Capcom = Rapists

July 31st is the death of whatever innocence gaming had left in it.

Why such a specific date, you ask? I'm glad you did. Now be quiet.

You see, July 31st is the day that Capcom releases its big DLC for the substandard fighting game Street Fighter x Tekken.

Now don't get me wrong, I've played the game and it isn't so bad. It's Street Fighter IV with Tekken characters and a decent tag system. My first problem with the game was that it is horribly overpriced, clocking in at full tag for a game that has less content than a better fighter, like the recently revived Mortal Kombat.

But gaming prices have always been the subject of debate since the very first time my mom bought me an n64 game. But at least back then you got the full monkey for what you slapped down on the counter. Nowadays DLC has given the industry a “Don't worry about finishing it, we can add it later for a bigger profit” mentality that personally sickens me. Games are more advanced now, I agree. No argument there.

But why release a game that isn't finished? There is a difference between DLC should be and what it is.

What it should be – adding content for a game that has been out for years to give players new reasons to go back.

What it is – releasing already finished content later to make more money.

As much I dislike paying DLC for a game that was probably held back specifically to be released later on for a better profit, I can at least understand and appreciate the sentiment. Is it a lousy way to do business? Absolutely. This is a business though, and you have to get ahead somehow.

Nature of the beast.

And at least they put it in later, right? Maybe it really wasn't finished and there were bugs. Maybe they added even more content to an already planned addition. Maybe, in some rare cases, it really IS brand new content that had been completed after the game shipped. In our heart of hearts, we certainly like to believe that.

And then there is Capcom, the whore bastard of the gaming industry. You can hate EA and Activision all you want, Lord knows I do sometimes, but Capcom is the single most biggest dick in the entire industry.

Remember when Resident Evil 5 shipped with day one DLC? That should have been a damn sign. We all forgave it, begrudgingly, because the game was pretty good. Well this is what happens when you let someone get away with something, because by letting Capcom into your home you just gave them permission to rape your family and eat your pizza.

You may have heard that Street Fighter x Tekken shipped with the DLC included on the disc. That's right, the DLC was shipped LOCKED ON THE DISC. All of it, every fighter and every costume, is already on the disc and ready to play. They're making you pay extra money just to unlock it. And if that isn't bad enough, they delayed releasing it for months! Content that is already finished and on the disc!!!

Now you can Google this and listen to their bullshit reasoning behind it. I'm sure a lot of people will, and they will buy the DLC anyway. You are literally giving Capcom permission to have sex with your children, and personally, I don't have any kids. But if I did I wouldn't want Capcom touching them inappropriately just so I could play as chick Ryu.

I will not buy Resident Evil 6. I will not buy any more Capcom games. I hardly ever cut a company off completely, hell I still shop at Gamestop after they canned me, but this is ridiculous. Do not feed the machine, people! 

DLC started as a great concept and companies like Capcom have turned it into the Boogeyman under the bed. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

This is how the end of the world starts.

Long live the new flesh.

A Promise to Keep pt. 2

I went into Gamestop (Boo!) to simply buy the Final Fantasy 1 and 2 combo for the GBA when one of their workers more or less forced me to buy WoW instead. I didn't want to get wrapped up in another online game with an increasingly hefty monthly fee so I was reluctant, but I did enjoy the RTS series and the lore so I decided to give it a try.

Let me just say that I only played Everquest briefly and did not enjoy my time there. I  considered myself an Ultima guy and the whole 3D look of the world threw me off with its terrible pixelation and hilariously bad character art. The concept of “fetch quests” and “kill X amount of X” was pretty new to me, and the quests seemed well thought out and connected to the world. I had an insane amount of fun with the game and played for many years off and on. I even convinced my now fiancee to play it and she joined me for many a quest.

The graphics had charm, the gameplay was solid, and the community was vast for better or worse. The accusation is thrown around a lot, but it really did take ideas from other games and polished the hell out of them. I've never enjoyed a by the numbers theme park MMO like I did World of Warcraft. I'm still on the fence about buying the Mists expansion though, as I'm not sure I have any Azeroth left in me at this point.

As for my promise, it doesn't count as an MMO purchase if its just an expansion, right?!

I hung up my adventuring boots for good when I lost my interest in WoW. Sure, others have come and gone. I've played everything from the cheapest of indie games to the then unheard of free to play Asian titles, all the way to almost every big budget release that has been put out. I've enjoyed the atmosphere but I've never been hooked like I was in my younger days.

And then the realization hit me that I am getting older, and all this time I thought I was searching for the next big thing when in reality I was trying to reclaim the nostalgia of a time when this was all new to me. They make improvements in the industry every so often, like the Old Republics story or Tera's fast paced combat. But there is always something out of whack or disjointed that I used to believe was because the developers weren't trying hard enough and it wasn't as good as it used to be.

It will never be as good as it used to be.

No amount of changes will give me the same feelings of joy I had when I was a teenager, sailing across the waters of Sosaria with my guild as a horizon of new experiences waited before us. I'll never have the same kind of smile as I did the first time I saw my first Jedi on Tatooine. Dungeon runs will never be as sweet as they were the first time I took my darling into the Deadmines and tried to teach her how to take down Van Cleef.

Enjoy what you have, gamers. Look for the beauty in it and cherish the good stuff, because it will eventually end and you'll find yourself a bitter junkie looking for that one last great fix that does not exist.

As for me, I'll pick up my blade one more time on August 28th. I'd like to think that this will be the one to recapture the magic, but if not, I hope to at least shed a little blood on my way out of this crazy lifestyle we call MMORPG gaming.

After all, a promise is a promise.

A Promise to Keep pt. 1

I knew this day would come eventually.

Guild Wars 2 finally has a release date, and it's a very hot August 28th.

This is fantastic news as I've been watching and waiting for this game very patiently since I first caught wind of it years ago. But with that sense of excitement comes a feeling of dread as I now have to own up to a promise I made to myself and my fiancee.

You see, as an MMORPG addict who is certainly no spring chicken now, I decided to give up my passion once and for all. Guild Wars 2 would be my final hurrah in the world of persistent online gaming, and I swore to myself and my beloved that I would follow through with my decision.

I don't know why I made such a boast. Maybe I felt like it would take so long for the game to come out that I would get the MMO blood out of me before it hit shelves. Maybe years upon years of new releases had tainted whatever good will I had towards the entire genre. It's no secret that my love for the industry has definitely waned over the past few years especially.

Now this isn't the ramblings of some Johnny-come-lately noob with a couple of seasons under his belt. No sir-ee, I've put my time in on a scale I like to think is both grand and sad depending on your tolerance of nerd devotion. I've traveled through more alternate realities than the cast of Sliders.

Let me give you a brief history lesson and touch on what I like to call the “Big Three.”

My introduction to the world of MMORPG's was the first for a lot of my brethren, and it's a title that I still hold dear to my heart. Richard Garriott and his Ultima franchise wasn't new to me, I had played some of the single player titles on the Commodore 64, which happened to my first computer. I found them charming, but they never blew me away like they did so many others. I was more of a Nintendo player at the time, and spent more hours in games like Final Fantasy and Super Mario Brothers.

But one day a frequent visitor to the diner my mom worked at, the same one who sold us our C64, told me about Ultima Online. He described it as an honest to God second world where you could do pretty much anything you wanted. There were no levels, no stat bonuses on items, no quests and no dungeon raids.  You weren't just slaying monsters, you could be a lumberjack, or a blacksmith, or a damn fisherman if you wanted to be. The world was yours to explore and there were very little restrictions in what you could do

The game had so many possibilities it still boggles my mind how they got “it” so right back then and titles now somehow have less features.

I spent many a year in UO, and it was the most rewarding game experience I have ever had. I still remember the first log in screen and the haunting MIDI song that greeted you. I would ask other beings if they were real or NPCs because I couldn't tell the difference sometimes. I started as a simple fisherman, casting the waters of Britian and selling fish steaks to a local bartender. In retrospect it may sound a bit boring, but the concept of an online persistent world was new to me. It was one of those “you had to be there” type of things.

I hooked up with a guild, the Crusaders of the Soul, and they taught me the ins and outs of Sosaria. It really felt like a brotherhood, and it was a kinship I have yet to find in another game. I gave up my fishing rod and learned the art of magery, and years later when my time in the world came to an end I was a grandmaster mage with a lifetime of virtual memories.

Expansion after expansion came out for Ultima, and each time I felt like the world dwindled a bit. I knew the good times couldn't last forever, and the introduction of artifact items and stats killed my love of the game. So eventually I moved on to what became the second biggest addiction in my gaming life- Star Wars Galaxies.

This is what an MMO should be. You take a popular IP, you give people the freedom to live their life how they see fit, and watch the profit roll in. Star Wars is one of my biggest obsessions (a nerd who loves Star Wars, go figure amiright?) and Galaxies looked amazing.

Make no mistake, the game had its faults. It was clunky in some aspects, the animations looked a little odd, and the combat didn't exactly set the world on storm. The same could be said of UO, but none of that mattered. It was freakin' STAR WARS and I was in it!

Like in my previous title I started simple as a stylist before I moved on to being a pistoleer. My best friend went with combat from the beginning, and he also made the mistake of rolling a Wookie that he joined the Empire with. It was funny to me that he had to work harder than other Imperials because they didn't like aliens, so to them he was a second class citizen. But once he climbed the ranks he could spit on NPC officers and they would apologize to him!

Fantastic!

But me, I was a covert rebel, and we had a strange friendship where we would help each other even though we were supposed to be enemies. We fought the Tusken raiders, we built our houses, sometimes we just stared at the beauty of Naboo.

Then the Jump to Lightspeed expansion came out and I finally realized my dream of being an X-Wing pilot. It even mostly played like X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, so I found new use for my flight stick that had been collecting dust since I lost interest in Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Like Ultima though, the good times couldn't last forever. Sony decided to change the game completely in a slight fiasco you may have heard of. Gone was my hybrid of a stylist and pistoleer, and my love for the open world Star Wars experience.

By this time the number of MMORPG releases were starting to grow in size. I hopped from game to game, never quite settling my bones anywhere in particular. There was fun to be had, but it felt like the same kind of fun everywhere I went. Honorable mentions at this point go to Ragnarok Online, and Final Fantasy XI, as they were both fantastic games that kept my interest for more than a month.

But, like most MMO gamers, my next big thing was World of Warcraft.

Where does the time go?

I hadn't realized it'd been so long! I think it's time I started telling you how I felt again.

Baby, this time it's forever.

No Cute Titles. Instead - "AION, WTF is wrong with you?"

I'm enjoying Aion. Mostly. It's the flavor of the month, I know. It will never replace World of Warcraft as my main MMO. But, it's enjoyable.

The character creation is amazing. The graphics are great. It has a definite fantasy feel to it, with giant flying creatures overhead and glowy feelings of coolness. Combat, while fairly simple, isn't boring. It's very streamlined with few confusing features and a solid frame rate. The animations are good and the facial movements are convincing. All in all it's definitely a first rate publish.

So with all of this awesomeness, I can't help but wonder where the fuck did it go wrong?

The feelings of joy I experience upon logging in disappear so quickly. I'm bombarded with dozens of messages/whispers from gold spammers with names like "djdhs" and "asdfg." After scrolling through and blocking them one by one I have to deal with the other jackasses in the chat, and while some of them are actually nice and helpful, most are just plain A grade jackasses. This is by far the worst community I've seen in a P2P MMO. Is it because its new? Because its Eastern based? I have no idea. But it's annoying. Why people pay a monthly fee to a social game to be dicks I'll never understand.

And there are those gold spammers. Ridiculous. Name one other MMO where you log in and are just attacked, on every channel and every zone, by 6 or 7 spammers at a time. This is by far the most embarrassing thing I've ever seen in an online game, and I've played just about all of them.

Where are the GM's? I've never asked this question about an MMO before. I've dealt with glitches, bots, and jackasses before and never questioned the people who run it. But I can't ignore it this time. Logging into a super well done polished game and experiencing such rampant abuse is a slap in the face. You wouldn't know by looking at the sweet case in the store that you're going to play this kind of mess.

Aion has the chance to be a great game. It does! If they would just lower the requirements to fight in the Abyss (the main selling point of the game which you can't get to until 25) and, you know, ENFORCE THEIR RULES, this game would be a contender to Warcraft. But right now it isn't.

People can bitch about WoW, and believe me I do too, but I was riding through Northrend yesterday staring at the amazing zones they put together and thinking "where are these in other games?" It's epic. Where is the epicness?

I beg of you, Ultima Online. Steal new graphics from someone, anyone. Then I can die happy.

Switched up the ending on you there. But seriously, do it. And Aion....why aren't you WoW?