EVE and the Apple

Damn son, it's been a while and...not all that much has happened. In gaming news, I still don't care about Halo ODST, the Microsoft Surface (I'll probably talk about the surface at length however) or whatever the hell Sony thinks they're doing (landing planes by the looks of their latest foray into gimmicky motion control). Granted there are some things I am genuinely excited for, Left 4 Dead 2, DeadSpace Extraction, Assassin's Creed 2, Champions Online spring to mind.
Apple of course have released the latest flavor of iPhones, Macbooks, and operating systems, however I have an iPod Touch, iMac, and Leopard to do those things. (not to say that I'm not on awe of the newest capabilities of the iPhone.
Perhaps it's a sign of the, shall we say, drought of new actually good games, but I have found myself spending hour after hour playing the most boring game I can possibly think of, EVE online (or Spread-Sheet Commander as I call it), and actually enjoying every moment of it. If you don't know what EVE is, don't fret neither does anyone else, just look it up. To give you an idea of the absolutely riveting experiences I have been enjoying for the past week; my character, Scott Thaen, an aspiring entrepreneur turned asteroid miner has been learning such skills as Signature Analasys, Astrogeology, and Mining Laser operation. My days have been consumed by trade runs between asteroid belts rich in omber ore and the local refinery station. When I get enough omber ore from mining the asteroids,roughly 990m³, I take it to the station and, rather than refining it, sell it to some poor sap who is buying it for 15% higher than the regional average.
But I digress. For the most part, my time has been consumed anxiously awaiting my new speakers, a pair of KRK RP5 monitors. My current built-ins simply don't do DeadSpace justice.
Like I said earlier, this may be a sign of the sorry state of game development over the last few months. "But hold on a minute, X, and Y and Z, and the expansion to A¹ all came out for the PS3 exclusively" you may say to me. Even if I gave a shit about what comes out for the PS3, I'll be damned if any of those aforementioned mathematical terms were any good to play. Point being, back in the day (late 1990's) anyone with a computer and an ability to code and draw 2D sprites worth a damn had his own game company. Black Isle, Interplay, The Digital Village, the old (and good) Bungie, Core Design, Ambrosia Software. All of them made fantastic games and you get 10 internets if you can think of any games they made without resorting to Wikipedia, and no, baby's first FPS, Halo, doesn't count. All of the games that came out of that era seemed to be made for the fun of it, rather than to please the investors or the whiny, bitchy fanboys. These days however, game development has boiled down to a shadowy council of mega-corporations, EA games, Ubisoft, Activion-Blizzard, Atari, and 2K Games. They seem to oversee the last dregs of real game developers that harken back to the good 'ol days like Blizzard (pre-Activion Merger) and Valve Soft.
My point is that I'm getting sick of playing as Blood Slaughter, the "emotionally involving" Space Marine, or as Jimmy Cale, the "emotionally involving" good 'ol American hero, fighting those commy bastards, the Nazis in their doom fortresses. I'm not tired of playing as Faith the "emotionally one-sided" and running across buildings being chased by Johnny Law however, or as Gordon Freeman, the "emotionally anonymous" killing aliens in arguably one of the best video game stories ever. I suppose it's time I reach a point. What I'm saying is that I'm tired of playing games for the sake of playing games. Honestly I'd rather see a game take 2 years to complete and have Corporal Blood Slaughter be an emotionally involving character, especially when he has to choose how do brutalize his family. I realize that that my contradict what I've been saying for the past 3 paragraphs, but all that I see in the future are more cookie-cutter sequels to fairly generic FPSs' and variations to sudoku and mah jong from the indie crowd.

3's a crowd

Earlier today I was told that the 'starter' (read: cheap/shit) version of Windows 7 would limit the user to only 3 active applications at any time. My first reaction was "yeah, bullshit. I know Microsoft is that stupid, but they can't be that stupid". Microsoft, unfortunately, IS that stupid.
Right now I guarantee that you have at least 3 applications open. Personally, I have Safari (browser), iTunes (music), Preview (pictures). On my PC I usually have Steam, Windows Picture Viewer, Firefox open, and if I want to play a game for instance, I would be out of
luck.

This, kids is why we proofread our statements, especially when we're SELLING THEM.

Combine all of that with the estimated price of Windows 7 'Starter edition' of $85 and you get pissed off businesspeople. Microsoft has said that this is intended for netbooks and PC built on the cheap. On its face that seems like a fairly reasonable excuse until you think about the types of 'cosmopolitans' that own netbooks. Generally when observing the computer of somone sipping a soy latte one can find a word processor (for writing 'novels'), a web browser (for plagiarizing F. Scott Fitzgerald), a Picture Viewer (for copying the cover from 'The Great Gatsby' ) and of course Limewire (for pirating music) open on one's computer. Those who can count will realize that this is 4 applications and that one will have to go. Some would say "some people don't use limewire/iTunes and instead use iPods or (God forbid) Zunes; and in doing this they will not be using 4 applications...". My point still stands however when you consider the number of people who use Outlook. This being the case, I would steer most people away from this ripoff.