YourGamer.Net

Imagine, if you will, a long, empty stretch of sand desert. There’s nothing on the horizon. The land is utterly flat and featureless. But this isn’t just a normal emptiness. This is a malicious emptiness. A overbearingly, almost painfully frustrating lack of any feature of interest. The only thing one can do is set his sights on a faint glimmer spotted on the horizon and trudge forward, praying to find something interesting, praying that whatever he’s after is real, and, if it’s not a mirage, that it doesn’t suck ass. This is the predicament I now find myself in. I am a man on the edge. A man with nothing left to lose. A man…on dial-up.

Did you like that allegory? All poetical and thought provoking, right? Well, don’t expect any more shit like that. I’m not feeling particularly poetic at the moment. In fact, I’m feeling murderous. And that’s not normal. I’m one of those “Peace, Love, Unity” hippie types…and yet, at the moment, I want nothing more than to pack up some kitchen knives and stomp out to the corporate headquarters of a certain cable company that shall remain nameless. After over a year of hassling with their bullshit, and a few months without any services at all, I’m done. VOIP phone service? Gone. I hate talking on the phone 500 channels? Fuck that, I never watch TV anyways. 5MBPS interwebz…oh shit.

So here I sit, rocking my 56k new hotness. To be fair, I had built it up in my mind to be far worse than it really is. I can load a few pictures at the same time, at the very least, and text is like a breeze…oh god. Do you see what I’m reduced to? How am I supposed to live with this? And how, more importantly, am I supposed to game with this? You know, a lot of games these days don’t even support 56k, and the ones that do give me this little slap in the face on the side of their boxes:

Recommended: Cable/DSL Internet connection @ 256Kbps or higher

Required: 56Kbps Internet connection

You know what I call that? I call that a filthy lie. I’ve gone through my games to see what is “supported.” I went through all my Steam games. Counterstrike? Yarite, lol. How about some fun mods? Battlegrounds 2? N…no. Dystopia? Nope. The SHIP, FOR FUCK’S SAKE??? Nothing doing. On, then, to the MMO field. I loaded LOTRO, praying I could get back to hanging out with my Kinship, even though the game itself is…well, yeah. Guess what I get? 2 Gigs worth of patches from the last few months. Okay, save that for a later day, when I get really desperate. Finally, I turned to my old standby, Savage. Surely a game over four years old had to make allowances…the broadband revolution was only partway through back then! It starts up, looks fine, the server list is a bit slow but nothing awful. Connecting…connecting…

…800 ping.

So, I’m really in trouble now. I need something to keep in shape for whenever AT&T decides to provide DSL to my area. Therefore, it’s time for me to dig through my motley collection of single player games. HL2? Played and played and played. Fable? Played and Played and Played. Jade Empire…do you notice a pattern here? I haven’t bought a new single player game in a year or so, firstly because I think that paying 50-60 bucks for a game is obscene when the price just drops down in a couple of months, especially when there’s not the replayability that’s inherent in a MP focused title. Only games I’m REALLY psyched about do I pay that sort of premium for, and when I do, I usually just preorder. Otherwise, it’s the bargain bin for me. So, off I go to my friendly neighborhood Walmart, to sell my soul and morals for the low, low prices only a megamonopoly can provide me. Let me tell you, there is nothing to make your faith in the game industry plummet like looking through this graveyard of shit. And I do mean a graveyard of shit: it’s the place where shit buries shit that’s died. Think how that must smell. Dead shit. You know what dead shit smells like? It smells like Impossible Creatures, a 5 year old RTS from Relic and Microsoft Game Studios. Does anybody else remember anticipating this game? I was 14 at the time, so I didn’t know any better. It was a pretty cool idea: create your own units by splicing the genes of different species of animals, thereby creating unique models through the “army builder” and giving your units combinations of the abilities of each separate animal. You know what we got? I didn’t until a few days ago, because I actually decided to drop ten bucks on it. What we got is a broken Warcraft clone, with broken resource management, broken build orders, and the army builder, the main selling point of the game, implemented with about as much thought as a three year old child gives before sucking the sweet, sweet ink out of a permanent marker. The only thing I could think about the whole time I played (2 hours) was, “This is from the studio that gave us Homeworld and Company of Heroes.” Even the name sucks. I remember that the working title was “Sigma.” That was a cool name. Then they..well, I really don’t know what possessed them to change the name to something so stupid. I also don’t know why they felt the need to create a crappy 1930’s era backstory starring a hero named “Rex Chance” and a love interest named “Lucy Willing.” I get the impression that she’s an easy lay, though I’m not sure what led me to believe this. I also get the impression that Rex has a really tiny dick. There’s no other reason for him to have such a ridiculously pathetic attempt at a macho name. Call your hero Stringfellow Hawk next time, fuckers.

After rolling around in that cesspool for a while, Impossible Creatures became the very first game I have ever literally thrown away. Into the garbage can it went, right where it belonged. I felt cleansed. I felt enlightened. I felt as though there was new hope for me. Then I went to check my email and got treated to the musical saw orchestra of my modem while I waited for an hour to connect.

Somebody end this before the dial-up steals my soul. Oh, too late: I’m downloading flash games to keep myself occupied. Portal: The Flash Version is actually kind of fun.

…better than Impossible Creatures, anyways.