Grrr… this is so retarded… It seems FPS’s for the PC are limited to laggy or buggy these days… it makes me want to shoot myself, but it probably won’t work because I’ll get thrown out of the lobby before it happens… or my gun animation won’t play properly and so I won’t shoot myself in the head correctly…

I just want a game that has decent everything, but I guess that’s too much to ask for, isn’t it?

On one hand, you have Modern Warfare 2 by Infinity Ward and ActivisionBlizzard. It’s a good game all round gameplay wise, with fairly well balanced and large list of weapons and killstreaks (except those fucking chopper gunners and pave lows… at least the AC130 takes skill!), lots of different gamemodes to keep things exciting, no bugs that would distract from gameplay or make you frustrated, and all round gives a fairly decent playing experience…

Or it would if it had dedicated servers to round it all off. No dedicated servers means hosting on home based connections which, frankly, are not designed or usually capable of supporting a server for 11 other players (especially in Australia with Asynchronous download and upload speeds, with the former being 4 to 8 times faster than the latter on average) means that over half the games you join are either going to be so laggy it makes you scream and pull out hair (Ashley and Martin’s should have seen a big influx of patrons after the release of MW2 ) or completely fall over because of some arbitrary reason, like the host just failing to load, which makes you wonder “WHY DIDN’T YOU PICK ME AS THE HOST! YOU FOOL, IWNET!”.

Then, on the other hand, you have Bad Company 2. The name of the game itself is representative of my views on Electronic Arts and DICE, the makers of the game and Battlefield series. While in the past I have regarded the Battlefield series with contempt for being bug ridden pieces of CRAP, I decided to give them a chance, see if they had changed their ways at all, and purchase Bad Company 2 (at the time, I was sick of IW’s matchmaking, so I was looking for a change… that change being some fucking dedicated server support! ).

On the surface, it has potential. It boasts big sprawling maps with infantry and vehicle warfare and squad based teamwork (which, by the way, is an awesome way to promote working with other players on your team… there are still noobs in the world, though, so it doesn’t work 100% D:), and an array of weapons and possible tactics and layouts. Sounds good, and their implementation of it works fairly well…

But, and it always seems to be the same thing with EA’s games (I totally should have seen it coming, but my guard was down), the game has so many minor bugs it makes me wonder what the fuck the QA department was doing over in the DICE studios. Running around in circles? Drawing dicks all over MW2’s cover? I can tell you now that whoever IS doing QA needs to be fired from their job and then pushed off Mount. Everest with a parachute made of waffles so they can feel both fear and despair at the same time for wasting my time and money. Oh, sure, there’s nothing gameplay wise that seems to be broken, but I could not immerse myself in the single player story well enough because I’d keep encountering bugs. Oh, look, my gun is still making a firing noise while I’m reloading. Oh, look again, I can see underneath this skidmark (how the fuck was that done incorrectly?). Oh, look some more, even though my chopper died and everyone else on board should be dead, they’re still talking about landing the damn thing. What the fuck!

And I can’t even enjoy the multiplayer part of the game properly because of their very very VERY poorly coded server browser. If my family were programmers, I’d be saying my grandma could do a much better job… but unfortunately they aren’t, so I can’t. The poor filtering system allows me to find NO servers whenever I have ANY filters applied. I can’t find any Australian specific servers, like GameArena or 3FL or any shit like that, using the server browser. Oh, sure, I can add the favourites in by opening up GameSettings.ini and putting them under a certain key, but if you were about to say that, you’re missing the point. And that is I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO DO THAT JUST TO PLAY A FUCKING GAME! D:!!

Screw it, I’m going to go play some Portal…

Tags: activisionblizzard, dice, die in a fire, electronic arts, infinity ward