In a world with so many MMORPGs on the market, it can be tough to decide which games have actual content, and which are just meant to be profit machines for companies. The latter seems to be happening more often recently as companies fear to break the ‘be like World of Warcraft’ mold for fear of making no profit. This causes the market to turn into one bland, singular blob of mediocrity in our games. It’s for this very reason that this gamer in particular cannot recommend any new MMO releases this year. So what are we left to? Well not much.

Despite all that I’m about to say, I want to make it clear that I’ve played my share of MMORPGs (and still do.) I do not dislike them, I do however see many, many flaws in them. I would like to outline a few popular MMORPGs with established (or not so established in a few cases) playerbases so that you– the gamer- can decide what is worthwhile and what isn’t. The first thing this gamer can advise however, is to avoid any free or web bases MMO like the plague (you’re going to get exactly what you pay for.) So what’s good? What’s bad? What’s just plain laughable? Well it all depends on what you’re looking for. Let’s start out with the most popular and work our way around from there…
(continue reading…)

THQ should feel bad. Really bad. They had their act together with Dark Crusade– but Soulstorm just started bad. This coming from a huge fan of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000– I even made excuses for why Shadow of the Horned Rat is a really good game, and anyone familiar with that intolerable dog turd of a game should know that basically seals my fan boy status.

I’ll preface (can you be a paragraph in and still count it as a preface?) this by saying I am not an RTS guru. Hell, I’m not even much of a fan. I played Starcraft religiously in 1998 along with half the world, but I don’t think that counts. Soulstorm, though not technically an expansion as it is a stand alone game, when combined with the other parts of the Dawn of War franchise do not, as I first suspected, form the giant fighting robot Warhammeron. Instead, it forms an ungainly abomination with eight playable races.

Anyone familiar with the fine tuning of Starcraft should see where I’m going with this.
(continue reading…)