DC Universe and monthly subscriptions.

DC Universe

Personally I’ve been really looking forward to this game and i was going to get it until i saw you have to pay a subscription for it and I’ve done this before for a pc game but never for a console game. Sure there is nothing saying consoles should be able to charge a subscription to play but, i find it a bit wrong. Like I’ve played the game MAG and its been out a year now 256 players in one game to me that’s nearly making it a MMOFPS and so far they have always supported it and is now on patch 2.10, to me that’s pretty impressive and this is all free. DC Universe on the other hand is a lot more is charging a subscription of £10 or £9.99 for to play online. Now both these games are online only and I assume that DC Universe will be getting the same amount of support or more than MAG. I personally don’t understand where this £10 is going to. Sure it’s going to be supported but, why is that subscription based yet MAG is free. What makes it okay? 

DC universe is a MMORPG sure it needs big servers to support the game but £10? That’s more than World of Warcraft. It seems kind of cheeky to make a game that’s just come out more expensive than one of the best selling games of all time subscription wise.

Put it this way. The game cost around £30 then you have to pay £10 a month after wards. You get the first month free to play, so that’s £140 the first year to play just one game.  You could buy like 3 or 4 other games for that price. I just find it a bit messed up in the games industry that they are having this problem of people not buying enough games and yet they are spend more time on one game by making it subscription base and its making other companies lose money. Surely this money fest is going to cause so much more problems in the future for gaming. Like what if all companies start charging to play online? Is that fair? Either way it’s going to cause people to stay on the same game more or it’s going to cause people to stop buying games. Either way I don’t see this as a good thing at all for gaming. Like it’s going to be harder for new developers to make games and get peoples attentions if they are already subscribed to other games. To me if this happens I feel it could put a crash in the games industry which I don’t think anyone wants.

Reviews blog

Reviewing games is really a funny sort of business to get in to it has the people who love to write about games then there is the people who do it for the money. Both have their good and bad points about them both. Personally i think you should be a reviewer of games if you love writing and playing them, money shouldn’t be your main motivation for doing a job. An Big issue with reviewers for magazines is that that a magazine company has 19 or so days to do there magazine before its put in to print. This like many other companies like developers of games, makes it very fast paced to review and game same with developing a game it can leave games feeling incomplete and buggy. In this case with reviewers it can lead to them missing out point of the game and having to rush through it and not be shown the full potential of the game. Leaving games with low scores and disappointed developers because it can lead the game to not being sold as well as it could have been. But it’s not all the reviewers fault its the time limit they are given to review the game. Sure they can be unfair and biased about many things they could be a fan of the series and there for give it a high score than it should deserve. Like the EA Fifa games personally I don’t like the like series. I feel every year the game produces the same thing with little tweaks each game. This would probably cause me to be a little biased about the game and give it a lower mark that it actually deserves.

Also this raises the question of what do you base a game of to rate it? Graphics? /Gameplay?/ Fun? This can really hurt a game a lot because of reviewers. Like a FPS, if an FPS doesn’t have a Multiplayer should it be rated lower? Just for not having a feature others games have? Personally I don’t think it should I don’t think every game should be the same. If a developer decides to do something different with a game should they be scorned upon for this rating system for it? If a Developer wanted to make a game old school and have this really long campaign to it instead of this short campaign and huge multiplayer like most FPS games are doing lately then I think they should be supported for it.

I think when I do my own writing and reviewing a game I think I’ve very subjective to what I write and review. When I like watch trailer for a game i subject it to.. Does it look good? Does it look interesting?  To be honest I think I’m subjective about a lot of games. Like I’ll be a game for a feature that i like about it and not the whole game.  Like the game Brink for example I love the idea of being able to free run in an FPS that sounds cool and that’s why I want it. I’m only subjecting it to that feature and not the actual objective of the full game.

Personal gaming history

I think my first ever game i remember playing was either oddworld or Tomb raider on the Playstation 1. My family decided to get one for Christmas so the family could have two TV and do two different things at the same time instead of the constant moaning of what to watch on TV. It was create having a Playstation 1, for the first time in my life I could feel connected to something that wasn’t really or in my head it was just these virtual polygon worlds that pulled you in. All I can really remember about playing Oddworld was the silly little farts Abe use to do and how a lot of the levels end up with Abe running for his life I really did love that game. With tomb raider what got me addicted was being able to play as this adventurous woman who could kick ass and shot stuff. As a kid growing up there was a lot of enjoyment to playing Tomb Raider, but a lot of the time it ended with frustration of having  Lara croft fall to her death many many times. Which lead to me never completing the game.

I had many other games on the Playstation 1 like final fantasy 7, spider, and croc. Eventually thought i ended up getting a Playstation 2 as I enjoyed the first console so much. One of the first games I had for that was Ratchet and clank. I really did love the story of the first game. I think the characters of a robot being friends with this mechanic that’s a creature (?) really did sell this game for me. It’s a shame the rest of them seems to be the same. It’s the same with the Tony Hawk’s series after awhile I got bored with it because they are all the same basically.  Even though the Xbox and Game cube was out at the same time as the Playstation 2, I had played all the Consoles but never really felt bonded to them as much as I did with my Playstation consoles.  Maybe it was me being arrogant and not giving them much of a chance, I don’t know.

The Playstation 3 is probably the main reason what made me want to do game art because the games I kept playing just kept inspiring me. Like:

Resistance fall of man

Motorstorm

Assassins Creed

Uncharted

Grand theft auto

Battlefield bad company

Socom

Resistance and Motorstorm was some of the first games that came out for the PS3 When I first played them they blew me away on graphics on what this generation of gaming is all about. The gameplay to these games were there but, the graphics to me is what sold it for me. 

With uncharted and Assassins creed it’s the story that has drove me in to these series and that fact that you could climb these buildings and seem these beautiful landscapes around these worlds. It really showed off to me these art sides to the games. 

Grand theft auto I played the first, London, 3, Vice city, and San Andreas and now number 4 but This game I think changed gaming history for a lot of games it created the Sandbox genre where you can explore these open worlds and to me I found that amazing being able to go where I want and how I want like being able to steal cars and planes and boats and stuff really did make me love this series. 

Socom Confrontation is the only game I’ve played of the series and it’s the most challenging game I’ve ever played. It’s an online only third person tactical shooter. Basically you have 8 rounds and only 1 life per round it and added a scene of protecting your like instead of running and gunning like most FPS games. I wouldn’t say it caused camping, it just made plays have and objective like save the hostages and you had to check each corner as a team and watch peoples back. It really did change my views of online gaming and team work.

Battlefield bad company is the only FPS I actually love to bits. The campaign isn’t too series it has its funny jokes and the main selling point to me on this game is you can blow stuff up.  I can’t stress enough on how fun it is on BFBC 1 and 2 how fun it is to see some player online behind a window or wall and being able to pick out a rocket launcher or something explosive and blowing the hell out of the wall and the player. There is such a good satisfaction about blowing stuff up to me that makes me love this game.