. The incomparably lucrative MMORPG market is currently bound to the PC. While this too is not exclusive, with games such as Final Fantasy XI making the move, vaguely successfully to consoles, it means that the PC is still managing to attract some new gamers. World of Warcraft, the market leader in the MMORPG sector of the games industry, currently has over 9 million members, an impressive figure for any game, but even more so when those members are all paying £8.99 a month.

Such a PC based success story surely shows that there is still interest the classic games platform, however this boost for PC gaming may soon be lost, as consoles become more and more like their PC cousins. The addition of a hard-drive and network connectivity to consoles (starting with the Xbox and now common in the current generation of consoles), puts developing an MMORPG for consoles, that is on par with the PC offerings, not only possible, but inevitable. While there is the issue of adapting a game as complex as an MMORPG for use with a portable controller, many companies have managed to make several complex game engines feel natural with them, so it is likely that a sturdy system could be found.

Another boost for the PC offensive, is the re-launch of Microsoft's Games for Windows line, which aims to bring PCs a console like consistency to their operation and installation, with some of them even connecting to the, up until now Xbox exclusive, LIVE service. Similarly the PC based Steam system, which runs, in some ways, very much like Games for windows and Xbox Live, is providing unified friends lists, an online store, and automated updates for the games that support it. Could these services, which are echoed in the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 be the savior of PC gaming? If so, are there really that many benefits to one platform over the other?

If you ask me, there is life in the old dog yet.

I, like most RPG fans, played Diablo II at one point. It was an addiction, one of my bigger ones I might add, that took me a long time to get bored of. Recently though, I got an urge to play it again, but while looking on the internet at the latest updates, I came across Hellgate: London, a game made by the Diablo team that seems to be the latest Diablo with a real world slant. I was hooked on what I read and I started looking forward to it, but it was still such a long way from release and so I set it to the back of my mind, ready to be awakened closer to its release.

Then Guild Wars was shot across my bow by a friend who had picked it up. I started a new character, an Elementalist, and after a few hours of play I realised something. I was playing a Diablo Clone. Its well hidden, the lobby is intergrated into the lagtastic towns and the leveling may be played down, but it is a Diablo clone.

Since this revelation I have been enjoying the game thorroughly, though I think that they make levels less important, which I am not too keen on, there is a rich database of quests and a lot of friendly people all looking for a good quest or two.

So untill Hellgate: London arrives with its lush graphics and spooky, post appocolyptic setting, I will be adventuring Guild Wars style!

A lot of people have problems with big companies, many hate Microsoft and everyone seems to hate EA. The target of this hatred in the MMORPG scene is Sony Online Entertainment. Brought into power by theJuggernaut that is EverQuest, and maintained by the likes of Star Wars Galaxies, it seems to have no end to its expansion. And now with the acquisition of The Matrix Online, it has the power to controll the MMORPG's for the top 2 Sci-Fi trilogies of all time.

When World of Warcraft came out, there must have been a few sweaty execs over at SoE HQ, after all, the seemingly neverending amount of WoW Servers and an outstanding influx of players was quite incredible. Then with the European launch, it got even better, another huge load of servers and a record breaking amount of new accounts. Now as everybody knows, there have been problems with overpopulated WoW servers, but all in all the service has been pretty good. Then you look at The Matrix Online. A game, thats name alone should sell it a million. But alas, its just not very good, visually, sure, very impressive. But its just not very fun. There is not much going on, with the excuse that there are the live events, which are thin at best. I hope that SoE can do some good to this struggling MMORPG, as I am a huge fan of everything Matrix. But even that will not keep me playing unless there are some major changes...