This 3rd quarter has been a busy one with the release of many high performing games from some of the best houses out there, which is refreshing after a disappointing summer finish in my books. I had been awaiting the release of Aion: Tower of Eternity for quite some time, and even went ahead and pre-ordered the $90 collectors edition, only to cancel my account after the first month.

Is Aion a terrible MMO? No, not really. It just isn't fresh, everything it advertises as doing differently it pulls off in such a "Been there done that" way that it's not entertaining or original. Of all things, Eve has pulled me back in, and I think will stick as my MMO of choice for the next little while.

Demon's Souls for the PS3 has proven an fun and exciting adventure for what it is, a masochistic hack and slasher. The charm of risking it all to push forward grabbed me almost immediately and while my play has slowed down for the moment, I can count on coming back to this gem.

Borderlands, to no surprise is a fantastic RPG/FPS hybrid and in my mind illustrates to a greater degree than Bioshock what that genre should be about, progression. All the reviews say play with your friends, and I tend to agree, but don't pass this game up if you're only interested in the single player either, it's still great. A word of caution, even online the world can seem a very lonely place without a mic, if you don't have one, head over to your local Factory Direct and grab a $2.25 white, pod-shaped mic ( No idea who makes them ). They're cheap and sound just as good as anything you'll buy for more.

Finally, the much anticipated Dragon Age: Origins. Up until a few days ago I wasn't particularly excited about this one and in truth almost passed it off as "Neverwinter Nights 3.0". After trading in a few of my older movies though, I picked up the game and was completely floored. Not only is the combat more visceral and exciting than any other tactical RPG I've played, the story line, the emotion, the characters, are all so well put together you could almost believe you yourself were taking part in the strife and adventure of this world.

I might just start blogging a bit more often here with some 2 line reviews, like next week when Call of Duty: Modern....lol, just kidding, I'm not giving any money to those sellout SOBs. I may well play CoD:MW1 multi until the day I die, but that's the last penny Infinity Ward is going to get from me.

Well, finally on Friday Far Cry 2 made its release here in Canada, or at least at the venues I frequent. On Thursday I posted a rather irate message in the forums about how us PC gamers are always stuck with delays on how that in itself does not help the whole piracy thing. While I still stand very much by my comment, if Ubisoft had made everyone wait another week, it still would have been worth it for this game. Before I ventured out to obtain my game, I read the forums, and that concerned me greatly, because all I saw was a bunch of people complaining about how ugly the game was, how badly it played, motion sickness, difficult level, etc. Well after having played it for nearly 10 hours over the course of 2 days, I am extremely impressed. It seems to me that what a lot of people are complaining about are what make the game fun and accessable, the people saying "Oh, every car has a GPS qq" would probably be the same people whining if they didn't and they couldn't find thier way through the savanna. I plan on doing a full review once I've beat the game, but for right now, all I want to say is this: A good game is about finding the balance between what's fun and what's real, and Far Cry 2 did an extremely good job of that, it is my observation that people will whine about nearly anything if they had a different picture in thier heads, and some of the stuff I've heard are just unbelievable. As Jade_Monkey told me, people are like that focus group for the Krusty the Clown Show, "They want a totally realistic show that is completely off the wall and filled with alien robots."

Eventful week for me my friends, found meself a nice new video card to work towards, a fantastic website for music and bought Mass Effect for the PC despite my intense hatred for Bioware right now ( Bought a 360 for Mass Effect, if that wasn't bad enough, literally 3 days before it was announced for PC ). First off, The ATI Radeon HD 4850, my new baby, and apparently it'll go really well with my new 26" Monitor whenever I decide to grab it. Second, Lastfm.com, if anyone reading this has not already checked out this website, do so now! It pretty much allows you to add artists to your library then plays a radio station built completely off of the music you added. I don't think the music collection there is close to complete, but it's better than nothing, and extremely good if you're looking for something new since it will make intelligent recommendations to its users. The sound quality is nothing to shake a stick at either, for streaming over the night it is quite good, and in fact outdoes some of the music I have on my harddrive. Lastly, Mass Effect, I'm going to try and not get into another rant, but I really hate it when companies forget who made them big and release games on consoles with words like "not being released for PC". It was words like that which forced me to buy a 360 for Mass Effect, only to have a PC version announced literally 3 days later. Anyhow, the PC version of ME is far superior, graphics alone blow the 360 clear out of the water, sound is just brilliant and the control scheme couldn't be more intuitive. Damnit Bioware, stop selling out, stick with what you're good at, PC games!

Hello all,

For those of you who may have seen my rant on the Mirror's Edge comment section, I wanted to give you a bit of perspective.It is seriously my belief that consoles are ruining not just gaming, but computing in general and I'm going to show you why using an analogy we're all going to love, PORN! As most of you probably know, porn controls which medium we can expect to see succeed whenever we encounter a format war since it is easily the highest grossing genre out there. When porn moved to Blueray, the rest of the world followed despite the very slight differences in HDDVD and Blueray, it of course helped that every PS3 had a Blueray player wrapped and ready, but looking at the PS3s sales I'm not positive it is what swayed the industry.

Several years ago, when I was but a wee lad, and consoles couldn't hope to match what a PC would do, times were good, every year you would likely need to update your computer in order to get the best performance out of it. Many of you would say this is a bad thing, but all in all it meant the manufacturers and developers were doing thier jobs by pushing the limits. Look at the minimum and recommended system requirements at PC games over the last 3 to 4 years, they've pretty much remained steady aside from a few graphically pretty releases. I know development in faster computer technology has not ceased, but no one can tell me it's moving at the same pace it once was.

Back when the first dual-core processors came out, it was extremely fast that we went from single core to dual cores, now the advent of quad-core was greeted with the chirp of a few curious crickets. AI has also declined overall, while FEAR being an exception to this, having some of the best AI I've ever seen, but generally RTSs, Adventure games, FPS, all of them have sacrificed challenging opponents for either overwhelming odds or gimmicks.

Well that is my rant, I hope at least a few people take a look at this, I'm not a fanboy, I own consoles, but over the last while I've become all to familiar with what staying comfortable can do to advancement. If you can disprove me with some facts, or you have constructive criticism drop me a message and I'll read it, but overall, I think gaming has become the industry that pushes the hardware much like porn pushes the formats.

- All who read, have a good one.