Burke's Joystick

I think one the greatest events in any gamer's life is that magical moment when he knows that he has discovered an original game universe, one that he intuitively knows he will be exploring and enjoying for a great many years to come.  Such moments are unfortunately uncommon.  Gaming is no different than other media, be it books, television, or movies: works of true genius are exceedingly rare, so such magical movements are few and far between.  For me, I've only had two such gaming moments: when I first discovered the fantastically grim military science fiction setting that is Warhammer 40K, and now that I have belatedly discovered the wonderful Shadowrun universe (thanks to Harebrained Schemes fantastic PC translation ). When I first heard about the Shadowrun setting I was not all that interested because it seemed like such a weird mash-up of differing genres....

Lately, I've been pretty harsh on the world of PC gaming, even to the point of labeling the industry as being  downright disreputable . I still stand behind those sentiments. And little, if anything, has changed in the intervening months. Things are still pretty rotten around these here parts, perhaps more so as we now can add disreputable indie developers - who hype projects, pocket lots of crowd-sourced cash, and ultimately release  mediocre  products - to the mix. It's all enough to make a man want to take up chess again....  Be that as it may, there is one aspect of the shameful record of modern gaming that I do feel I need to revisit in the interest of fairness, and that would be EA/DICE's Battlefield 4 . As I have pointed out time and again over the last few months (most notably  here  &  here , amongst other threads ), BF4 was a good poster child for everything that is ailing the modern games industry: it was a title that seemed to be...

Of course, there is another mecha game fast approaching on its stompy legs:  the much ballyhooed Titanfall from Respawn Entertainment.  This is already proving something of a lodestone in gaming as it pits the aggrieved team that formerly constituted Infinity Ward - the geniuses who reinvented the first person shooter with their world famous Call of Duty franchise - against their old bosses at Activision who fired them out of alleged avarice.  So we definitely have a lot of emotional baggage in play with this title.  But Titanfall is also drawing a lot of attention for another reason:  it promises to repeat the success of CoD by reinventing a very stale shooter genre yet again.  Will the devs catch lightning in a bottle for a second time? Did I mention that I have about twelve hours in the beta so far?  Yeah.  Twelve hours in the Titanfall beta.  Sort of gives away the answer, doesn't it?

If you wear glasses, you are well aware that there is no worse feeling in the world than when your glasses break.  Unfortunately that is what happened to me two weeks ago.  They just snapped in half for no apparent reason.   The eyeglass shop I go to was kind enough to give me a lender set while mine were in the repair shop, but as anyone who wears glasses also knows, even a near identical set of frames adds enough variation to your prescription that it still takes a bit of time before your eyes adjust.  Hence the reason why I haven't been writing much. But now I am good to go.  Phew! Fortunately, it doesn't appear that I have missed much in terms of gaming news, especially political gaming news.  I guess this is a sign that gaming is definitely cooling off for longer and longer periods of time in the wake of the pre-Christmas rush.  Makes you wonder about the long term health of the hobby.... One story that did recently catch my eye is th...