I say that a lot, especially of late, but I don't think people really understand why. It's not false modesty, or fishing for people to tell me I am one, or that I am good at it. It's that I think the standard of writing required to be labelled a writer is markedly higher than my own skills in the field.
Compiling recaps of The Biggest Loser isn't much more than transcription with a few swears and observations thrown in. It's more about having the ability to type a decent amount of words per minute than it is any particular ability with shaping those words into something worth reading.

Doing a piece for Player Attack is more about babbling on about a game (or concept, recently) until I feel like I've said enough that people might read it and be interested by something I've blurted out. It's been great for me, I've learned plenty of things about writing from the editorial skills of Ms Jessica Citizen after she neatens up whatever I send in, but other than that one super (un)popular Guild Wars 2 article I'm not too sure what any of the people reading my bits have thought.
Plus there's always the niggling thought at the back of my mind that I only get asked to do such things because I obviously have so much free time and can readily spit out a great quantity of words on most any subject.

And that's mostly true, I do often have the free time to write something and, especially if it's something I'm interested in, can generally mush together my thoughts into some words on the subject.
And that's mostly untrue, in that I doubt I would keep getting asked to write something if it was just because I can do so in relatively short order. There are plenty of other people who have thoughts and ideas and they all tend to be more qualified than me. As in they write about gaming things and big magazines pay them money for those words. Or they have some kind of a degree from a university.

Or they at least did the fancy English course in High School. Something other than just reading a lot of books and not knowing when to shut the hell up.

Perhaps my time in school is where some of the writer-insecurity comes from? Oh, not the usual tale of a bullied nerd, but the lack of any real recognition or encouragement when it came to anything writing related. The closest I got was encouragement to stick with the debating team.

Yes, I was argumentative in school, too. But scribbling notes on cue cards and having to turn those into speeches defending a point of view mostly came easily to me and it's probably influenced my writing more than most things.

Maybe I would have stretched further in my English studies if I hadn't been so heavily discouraged by the attitude of my Year Six teacher, Mrs Zotter? In her mind if you weren't writing in cursive you were doomed to mediocrity. And the high school teachers would mark you down for it. So you have to write in cursive!!!
As it turned out, high school teachers didn't give a crap so long as your writing was legible. So all those times she harangued me into doing the much slower cursive lettering were a waste of everyone's time, not to mention quite discouraging for a youngster who thought the content of the writing should be more important than the neatness.

Then in Year Seven or Eight I had a teacher who set us Macbeth to read. Only it was Macbeth in comic book form.

I sometimes wonder how much of my language skills were learned in school past the fourth grade. I suspect I learned more about good sentence structure and fancier words from reading a lot of books and subconsciously assimilating the knowledge from there.

The insecurity surrounding my abilities as a person who writes things might also have something to do with severe depression and a generally poor outlook on life and future prospects, particularly in the area of employment.
The most creativity required of me in any previous employed position was figuring out how to get to and from work every day while getting paid only marginally more than the price of my weekly train ticket.
I didn't keep that job, in case you were wondering how that turned out for me. What the guy was doing was actually illegal and the employment agency who set it up for me were none too thrilled when I reported back to them the conditions.

Anyway, creativity, it's not really something I think of possessing either. And it's another thing a writer should really have, right?

I seem to have strayed a long way off track here.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that when I hear the word "writer" I think more in terms of book writers, screen writers, newspaper and magazine writers. People who write professionally, because someone thinks their words are worth money. People who write poetry or songs. People who do research and write about important things in society. People whose words I want to read.

Not some clown with an opinion and an hour to clumsily mash the keyboard.

What you've experienced is what Sony Online Entertainment dubbed the "New Game Experience", commonly abbreviated as the NGE, introduced in 2005 in a misguided attempt to recapture player interest in the game.

But what came before the NGE? How did players develop their characters before the dark times?

It all started with visiting one of the Novice level trainers for a starting profession - Artisan, Brawler, Entertainer, Marksman, Medic or Scout - and paying to unlock the first box in what, nowadays, looks very much like a talent tree from any number of other MMOs.

A partly developed Artisan.

Each starting class then has four branches of development. In the case of the Artisan, the base crafting profession, you can advance in the Engineering, Domestic Arts, Business and Surveying lines. Each branch typically required a different kind of experience gain to advance. Engineering, for example, could be advanced via crafting weaponry or simple structures like moisture vaporators or small mining excavators. Domestic Arts would require cooking food or crafting clothing. Business, if I recall correctly, required a "General" type of XP you could gain from crafting items like chance cubes or some backpacks. Surveying, unsurprisingly, required Survey XP which you would gain from using devices to track down mineral deposits and digging those deposits up out of the ground.

Other base classes had a similar system - Marksman had branches for Rifles, Carbines, Pistols and Support. In order to reach the Master box for a profession you would need to fill all four branches of the tree. Meaning a Master Marksman had not just gained the experience required with a rifle, they'd also done the same with a carbine and the same with a pistol - the XP required for Support would generally come on the way to the fourth box to one of the other branches.

The perks for reaching Master in a profession don't always end at a fancy title and some more skill modifiers and abilities. Mastering the Scout profession would unlock the elite Ranger profession for training, giving you better bonuses when harvesting creature hides, larger camps to construct and a greater ability to negotiate difficult terrain. Mastery of the Medic field leads to the Doctor profession, with an expansion of your healing abilities and the addition of some very useful buffs.

Not all the elite professions required mastery of a base profession. If you just want to stick with rifles you can enter the Rifleman profession with just the rifle branch of Marksman. Entry into the Dancer profession required the dancing boxes and the "support" tree of Entertainer, known as Entertainment Healing.

Then you have the hybrid advanced professions. If you wanted to train as a Bounty Hunter you had to pick up both Novice Scout and Novice Marksman. You needed one complete line, Exploration, in Scout and you had to achieve Master Marksman. Commando required the Unarmed line from Brawler and Master Marksman. Squad Leader? The Support line in Marksman and the Exploration and Survival lines in Scout.

But at no point are you railroaded into any of these options. If you want to be a Rifleman by day and a Dancer by night? Completely free to do that. You're bound only by the limit of 250 skill points in total, with boxes higher up the Starting Profession trees costing more points and boxes higher up the Advanced Professions taking fewer.

This obviously opens up a lot of options for players looking for some diversity in their combat. A popular combination for a long time was Rifleman for ranged combat with Teras Kasi for melee fights and the handy Meditation skill, which would boost your damage and defenses before a fight.

It wasn't limited to just the fun or the diverse, either. People discovered that the bonuses to skill modifiers you gain through certain professions would stack additively with the bonuses from others. The bonus to your Dodge rating from Fencer would stack with the one from Pistoleer, meaning someone who has mastered both professions would have a very high chance to dodge attacks, whether wielding a pistol or a one handed weapon.

And part of the genius of it all was that you weren't restricted to just filling all these boxes by visiting your trainer and coughing up your credits - any player who has already learned a skill can then go on to teach any other player, assuming they meet the requirements. Both a vast improvement over other games both before and since but also a great community building mechanic. Having a friend or guildmate of the appropriate profession as a mentor meant you had someone on hand to train you as you reach the XP requirements and, generally, they wouldn't even charge you for the training!

But what if you don't like your chosen profession?

Surrender your skills, start over again! (Source: MMORPG.com)

Yes, Star Wars Galaxies had a respec system. Back in 2003 a game featured such a thing and the world didn't end as a result. Take that, respec haters!

Surrendering a skill box removed any bonuses provided by that box and refunded the skill points used, allowing you to select a different box instead. And you could do it as often as you like, for free, anywhere and on any planet. Of course surrendering all your skills among nests of rancors on Dathomir was not advisable, but if you had a mentor along you could work your new skills back up without returning to town.

Or you could give up the adventuring life and take up crafting or entertaining for a change of pace, if being rancor bait no longer appeals.

An unprecedented level of freedom in character development and one of the deepest systems ever to appear in an MMO and... they replaced it with a WoW/Everquest system clone.

MMO developers are strange.

Reading the linked email on Reddit from "Mike" to the unlucky Lauren, I can see why it would be a topic of debate, especially on The Twitters, where we love to talk about everything and forget we only have 140 characters. Though I'm not sure why anyone would want to friend zone Mike. He seems like a real catch!

But what I really want to talk about is the lack of friend zone issues experienced by Draqul, or more exactly, my chronic and perpetual friend zoning by every female, ever. And why it's not actually a terrible curse.

There's a number of reasons I am eternally in the "just a friend" box, from being beaten by the ugly stick to living in the wrong state to just plain being a dude when the lady in question prefers anything but men. And every possible reason in between. I'm sure this is not an unfamiliar situation for a lot of people on both sides of the gender-fence. And it causes a lot of angst, for some.

But think about it for a moment - okay, you might not get to touch The Boobies. But there must be other things you like about this person, right? They enjoy the same sorts of movies, or music or outdoor activities? Maybe they're a big fan of video games or philosophy books. Or they tell great jokes and funny anecdotes. Perhaps they too collect stamps.

Regardless of what it is, you still share that with them and thus they are likely to be a good friend. And while most everyone is a fan of boobies, having friends is hardly the worst thing in the world.

If it was only a physical attraction to begin with then there really are plenty more fish in the sea. Probably ones with which you share interests and who are also open to a relationship with you. Perhaps that girl who put you in the friend zone will introduce you...?

Just don't be like Mike and not recognise when it's time to let it go. Calling someone "impolite, immature, passive aggressive, and cowardly" is not the way to their heart.

And if all else fails, high class call girls/boys are probably cheaper anyway. :-P

Long answer: For some reason I occasionally get people asking me if Game X is any good, especially if I have the Steam Community logged in while playing something. I don't know why anyone would ask me, I play all sorts of random crap!
But never have so many people asked after Dungeon Defenders. There's been a few questions on Twitter and a few via Steam Chat and rather than answer any more individually... BLOG POST.

As per the short answer, Dungeon Defenders is yet another tower defense style game. You get a certain amount of resources - mana in this instance - to construct various towers and barricades and other traps to slow or kill waves of enemies. Each enemy drops some more mana, letting you place more defenses or upgrade and repair the ones you've already placed.
That's fairly standard for a tower defense game and there's plenty of excellent examples that only take the idea that far.

Unlike other tower defense games, Dungeon Defenders doesn't have you sit above the playing field as the bad guys roll in. You play as an actual hero in the world and can choose to fight the monsters directly, with sword, bow or magic, or take on the role of a mechanic, fixing defenses up or even building new ones on the fly.
In the early stages of a map it is often essential to get into the fight yourself, or at least expedient to do so. The sooner you wipe out a wave the sooner you get some new treasure chests full of mana to improve upon your defenses.

But Dungeon Defenders' additions don't stop there. Rather than just being a stock standard hero type you can choose between, initially, four different hero classes.

The Apprentice is supposed to be the "newbie" class. Play as an Apprentice and you're a wizard, capable of shooting balls of light from your staff - or charging up for a more damaging blast - as a primary attack and emitting a damaging shockwave that throws enemies back for a secondary attack.
The Squire is a slightly more advanced class, according to the in-game description, and sees you take on the role of a mini-knight. You can swing your sword to slice up foes or hold it up to block attacks for your secondary. It's often better to simply swing faster and kill things, rather than block...
The third class is the Huntress, the ranged specialist, equipped with a crossbow. The primary attack for the Huntress is simply shooting the crossbow with the secondary reserved for reloading. Crossbows in Dungeon Defenders often have 20 or more bolts preloaded. Via magic or something.
Last of the base classes is the Monk. The monk has a basic melee attack and a basic ranged magic attack for a secondary.

The differences don't end at the physical look or choice of weaponry, either. Each class has their own set of unique defenses they can construct.
The Apprentice can mostly construct magical towers to damage foes from a distance.
The Squire has a few barricade type options, along with a harpoon turret and a cannonball turret.
The Huntress has a variety of traps that can be placed on the floor and triggered when an enemy is in proximity.
The Monk doesn't get any real buildings but can instead set an area with an aura, damaging or debilitating foes or healing up friendly heroes.

Squire Mythor Inspects The Defenses

Each class also gets a self heal spell and a couple of other abilities you won't really use much since you're saving your mana for defenses, repairs and upgrades!

Dropping from enemies and treasure chests is a variety of loot for your hero. Different weaponry and armour with better or worse statistics and skill modifiers. Fairly standard RPG stuff, though the armour you find isn't shown on your character in any way. Weapons vary wildly in appearance and sometimes even in their basic functionality - the Huntress' crossbow can be replaced with a rapidfire minigun or a single shot dragon fire launcher... thing.
Each character has eight skills they can assign points to when they reach a new level. There's the basic "more health" and "more damage" skills but also options to fortify the health of your defenses, cause them to do more damage or affect a larger area. It's not something where you can "ruin" a character by not putting the points in the "right" spots, and there is a respec option available, but the benefits of investing heavily in a certain area are obvious. A Squire who's spent a lot of their skill points in increasing their health will be very tough indeed while one who has focused on increasing the health of their constructed barricades will have an easy time keeping monsters safely at a distance.

All of these skills and defenses aid you in preventing the various monsters from reaching your "Eternia Crystal", which the lore tells you contains the souls of ancient demons and releasing them would be bad. Or something.

Good job, loser.

Defend the crystal or it's game over, you're not going to care beyond that!

Certain maps start with a series of progressively tougher enemies and you simply need to survive the final wave to move on. Others see you survive the final wave and then the game will throw a boss fight at you.
And these aren't your average tower defense boss fights, where it's just a tougher version of an existing foe. Dungeon Defenders has a flying demon, a giant dragon that can roast you alive and probably other beasties I've not even seen yet. Even for an appropriately tough group the boss fights can take a significant amount of time and will likely result in more than one death in the party.
Fortunately, death just means losing your mana reserves and having to wait for a respawn timer!
If that's not enough for you then the game also has assorted "Challenge" modes, where you're given a specific restriction such as "No Towers" and must prevail. You can also set up a map in "Survival" mode - the enemies will just keep coming, forever, in tougher and tougher forms, until they break through your defense and destroy your crystal.

Dead. Again.

But wait, there's more! You can play the game with up to three other people, all defending the same crystal or crystals, all capable of constructing their defenses and attacking the waves of enemies that come pouring through the gates. This can make life a lot easier for you.

When those other people aren't gobbling up all the mana to build defenses in stupid places. Or pinching all the good loot. Or using the voice chat system in a manner most unbecoming.
Or, if you've joined someone else's game, just plain kicking you out for Stupid Reason X.

And when you do get a game with other folks, hopefully it won't be laggy or randomly decide to disconnect you from the host, or...

Dungeon Defenders is certainly not without its issues, but the depth and replayability present exceeds that of much bigger name games and all at a fraction of the price, a mere $15 from Steam.
Dungeon Defenders is simply a must have. I don't know why you're even still reading this instead of buying the darn thing already.

But at long last Dungeon Siege III (DS3) was unleashed upon the world this year. It wasn't developed by Gas Powered Games, it wasn't going to be as party-based as the previous two titles, the skill system wasn't going to be freeform anymore and it wasn't going to be a PC exclusive - perhaps the most egregious of all the changes, in some circles. Obsidian Entertainment have brought a lot of changes to the formula for their version of Dungeon Siege.

Fortunately, some things never change.

The Kingdom of Ehb is once again in turmoil. A civil war has broken out and the 10th Legion, long a stabilising force in the region, has been all but destroyed. A handful of legionnaires have managed to avoid the slaughter of their comrades and now seek to reform the 10th Legion, establish alliances and put an end to the designs of Jeyne Kessynder, architect of the original massacre of the Legion thirty years ago.

This, of course, is where the player comes in. Taking on the role of one of four descendants of the 10th Legion you're heading towards a meeting of other legionnaires and supporters at the Montbarron Estate as the game starts. But by the time you arrive the mercenary forces of Jeyne Kessynder have already slaughtered everyone and set the mansion ablaze. Probably should've spent a bit less time faffing about learning how to control your character and move the camera around during the tutorial phase but there's no helping that now.

Katarina in almost-sensible armour.

Advancing through the mansion searching for survivors, clues and the first pieces of precious loot you're introduced to more of the game's systems. In the previous games you would click on an enemy and your character would attack them autonomously. If you had a melee weapon equipped, melee attacks would be used. Ranged weapons would result in a ranged attack and picking a spell would have your character use that to attack enemies or help other members of the party. As you used each kind of attack you'd gradually improve the corresponding skills and attributes.

Dungeon Siege III has (mostly) done away with this system. Each character has two stances, one suited to fighting single targets and one suited to fighting multiple opponents, regardless of whether the attack is melee, ranged or magical in nature.
Katarina, the character I chose for my initial playthrough, has a rifle for her single target attacks and dual wields a pistol and a short shotgun for her group fighting stance. The rifle's default attack is a single, long range shot. This single shot can be chained into a combo 3 shots long, with Katarina taking one shot, shifting stance for her second shot and giving a Terminator-esque twirl to reload while stepping back for the third. In this way you can keep firing while slowly moving back away from your target.
Katarina's group fighting stance is much more of a short range blast, hitting everything in front of her, out to a few metres.

Rounding out the basics of the combat system, all characters have the ability to perform an evasive roll to avoid damage. Not just reduce damage, or only avoid projectiles if you time it right, during the evasion your character is completely invulnerable, which trivialises some of the "traps" later in the game.
Evasive rolls are all well and good for a character that focuses on ranged attacks but the melee characters aren't left out. Players can also block attacks, though any damage taken will drain Focus, the power pool all the characters use to fuel their special abilities and attacks, rather than subtracting from Health.

Unlike previous iterations you're not stuck making the same basic attack for the entire game. Each character gets a total of nine activated skills, unlocked gradually as you advance in levels. Three skills are available while in your single opponent stance, three more in your group stance and the final three are defensive or buff skills, able to be activated in either stance and providing a self heal, damage buff or other effect.

Adding extra interest to the skill system is the ability to slot each with additional traits. A skill that boosts damage could be traited to also return health, or a single target attack could be altered to occasionally strike more enemies or just hit harder in general. Each skill has a choice of two traits to build on and players can choose to max out on one or the other or go for a mixture of the two.

Any game with a shield smash skill is alright by me.

In a small nod to the past each skill also has a Mastery rating, which increases as you use the skill during the game. Once you've used a skill enough times you gain access to an empowered version. A healing ability might heal the entire party or an attack might become much more lethal.
A great idea that falls somewhat flat as you need to use each skill a great many times to unlock each Empowered version. From start to finish in my time with Katarina I unlocked just two empowered skills, with one only getting done via a concerted effort to use the base skill more often than was really necessary. It may have been better to tie the unlocking of ability traits to the Mastery progress bar as well, rather than having players gain a trait point per level.

Another thorn in the side of the combat system is the evasive dodge and block abilities being triggered by the same button. Hold a direction while pressing the button and you'll dodge. Stand still, you block.
But when you do an evasive roll you come out facing in the direction of your roll, which is almost always the exact opposite of facing your enemies. So, naturally, you push the thumbstick to turn your character the right way... and often end up rolling right back into the spot you just vacated.
Similarly with block you will want to change the direction your character is facing, whether to prepare to attack an enemy or to align your block more accurately. Suddenly you're rolling off to the side of the fight, or rolling right into the path of whatever you were preparing to block.
Playing a ranged character was a blessing since it meant relying on dodging more than blocking. A dodge in the wrong direction is easily rectified by immediately dodging again, as well as opening plenty of space between you and your enemies. Trying to play the game as the melee-centric Lucas is sometimes an exercise in frustration.

Of course it's not a Dungeon Siege title without pack mule loads of loot. And even though there's no pack mule to carry it around for you this time, the quantity of loot to be found is impressive, though the visual variety is sometimes a little disappointing. Katarina wields a rifle as her primary weapon and it's always a rifle, never a crossbow or regular bow. There might be small differences in the physical model but as you spend most of the game zoomed out to see as much of the battlefield as possible, this is rarely something you will notice.
More likely to be noticed are the various armours you can equip, with much greater visual changes between the various sets of armour.

One has Queen in the name. Dilemma solved!

Everyone knows that juggling item statistics is where the fun begins and DS3 has a goodly selection of magical and mundane modifiers available for the items you find. There's the expected boosts to statistics like Health and Focus, armour and block values. But the game also offers up a set of "Chaos" modifiers, which can add frost, fire, lightning or poison damage. Some even act to decrease an enemies defense or offense and the ever coveted life leech.
The amusingly named "Doom" statistic is a little less exciting than it sounds - a simple boost to the damage done when an attack is a critical hit. A welcome boost, to be sure, and another factor to consider when choosing between various items.

Also making a return from earlier versions is the Transmute ability. In previous games, Transmute was a spell you could cast on items on the ground to instantly turn them into some gold. This let you turn junk directly into gold when you would otherwise simply discard it to make way for more valuable loot.
In DS3 you need not find the spell scroll to cast Transmute, it's just an option in the Items menu. This is great when you only want to do away with a single item but when you want to get rid of a bunch of junk at once it involves a lot more pressing of buttons and twiddling of the control stick than should be necessary, due to the game always asking if you're sure and always defaulting to the negative.
And returns of a single gold coin per item are annoyingly common. Even late in the game, when even the rubbish items ought to sell to vendors for a hundred gold or more you're still stuck transmuting for a pittance or hoping a vendor is coming up soon.

What happens when you don't use Transmute?

For a series better known for its action, looting and dungeon crawling the big surprise is how many conversations you take part in. Very reminiscent of the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series from Bioware you're often presented with a variety of responses to NPCs, some of which have serious consequences. More than one conversation could end in the death of another character, including the ultimate fate of Jeyne Kessynder, leader of the opposition forces.
Not every dialog ends with such a dire outcome. In the latter stages of the game in particular there are some genuinely funny conversations that are really not crucial to the storyline but a welcome diversion from the constant pressure of saving the Kingdom.

The latter stages of the game are also where the story starts to get really interesting, which is an odd way of going about things but makes persevering that much more rewarding. Not everything is as black and white as you have been led to believe in the early stages and it makes the choices in the latter parts of the game a lot tougher.
While it's not the best, most enthralling story ever told and the voice acting occasionally leaves a bit to be desired it's certainly an unexpected - but welcome - addition to the series.

SCIENCE!

Overall Dungeon Siege III is a marked departure from what made the series great. The only real connection to the previous games is the setting and the title. Other games have gone this route and ended in disaster, so the trepidation surrounding DS3 was understandable.
But if you can get past the slightly clumsy controls there's a lot of fun to be found here, if you're into crawling through dungeons and looting up a storm.

And yeah, the game does support multiplayer. Technically. Apparently only the person hosting the game gets to save any of their character's progress, loot, gold and so on. Whoever thought that was acceptable in a world where Diablo II exists clearly has no business in game design. Everyone should simply consider this a singleplayer-only affair as the game comes off a lot better if you pretend the multiplayer was never tacked on to begin with.

For a while now the game has had "Unusual" hats available. Obtainable only through opening mysterious crates - using a key that costs $2.49 - these Unusual hats are blessed with cosmetic effects, such as confetti falling from the brim, a swirling holographic Team Fortress logo or unearthly glows in a variety of colours, among many other neat effects.
But the chances of finding one of those Unusual hats has always been quite low, with the chance of a regular version of a hat not being much better. Couple that with a general reluctance of players to spend even more money on a game they've already paid for and the mysterious crates are not as enticing as they once were.

And so now mysterious crates can be unlocked to reveal... "Strange" Weapons.

Fortunately these aren't dolled up with particle effects, as are their Unusual Hat cousins.

Instead, the "Strange" version of any given weapon looks and performs identically to the regular version but with the addition of a Kill Counter in the item information. Each time you kill an enemy player with that weapon the counter will increment by one. As the count reaches certain predetermined numbers the weapon will update its name.

So you may start out with a "Strange Shotgun" and once you've recorded 10 kills with the gun it will update to a "Unremarkable Shotgun". Score 25 kills in total and it will become a "Scarcely Lethal Shotgun" and so on up the ranks.

It's a completely cosmetic change - the effectiveness of the weapon never changes, nor do any bonuses or maluses attached to the weapon. But as you attain each milestone with a weapon it will announce the update to the entire server. Which is a bit of extra fun.

The benefits here for Valve are fairly obvious - people will need to buy keys to unlock the crates to get more base level Strange Weapons. More keys sold means more money for Valve!
And by having the items announce their milestones on the server they naturally spark conversations between players wondering how they, too, can have an item like that. Increasing the chance people will go ahead and buy a key.

The players of Team Fortress 2 benefit from this a little less obviously. Assuming you discount the "cool factor" of a fun new mechanic in the game.

First and foremost, people are going to have a reason to use weapons they may not ordinarily choose. The first Strange Weapon I found was a Soldier's "Direct Hit" rocket launcher, my least favourite of his weapons because I am simply terrible at using it.
But because I could "level up" that launcher, I was giving it another chance. And I even found myself coming to like it... from time to time.
People who do not ordinarily play Scout might choose to give it a shot when they unlock a crate and find a Strange Scattergun inside, or someone might swap to Pyro when the team needs one, just so they can try that Strange Backburner they just uncrated.

Someone might use the Heavy's Brass Beast for a reason other than not knowing any better.

Secondly, and a little less obviously, if Valve sell more items, be they keys or hats or anything else, Valve are obviously going to be motivated to create more new items for players to collect and kill each other with.

And it's that new stream of revenue from an old game that has made things like the Uber Update possible. Very few FPS titles have such a strong following this long after initial release and Valve's continued support has played a large part in Team Fortress 2's continued success.

So when you see someone's Strange Weapon update come up on the screen you can see it as "another way Valve is ruining the game" or even "another cash grab by Valve" but in the end the reason you're still playing the game is because Valve have continued to support it so well.

So just shut up and play the game. It's supposed to be fun, remember? :-)

You start the game in a helicopter, flying to who knows where in the middle of the night. As you're about to rappel out of the chopper it gets shot down and just before your face hits the ground the game fades to black and takes things back to... six months prior to the chopper. Do I die in six months? Is that actually someone else entirely? Not Epic Beard Guy from the trailers, surely he can't be dead? Anyway...

Now you're watching the Earth from way up high! Oooh, pretty lights. And there goes a plane. And the camera moves down further and eventually you see a Predator drone, which you then see through the camera of as it tracks two trucks along a road in some desolate looking country. Do I get to blow up a truck with a Predator drone? Already?

No, now I get to sit in one of those trucks, driving through the night. And my viewpoint is locked in place so I have to look wherever the game tells me to look. Well, okay, it's a bit dark but I can admire the scenery for a bit. It's not like I loaded this to actually play or anything.

There's chatter about Tariq. Tariq's our target. We've got to go get Tariq. Some informants told us Tariq is here. These dudes at the roadblock are Tariq's men and they sold him out. So let's go kill Tariq! Tier 1, woooo!

No, wait, first we have more driving to do. Though now it's through streets of some vaguely Middle Eastern looking and run down town. And I still can't look at whatever I want...

This on-rails feeling is something I should have gotten used to as when our trucks are inevitably ambushed and I am finally allowed out of the straitjacket of the "cinematic" intro... It's still very much on-rails as you move down corridors from one set piece to the next.

Fight off the initial attackers. Move up. Fight off some more attackers. Move up. Toss a grenade. Move up. Vault over a convenient barricade. Keep moving.

Get to a 6-7 foot wall my companion climbs up with ease, wait around below till I can hit F to have companion lift me up.

I'm not a Tier 1 operator but I can sure as hell clamber up and over a six foot wall.

Anyway. Move up. Shoot some more dudes. Move up. Shoot some more dudes. Move up. Get helped up another wall. Cover the other two dudes. Move up. Cover the other two dudes while they move up.

Then we finally find the door behind which Tariq is waiting for us. Fuck yeah, lets bust this door down and smoke this guy!

Hey... Tariq? Buddy? You're not looking so good. Tied up to a chair with some bullet holes and whatnot. How are we going to rescue you now...

Yeah, that's right. We're supposed to be rescuing him. Not killing him. Good to know, thanks for that.

Also, it's not actually Tariq. It's some other poor sap. Who looks like he might be dead, though it's hard to say.

His body/corpse is rigged with an explosive though, so if he wasn't dead before he's very dead after we kick him off the balcony to avoid the explosion.

So, no Tariq? Time for more moving up, shooting bad guys, moving up, shooting bad guys, flanking the heavy MG, shooting bad guys, move up?

Bet your sweet ass it is!

Bugger it. I've no idea why we're doing what we're doing and I don't care. I didn't even feel bad when I accidentally shot that "Mother" guy in the back because he's just some bland military guy being tough and efficient and... military-y.

Also, at one point, it told me to right-click to use "iron sights". My M4 came equipped with a red dot sight...

And if you think that was boring to read, well, it was even more boring to play. Thus it has been uninstalled in record time!

(I just said on Twitter that I wasn't going to do this... but consistency is for custards and creams and such. So I did.)

Shit happens. I didn't lose any money and a quick round of updating records made sure the important bills (INTERNET!!!) would get paid with my replacement card. No drama here!

At least, no drama until recently. I started getting emails from Microsoft telling me that my Gold membership couldn't be automatically renewed as the credit card funding it had been rejected. I didn't think much of it at the time since I haven't touched my XBOX much since finishing Fable 3.

I thought, quite reasonably, that since Microsoft couldn't charge me for Gold they would revert me to Silver and that'd be an end to it.

Oh, how silly I am.

It seems that when Microsoft can't charge you for an auto renewal they will try again. Which seems sensible. And a third time, which is still pretty fair.

But then they'll just keep on trying and telling you it's failing and trying and telling you it's failing...

Still no big deal, right? They'll give up after X attempts and all will be just fine. They'll revert me to Silver and I won't care because I don't need Gold right now anyway.

Well, no. At some point some system in Microsoft twigs that you've not paid for your Gold membership and so your account becomes S... Suspended?

Son of a bitch!

It used to be that you could click a button on the website to switch autorenewal off, but that went away during one of the site "upgrades". These days you have to call them up on the telephone to cancel it. Which is no mean feat in itself - out of a dozen attempts I only got through to an actual human once, today, finally.

After muddling through an explanation of what I wanted done and a very long time on hold - presumably while a manager was consulted - I was told that my account will remain suspended until I settle the outstanding Gold membership fee.

So, if I want to get back to Silver membership, the guaranteed basic free level of XBOX Live, I have to cough up the $79.95 (Australian) Microsoft were trying to charge for my yearly renewal. Even though I don't want it and have not received any benefit from the Gold membership in the time period I was in arrears.

Oh, but if I do pay the amount? Then the autorenewal will be cancelled and when my membership expires next time it won't try and charge me again. Or so they say...

Sigh.

Lesson learned. If you paid for your Gold membership with a credit/debit card and you want to cancel the membership or your card becomes invalid for any reason, you must call XBOX Support before it comes up for renewal. Else you find yourself, like me, in the land of Suspended Accounts and Unexpected Bills.

Homefront's singleplayer campaign takes place as the western half of America has been occupied for a few years by an army from North Korea. The living conditions for the average American are pretty grim. Either they eke out a living on their own among the shattered remnants of their cities, or more likely they are conscripted into forced labour crews, toiling endlessly for the occupying forces.

As the game gets underway this seems to be the fate that has found you. You've been rounded up by the Korean People's Army - the KPA or "norks" - along with some other poor unfortunates and shepherded onto a converted school bus. It emerges that this group consists of people with some level of flight experience, with the assumption you're to be put to work. After some "re-education", of course.
As the bus winds through the streets of a shattered American town you look out to see KPA troops harassing civilians, arresting them in some instances, beating them with boots and rifle butts in others. As one runs away from the troops he is, quite casually, shot in the back of the head, leaving a wet splatter of blood on the window ahead of you.

If that's a little too grim for you, this is the point you should stop playing. Because the game goes to much darker places than this before the end.

As you might reasonably expect from the setting you are fairly quickly conscripted by the local militia in their efforts to fight back against the occupying army. If you wanted to fight this war on the Korean side you're out of luck.

Hello. Why is the bus upside-down?

If you've played other recent FPS titles set in the modern era you'll have a fair idea of what is expected of you in Homefront. Someone who is physically with you or in radio contact will tell you what needs doing or who needs killing and you're expected to follow those instructions, with varying degrees of punctuality being required.
Simple "move here" objectives will often have no time limit attached, giving you time to explore your immediate vicinity for collectable newspapers that fill in the backstory of the game.
At other times a "move here" objective, like moving to and boarding a truck, must be acted upon within seconds or you will fail and have to retry from the last checkpoint.

Fortunately those checkpoints are frequent and conveniently placed.

Body armour that covers the belly? That's so 2010.

Death often comes quite unexpectedly in Homefront, too, forcing more checkpoint restarts. The game features the now-ubiquitous on-screen warning indicator for grenades, letting you know that an enemy has lobbed an explosive ball of death in your general vicinity. This gives you time to find cover or otherwise move outside the blast radius.
At least, that's the theory. Unfortunately the AI in Homefront is unnervingly accurate with its grenade tosses, often leaving you with little to no time to get safely away. And then there's the inexplicably inconsistent damage the grenades inflict, should you be unfortunate enough not to make it clear of the blast. Sometimes you can stand virtually on top of a grenade and not suffer a fatal amount of damage yet at other times you can be uninjured and almost outside the blast radius and be instantly killed.

Subtle nods to the past never go out of style.

If you decide to try flanking an enemy in certain sections of the game you will find it's a very useful tactic. Try it again two minutes later and you get shot in the head by a sniper, forcing another trip back to the previous checkpoint.
Occasionally you'll be called to paint a target with a laser to set up a precision strike. Often this is a simple task you can do from some nearby cover. Sometimes you will need to run out into the middle of a firefight to make it happen as weird sightline issues prevent you from getting a lock on your target. Expect to die a few times due to that little gem.

All this dying might give the impression that the game is unrelentingly difficult, but the reality is far simpler - Homefront's singleplayer campaign is very brief.
Even a casual FPS gamer should not have any trouble getting through the entire story in under 5 hours on the default difficulty. More experienced gamers should expect it to last around 3 hours from start to finish.
All the unfair deaths and failure situations seem designed solely to disguise the unprecedented shortness of the campaign. Even the Call of Duty series, long criticised for the brevity of the singleplayer experience, wisely stick to average play times above the 5 hour mark.

What Homefront lacks in longevity it more than makes up for in clever pacing and tightly woven action.
You're never asked to eliminate some air defences for some fighter jocks you'll never meet to blow up something you'll never see. If you need to blow up a SAM site it's so you can safely escape in the helicopter you're planning to hijack. You don't sit in a belltower with a sniper rifle picking off hapless minions because they're there, you're picking off specific targets for your friends to sneak through enemy lines.

None of the objectives ever feel like they're just padding. You're not facing off against wave after wave of enemies for a specific length of time. If you're tasked with defending someone or something it's more likely to be for twenty to thirty seconds rather than two to three minutes of firing a minigun into the hapless hordes of cannon fodder.

Other than being extraordinarily brief and tightly tied together, the Homefront singleplayer experience is much the same as other recent FPS titles. There's the requisite "stealthy" section, a part where you have to fly an aircraft, a bit where you get to use a sniper rifle and a bunch of moving from cover to cover, gunning down whoever gets in the way.
Enemy AI ranges from competent to a little too good, ensuring you're rarely in situations where you can simply abuse the AI's shortcomings to succeed.

Can't I just fight the entire North Korean Army instead?

The singleplayer does have one issue that is likely to frustrate most everyone at some point. In certain missions you're told to follow your companions to the next waypoint. If you're a good little rebel soldier and follow right on their heels you will often get to the waypoint at almost the same time as your companions.
Your companions will then stand there staring blankly at you while you try and discover what you're supposed to do next. It seems the "Continue" trigger is set a bit before the waypoint location and if you cross it before the NPCs are ready for you, nothing will happen. You'll need to run back a short distance and re-approach them to get things moving again.
Not gamebreaking but it does happen often enough that you begin to wonder what the game's testers were doing.

But where Kaos Studios and THQ are obviously hoping to hit the jackpot is in the multiplayer portion of the game.

Homefront's multiplayer offering includes the regulation Team Deathmatch and what they're calling Ground Control, which is very similar to Frontlines' standard multiplayer mode.
In Ground Control there are three locations on the map that your team has to capture and hold. Locations are captured automatically when a player is within about 15 metres of the goal. The more allies capturing a point at once, the faster the process goes. If even a single enemy player gets within capture range it becomes a contested - unable to be captured - point until one side or the other no longer has anyone in range.
Each location a team controls fills a victory meter just above the minimap. Once a team's meter is completely filled they are awarded a point and the game shifts the capture locations to another area.
The first team to get to two victory points wins the match.

That's all fairly straightforward and probably familiar to many.
Where Homefront differentiates itself is in the addition of a Battle Commander, which can be enabled for either Team Deathmatch or Ground Control.
The Battle Commander is an AI that is not allied with either team. Instead it sits on the sidelines rewarding players who are doing well - with extra armour, health, a personal motion sensor and other goodies - while simultaneously putting prices on the heads of those players who're racking up the points. If you kill 3 people in a row without dying yourself you might be rewarded with a flak jacket... and find yourself under the gun from two enemy players who're alerted to your success and given a marker displaying your general location.

So if you're slaughtering the opposition from the comfort of your attack helicopter then you're not only going to have to deal with people who're annoyed at being killed by you but also their team mates hunting you for the big Battle Point bounty on your head.

Battle Points are the in-game currency of the game, another area where Homefront is setting itself apart from the competition. In other games if you want an RPG to fire at a tank you would have to swap to a kit loadout that includes an RPG.
In Homefront you can spend some of your accrued Battle Points and instantly buy an RPG. Or instantly purchase a flak jacket, or a recon drone, or an attack drone, or call in a Hellfire strike.

Or, when respawning, you could choose to spend your points on a Humvee, tank or helicopter of your very own. There's no fighting over who gets to drive or fly in Homefront as when you purchase a vehicle you're automatically in the driver's seat. Team mates can then choose to spawn into the secondary seat on your vehicle, taking control of a secondary turret.

Battle Points reset between maps so everyone is much more likely to spend them on an RPG if it's needed or a drone to harass the enemy. And you're never left behind the curve by higher level players constantly respawning in tanks while you can't even afford a recon drone. Everyone starts with the same number of Battle Points and earns them according to their performance.

In between rounds there's a decent amount of customisation on offer for your soldier's kit. You can choose your primary weapon from among a handful of assault rifles, machine guns and sniper rifles. Many of the guns feature an assortment of optional attachments like optical sights, silencers, underbarrel shotguns or grenade launchers and all of the guns are able to be painted with various camouflage patterns.
The attachments are unlocked by reaching certain milestones in your kill count with the weapon in question. So your M4 Rifle will start out as a standard rifle with regular sights until you've achieved 5 kills with it. At that point you unlock some of the holographic scopes and can attach one to your rifle, vastly improving your ability to hit targets at longer ranges.

And you'll want to be hitting things at longer ranges when you can. Infantry in Homefront are extremely fragile. One or two bursts from most of the automatic weapons is enough to put people down and two body shots from a sniper rifle - or one headshot - is also enough to kill someone.
Like most other modern shooters you do have regenerating health, however with so few bullets being required to put you out of the fight it's rare you're given the opportunity to seek cover after being shot.

While both the KPA and USA teams have identical kit, in practice the differences in style between players and teams matter more than having the extra variety of side specific weaponry.
It's a little harder to excuse the paucity of primary weapons on offer. Six assault rifles, two light machine guns, two sub machine guns and two sniper rifles. Though until you advance in levels you won't even have half so many options.

The "Perks" system from the Call of Duty series also makes an appearance in your soldier's customisation screen. There's the expected faster reload speed, better melee knife and some drone boosting perks for those who use them.
Kaos have also extended the perks system to the vehicles, letting you choose a larger gas tank, faster turret turn speeds, more armour and so on. You don't get to tinker with most of these until you've been playing multiplayer for quite a while but it's another twiddly knob you can tweak to suit your own personal tastes.

But all the twiddly knobs can't save the multiplayer side of the game from some really basic shortcomings, particularly compared to the competition.

Everyone knows it's a tedious job testing a map to find every last spot where players can get stuck or can't traverse as they would expect. But the number of tiny steps a player cannot walk over, or invisible blocks in the terrain, is quite unacceptable. Particularly when some of those invisible blocks in the terrain prevent bullets reaching their target... or cause rockets to explode in one's face, despite an apparently unimpeded path.

Speaking of bullets not reaching their targets, between now and 2025 someone is going to invent bulletproof white picket fences. And bulletproof gyprock. And bulletproof tarps used as makeshift windows. And bulletproof chainlink fences...
There is zero bullet or explosive penetration in Homefront. Shrubs and tall grass are about the only things that don't offer protection from bullets. Doesn't matter what gun you're firing at a piece of sheet metal with, your enemy is completely safe behind it. Even a tank shell won't do anything beyond rattle their teeth a little.
Five years ago this would have been expected and unremarkable. Since then we've had the Call of Duty series introduce the concept and the Battlefield series take it a step further, allowing the destruction of buildings that would previously have been impregnable fortresses.
For Homefront to so completely ignore this is a shame.

The most disappointing part of Homefront's multiplayer is not entirely Kaos' fault, however. 95% of the dedicated servers currently online for the PC version of the game aren't running with the Battle Commander enabled. One of the major areas in which Homefront is doing something different to everyone else and most people playing the game aren't even seeing it. While this is down to the various server providers not switching the option on, Kaos has to take some responsibility for not pushing it harder.

These problems are not unfixable though. With some extra work by Kaos and some pointed nudging by the community to their preferred server providers, Homefront could be a solid third entrant in the field.

As it stands the game is difficult to recommend at the $70-80 THQ is asking in Australia. The singleplayer portion of the game is simply too short, despite being enjoyable while it lasts. The multiplayer is fun for a few hours but lacking in longevity with a small array of maps. With most of the servers not utilising the Battle Commander system there's little to recommend it over the technically superior Battlefield: Bad Company 2 or the much more popular Call of Duty: Black Ops.
With some prompt attention from the developers Homefront has potential. If they allow the problems to linger too long, as they did with Frontlines: Fuel of War, the game is destined for the scrap heap like so many pretenders before it.

Score: 67%

Rift is the latest of these dalliances and while there's definitely some similarities to other MMOs, it's got enough original concepts to be interesting.

But that's not what I'm here on my blog to talk about. Not at all.

Many MMOs have been recording who was the first player to achieve certain goals in the game or the first to find certain items. Ordinarily I am not someone who ever finds any of these things because I'm either coming into the game late or just not playing it 18 hours a day, as it seems some people will do during the launch of a new MMO.

Until the other day, when I was the first to find... Err, some "rare" bow that really wasn't that useful to my Warrior. But it was announced to everyone that I found it first, which was pretty cool!

What was even cooler was the way in which I found the bow.

A few days prior to my discovery I had stumbled across a Travelling Vendor, Buckley, out in the middle of nowhere in particular. I thought it a little odd and decided to see what he had for sale. I managed to pick up a much nicer shield and some other item I've since forgotten or replaced. All in all, a nice little discovery. I wondered if I'd run into the guy again later, or one of his friends in another zone.

Then, while riding back to town to turn in some quests, a portal opened beside the road. I stopped my mount and waited to see what would happen next.

Out strolled Buckley the Travelling Vendor!

He hailed me and said he recognises an item he sold to me, is it serving me well, etc? Then says he has another stash of items nearby and he'd be happy to offer a discount to his best customer.

So I follow along after him, sort of expecting a trap or a quest or maybe just some new shinies to buy.

We get to where his stash is supposed to be and - surprise! - it's gone. Buckley scurries back and forth trying to work out where it's gone and then requests my patience while he tries to locate his items.

He starts casting some kind of spell, which I figure is the prelude to him finding the treasure and sending me on a quest to retrieve it. I had nothing better to do at the time so I was curious to see where this was leading.

Then suddenly Buckley the Travelling Vendor is gone and in his place is Buckley the Travelling Vendor big-freaking-troll-ogre-thing, who immediately tries to eat me. :-D

After a bit of a battle I emerge victorious, of course, and get to loot him. He had a ring named after him and the rare bow I was the first to find, plus some cash. Score!

Turns out he'll randomly reappear when you're riding through the Gloamwood, both in the "It's a trap!" mode and as a vendor you can buy some random goodies from. So it's a dynamic and repeatable sort of "mini quest".

But that first time is definitely the most fun. :-)