So, on a more serious note (meaning something other than just the goings on of my life), why do so many games seem to do the same thing, and why do so many people clamor for them to do the same thing when they originally don't. This is especially prevalent in the MMORPG realm, though it also happens all the time in single-player games. I ask this question after recently watching the review of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune by Yahtzee over at Escapist Magazine. Honestly, I love his reviews, and more often than not, he's basically said almost exactly what I was thinking about a particular game. So, to sum up (in case you don't have 5 minutes to spare), the game does nothing new, instead just follows the current gaming trend of what's popular and trying to include everything but the kitchen sink (though that may be in there as well, who knows?) But I'm not going to focus on single-player games, since once they're made, they're pretty much static.

I don't have the most MMO experience out there. It basically boils down to Final Fantasy XI, Lineage II, Dungeons and Dragons Online, and Hellgate: London, in that order. Lineage II honestly didn't really appeal to me, so my time playing is limited. I never played World of Warcraft, and even though it seems all my friends do and talk about nothing but, I just never felt the need to play. But, I have heard a lot about it, enough to know that it includes so many things that people love to waste time doing. I think I wasted enough time playing FFXI before I finally got tired of having to spend 5+ hours just to get the chance to do something worthwhile (leveling, trying to get an item to drop, whatever). So I started to play DDO. It's pretty far removed from current MMOs, meaning that there isn't a crafting skill option, everything is instance-based, and there is very little travel to be done between quests. All in all, there isn't much in the way of time sinks to be had, whihc fits me just fine. But you get the interactions of other people, and suddenly they want the game to have some crafting system that you can spend hundreds of hours losing money to get a crafting skill up, and they want long travel times between quests. It seems like they want WoWDDO, with tons of things to waste time on. I've heard the exact same things about Hellgate: London. In both cases, people want a number of things that add very little actual play value to the game, but keeps you playing longer because now it takes time to do something.

Is it so wrong to have a MMO that doesn't require large amounts of time to do something? Are you really getting value for your money if a 20 minute quest takes 40 minutes to get there? Should that really count as an hour of gameplay, or is that 20 minutes of gameplay with 40 minutes of wasted time? Honestly, when I play DDO and run out of content I feel like playing at any given point, do you know what I do? I stop playing that and do something else. Maybe play a different video game. I still feel that I get enjoyment out of the game, enough to keep playing. But just because I'm paying a monthly fee doesn't mean that I feel I should always be playing the game. Let a game be unique and try new things. Maybe you'll even find one that breaks the mold and is really enjoyable exactly because it's not WoW

So this weekend I had company come and visit me. The strange thing about this is that these people drove almost 7 hours to come and visit, and yet we spent much of the time playing video games. Oddly, that's normally the exact same thing we all do when I go down to their place to see them. There was much Rock Band being played, which is always fun. I still can't seem to break out past Medium on the drums. My coordination between two hands and a foot just isn't there yet. So, now my friend is waiting for Rock Band to come out on the Wii, but until that comes out, I guess he can content himself with No More Heroes, which he ended up buying.

It's a pretty fun game, with some incredibly over-the-top scenes of anime-like graphic violence. I think some of the boss fights are a little annoying, but overall it was pretty entertaining. I also got him playing Super Mario Galaxies, whihc he didn't think he'd enjoy playing, since he didn't like Super Mario 64. Needless to say, I think he and his wife will be enjoying playing that one. Of course, now I really want to play it, but I have no Wii. I really need to fix that, and I try, but I swear that thing is just about like vaporware. Either that or people that find them just buy all of them to sell on E-Bay, those &*#$@es. You know those people. They're the same ones that list it as coming with 5 games, as if Wii Sports is really 5 different games, or acting like the 9 games that come as Wii Play are completely separate. Anyway, not going to rant on about them, or the Wii... but I could.

So I ended up spending the entire weekend messing around building a concrete canoe. It involved many long hours, and much lack of sleep. So now I'm tired, and I want to go to sleep, but I can't right now, because I'm at school.

In other news, I did enjoy getting to play Rock Band a little this weekend. When I say a little, I mean about 4 hours longer than I had planned on it. There's just something about playing the drums that I really enjoy. Other than that, my gaming news is rather slim. I did update a number of the games I have. I guess the next stage is going through all my PS2 games. Joy of joys.