Strange days in gaming.

By: Charles Spurr | December 18th, 2009

I know I haven’t been much for expanding my gaming repertoire in the last few years, but since when has a game being good or bad been the fault of the player? It seems counter-intuitive to  me to suggest that a game is good and that the only reason people dislike it is because they are somehow prejudiced against it. However, in this article I see exactly that as Tony Hawk suggests that the reason anyone would think ill of the latest title bearing his name is a simple case of deciding to hate it ahead of time. Now, while I’m sure there are some game reviewers that may have received a copy to review, does he really think that accounts for people who actually purchased the title? In my experience, most people don’t go drop that kind of cash on something they don’t think is going to be worth buying. Mind you, I haven’t actually played RIDE. As such, I can make no claim about it’s awesomeness or lack thereof. All I’m saying is that Tony Hawk presents the most ridiculous argument to defend a product that I’ve seen in a while. If I were to hazard a guess as to why it may be that he thinks the game is awesome while many in the gaming community disagree, it would likely be that there aren’t many pro skateboarders in the gaming community. Many of us are at least a little out of shape and not exactly the most coordinated or balanced individuals. So asking theses people to stand on a plastic board and start doing some kind of sick stunt is probably a little unreasonable. Again, I haven’t experienced it for myself, though it’s unlikely that I ever will unless someone I know makes that purchase and invites me to try.

In other (also old) news, I’ve found out that Blizzard has released patch 1.13 on the public test realm for Diablo II (yes, as in 2). Details of the patch can be found in this posting by one of the devs. I’m going to go out on a limb with this one and say that anyone who has been playing Diablo II (and its expansion) for the last decade isn’t terribly likely to be anticipating some minor bug fixes and class balancing more than, say, Diablo III. Yes, the patch is free and finally fixes that item dupe issue that I’m sure has been keeping people up at night, but are there really that many people who hadn’t just learned to live with it by this point? Isn’t the new, shiny game what consumers really want from a software company? Perhaps the people over at 3D Realms should release a patch for Duke Nukem 3D to fix any minor bugs and balance the weapons a bit better instead of finishing Duke Nukem Forever (ok, even I had to take a minute to stop laughing about that). As an outsider, it just seems to me that Blizzard would be better served by getting a new product on the market than spending time and effort tuning one that I can’t imagine is really pulling in that much revenue for them anymore.