Just beat Batman, Arkham Asylum. What a game. I know I was late to play it, but was it ever worth the wait. They did everything right: free DLC, no glitches, great polish...I'll need to write a review here sometime soon.

I just received a $5 credit towards my GameFly account, so I'm thinking "oh goody, now I can buy one of the many great games of 2009 on the cheap". My assupmtion was that the relatively decent library of new and used games would be available to me. How wrong I was. There are 16 total PS3 games available for sale (all but 1 a full $60, most of them released within the last 6 months) and only 2 available for the Wii. Of course, there are like 50 for the 360, but I don't own that yet. What the hell? Taking $5 off a $60 game won't even cover taxes and shipping. The other beef I have with gamefly is that my top 8 games are all PS3 games, all with medium to high availability. So imagine my consternation when the next game to arrive wasa PS2 game that I had planned to take off the list anyway. Previously I had planned to cancel my Gamefly membership because the odds were the I would be living abroad for a long time. Now I'm planning to cancel because the service just sucks.

And how about that iPad, eh? Just a great big iPod Touch without a camera. It's going to be so cool when I don't buy it. Apple had managed to pique my interest with their tablet, but when I see no real innovation, my interest plummets. This reeks of a rush job to compete with the Kindle and the Nook, both of which sell for half of what the iPad will. If I'm ever to buy a tablet, it needs to do more than the iPod Touch and a Kindle combined. The problem with the whole tablet concept is that the logistics don't make sense. Even the smallest tablet is too big to be a phone, so you still need a phone. I think that phones, not tablets, are still the way forward. The iPhone was a huge step in the right direction, and kudos to Apple for that great device (I don't own one...yet). However, the next step is a fully functional, but miniaturized, OS. I'm actually more excited to see what the next generation or twoof iPhones and Blackberries will be able to do.

http://www.joystiq.com/2010/01/20/rumorang-elder-scrolls-mmo-three-years-into-development/

Isure hope the above rumor is false. There are many reasons that TES will fail as an MMO. Let me enumerate them for you as I wait in the airport:

1) User generated content will be destroyed. There's no way they can have a game that is playable by all the teeming masses at once as well as be mod-capable. If the devs at Bethesda don't realize that this is why Morrowind and Oblivion were so popular, then they are blind.

2) The Final Fantasy lesson. FFXI may have fared well enough money-wise, though not as well as hoped, but was it really worth it? Thankfully Square returned to their roots. Does Bethesda really need to re-learn the lesson?

3) Cost to value. Bethesda fans expect to get more than they pay for. With a subscription based MMO, you will have already paid the normal $60 by the 4th month or so, with no end in sight. That relates to...

4) Story. Morrowind and Oblivion took you through a clear main quest with hundreds of side quests. If the aim of the developer is to keep you paying month after month, what incentive do they have to write a decent story with a satisfying conclusion? None!

5) Market saturation. World of Warcraft has a stranglehold on the MMORPG market. They are very good at what they do and have a loyal fanbase. I can't see anybody having the ability to break that any time soon.

6) Sub-par graphics. To make it accessible to the masses, it will need to be playable by the masses. Hence, the graphics will need to be kept at a lower level that makes it so more people can play it. Look at the graphics of WoW versus Fallout III.

7) Console incompatibility. How many MMOs are there on the consoles? Going once, going twice...

I'll admit I was one of the people who wanted some multiplayer action in Oblivion. You know, hook up online with a couple of good friends and go questing. However, I did not ever want to play with everyone.

**update**

though my reasons above still stand, since writing them I have read a little more into the situation. it could very well be that the MMO is a side project of Zenimax, with Bethesda as developmental consultants. I sure hope that is the truth and that a true TES V is on the way.

It looks like my brief membership with GameFly may be near an end. I may be going away on a long-term European assignment and, among other things I will have to sacrifice, GameFly would have to be cancelled. I asked their customer service if they would do a temporary account suspension, but they do not I can cancel and then reactivate later, but then I lose the progress I've made on my account.

So knowing that my gamefly membership is probably drawing to a close, I tried to make the best of it this weekend. I blazed through CoD: World at War. It was really good, but I'm just not too big a fan of the run-n-gun games. For example, I really enjoyed the pace of Resistance, in which you set your own pace, but I did not like the pace of Resistance II because of the run-n-gun pace. Still, it was good and satisfying.

I also started playing WET, mostly because I worship Bethesda, but it isn't that great. It's like Devil May Cry dressed up as Kill Bill with a little of the VATS system splashed in for good measure. It is supposedly a short game, so I'll probably finish it, but it isn't really gripping.

I also beat Overlord II yesterday. Lots of fun, and I like the new innovations (few that they are), but it ended with a cliffhanger and seemed much shorter than the first Overlord.

Off to Missouri tomorrow. Maybe hop into OK and KS just to say I've been there.