Justin Calvert Associate Editor

Now Playing: Pro Evolution Soccer 3 (PS2), Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 (Xbox), Advance Wars 2 (GBA), C&C: Generals Zero Hour (PC) Awaiting My Attention: Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (GBA), Freedom Fighters (PS2), Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (Xbox), Soul Calibur II (PS2)

Looking for a GameSpotting Heading?

Despite what most of you probably think, the fact that I work for GameSpot doesn't mean that I get all of the games I want to play sent to me for free. A lot of the games I devote my limited spare time to playing are those that I've made the effort to go into town and purchase, and, as I mentioned in a previous GameSpotting article, the fact that my spare time is so limited nowadays has made me extremely picky when it comes to deciding which games I'm going to make time for.

These oil refineries would perform the same function no matter where they were on the map.

You might think that because I don't have as much time as I'd like to play games right now that I favor games that are relatively short, but in actual fact, the opposite is true. Games that I can complete in a weekend or even in a single sitting don't appeal to me nearly as much as those that I can really sink my teeth into and enjoy playing for weeks or even months. For this reason, I'm increasingly finding myself drawn to multiplayer games that, while having the potential to keep me entertained for months on end, don't necessarily require me to invest a great deal of time in a single sitting. Pro Evolution Soccer 3 and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2004 are firm favorites for my friends and me at the moment, and when I'm home alone I invariably go online in search of a Command & Conquer: Generals Zero Hour skirmish.

I could have sworn that gun was here the last time I looked...

Not all multiplayer games appeal to me, of course, and I think what most attracts me to Zero Hour (and sports games to a slightly lesser extent) is that I know I'll never play the same game twice. That said, I think that the one feature that the majority of games could benefit from, no matter what their genre, is the addition of a random map/level/circuit generator. I have no problem with losing at any game if the players I'm up against are clearly better than me, but I really don't enjoy being at a disadvantage in a game just because I've gone to the trouble of downloading a map for it that I'm not yet familiar with. A randomly created Generals map, for example, would ensure that players weren't able to capture oil refineries and the like until they'd successfully managed to locate them--and making the locations of enemy bases a little less obvious wouldn't hurt either. Another favorite online game of mine (still) is the original Half-Life, and, after who knows how many years of playing it, I've recently made a habit of joining games that are running maps I've never heard of before. Apart from adding a number of pretty poor map files to my collection, the result is that I often find myself at a disadvantage against players who know their way around.

Worms World Party--the daddy of random map generators.

Despite how brilliantly Team 17's Worms games have always made use of random maps, I realize that implementing a similar feature in games like Generals and Half-Life would be a little more difficult. So, for any developers reading this, I'd like to suggest that upcoming games, or perhaps even patches for those that I've mentioned, could incorporate a feature whereby even if the maps themselves aren't randomly generated, perhaps the locations of weapons, health packs, resources, oil refineries, and the like could be. Even if the random placement of these key items were restricted to a number of predetermined locations on a map, the fact that players would no longer be able to get them without first looking for them would, in my opinion, help to keep multiplayer games interesting and also place newbies at slightly less of a disadvantage. I refuse to believe that such a feature would be incredibly difficult to implement, and if you're worried that fans might not approve, why not include it as an option that can be switched on and off?