My family had an Atari 2600 before I was born with stuff like Pacman and Frogger, but my first system that was actually mine and actually the first system I had played (despite having it in the house I never had touched the Atari apparently) was the Nintendo Entertainment System.

First game was Super Mario Bros. Then Duck Hunt.

My father bought me the NES when it started having the Mario/Duck Hunt combo when I was 3 and I've been playing games ever since.

I hate the absence of bots in current games.

I absolutely loathe the absense of split-screen gameplay in current games.

It did start with the slow removal of bots from various games due to the Internet, which seemingly has given rise to the idea in developers to start removing split screen multiplayer. Look no further than to stuff like Motorstorm (and now seemingly Burnout Paradise). Why pray tell can you not play with a friend next to you?

Why on earth are you not allowed to play with friends anymore? Seriously. Sure, you may have an online buddy or an Internet pal, heck you may be lucky enough to have an actual friend who has the game too so you can actually play online together... I don't know about you, but I'd like to have my flesh and blood friend sitting right next to me.

Nothing was greater in Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat than turning and going "In yo face punk" after pulling off a great win. Stuff like NBA Jam was great for it too. Then of course you had the Goldeneye's and Perfect Dark's. Those were great for having friends or family over and just duking it out, or much better to my liking helping each other beat a game. Who doesn't have fond memories of taking on Red Falcon in Contra with a friend? Or whooping Shredder with your favourite Turtle combination? Even a couple of years ago with stuff like TimeSplitters and The Warriors.

What's even better though, especially as is the key thing with this thread in FPSs, bots?

Bots were awesome, especially in Perfect Dark. I played that game for hours on end by myself just playing with the bots. Add in some friends, and of course the bots, and you could have great times. But nowadays...

Meh to you! You don't have the Internet? Bah, tough luck.

I understand online is a big deal and a nice feature to have, but even at that only 40% of people with a 360 actually have Xbox Live. And that is considered at the high end. A lot of people with other systems don't even play online much if at all by comparison. A vast majority of people who play games don't even bother with online.

I guess I can deal with bots going absent, but it ultimately shortens down my desire to play the games. However I am not liking the removal of split screen from a lot of games. Offline multiplayer is dying for no justifiable reason.

My girlfriend and I have extraordinarily bad habits with buying games.

We actually got rid of about 60 games a couple of months ago that we never had intentions of getting around to.

We still have an inumerable amount of games to play through.

A big part of the problem is we have very wide ranging tastes and just about anything can look interesting. Add onto that some decent income and lack of other truly major hobbies (barring the occasional comic and of course movies at times) and no vices... We wind up buying just about whatever we think we'd have fun with.

But when you consider how limited time can be, we never do get around to games.

For example, I waited months and months for Rogue Galaxy to come out and we got it shortly after. Suffice to say, it's never even entered a Playstation. Heck, we picked up Metal Gear Acid 2 because I found the first one to be cool and while looking through our stuff the other day we noticed it was still in the damn shrink wrap.

Heck since getting all three current systems over the summer our PS2 and Gamecube games have gone by the wayside. We have had Metroid Prime for almost 3 years now and neither of us have gone past the first boss. But you can bet we have Metroid Prime 3 sitting about.... "We'll play it eventually" is a common phrase.

Heck with the 3 major systems out we just have no time to play anything... We're only now actually getting around to playing our Wii because our 360 died on us and was shipped off to be looked at. That doesn't even take into account our PSP and DSs.

Truthfully though, we've both come to accept that we actually buy some of them just to say we have them... Like earlier in the year I saw brand new non greatest hits copies of every important Square RPG for the Playstation (at least to me). So, yep bought them all up for a little over a hundred. I'll never likely get around to playing Chrono Cross, Final Fantasies IV-IX, Chrono Trigger, Xenogears or Vagrant Story, but it's just nice having them. My ten year old copy of FFVII doesn't feel so lonely anymore, hah.

It seems like a waste of money and effort, but I don't know... Some odd sort of enjoyment is derived from having them even if they'll likely never leave their case.

Albeit we've made the conscious decision that all our current stuff (namely PS3, 360 and Wii) must be played before anything else is purchased. So Brawl, GTAIV and LittleBigPlanet may be waiting a long time to be purchased...

^^^ Yeah, no...

Fallout.

Lots of Sci-Fi, and not a drop of magic.

XaosII

Because ^ that proves ya wrong.

I've avoided Sci-Fi RPGs over the years because of the over reliance on fantasy RPG standards. Why MUST their be magic or an equivelant there of? Same goes for all RPGs quite frankly. But with Sci-Fi RPGs it just seems like they're taking a fantasy RPG and slapping on a futuristic 'skin' to make it Sci-Fi. Sure, you can explain it away why it works all you want (parasitic creatures, the force, mass effect, etc.) but it all comes down to the same thing, magic.

It's one of the reasons I loved FFVI up until near the mid part. Only a couple of characters had magical abilities, but the others had realistic skills to compensate for lack of the standard (like Edgar's tooks and Sabin's blitzes, etc.).

Ugh. Jeff said this. Jeff said that. Jeff this, Jeff that. Enough already for crying out loud.

As for your actual question...

It's up to you. It's a decent game that I had a fair bit of fun with. However, that was with my girlfriend. We played through it co-op in about 7 hours, of which I'd say an hour of that was doing other things. It was great fun together and very entertaining. The game lost of steam near the end and I actually hate the end sequence quite frankly.

A lotf of its so called problems come down to taste entirely which is completely subjective. Of it's problems that are factual, they were severely over exagerated.

It's a fairly standard third person shooter with a fairly interesting story that's over all too quickly and doesn't have too much to come back to. It's effectively Freedom Fighters 2, so if you ever played and liked the first one you'll probably like this. Problem is, it pretty much is Freedom Fighters as IO didn't do too much improvement on the formula and took some of the more interesting traits of that title out.

Nintendo.

Absolutely Nintendo. If not for Nintendo I do not know if I would have ever been into video games and quite frankly because of them I have had so much fun in my life.

Namely first party games, primarily from EAD. Mario, Metroid, Zelda, etc. These are the games I think of when people mention Video games, and with good reason. A special mention goes to Hal Laboratories for stuff like Kirby, Earthbound and now Smash Bros.

Second would likely go to Square Soft. I have had so many friggin memories with their games it almost rivals Nintendo. Final Fantasies, Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Secret of Mana, uhh... So much great stuff. With that said though, it does seem like since becoming part of Enix the Square side of things has been quite crappy with only two Final Fantasy games being of any worth (X-2 and XII). Oh well...

3rd place is Sony. Primarily their first party titles. Stuff from Incognito (pretty much formerly Singletrac), Naughty Dog with Insomniac (though not owned by Sony) providing some of the most fun I've had on the Playstation systems with stuff like Crash, Twisted Metal, Jak, Ratchet & Clank, Warhawk and Uncharted. Just great stuff.

4th would be a tie between Capcom and Konami for all the great stuff I've played over the years. Mega Man, Metal Gear, Resident Evil, Castlevania, Street Fighter, Ninja Turtles, etc.

I'd also like to mention Rare as a likely 5th place so to speak. Stuff like Goldeneye, Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, Banjo, Donkey Kong 64 and so on are all tremendous. Even their stuff in recent years hasn't been too shabby. They may only be good compared to their once greatness, but many of their games stand the tests of time.

And as an honourable mention, Ubisoft's internal studios are really starting to crank out great stuff in the past years with all the Tom Clancy stuff, Rayman and Prince of Persia.

Other companies may have one or two games to their name that I liked or enjoyed immensely, but the above mentioned have provided me with the most fun over the years.

I have on and off bouts of interest with PC games. Depends what is out. It's mostly due to growing up playing on consoles exclusively. I never received a PC until I was into my teens and at that it was a piece of junk that could barely play much of anything except stuff around 1998 (which sucked in 2001 when I had friends bragging about things out at the time).

I know with a console I'll get a set piece of hardware that will be standard for a set number of years, and subsequently companies will have to suck all they can out of it before going on to the next hardware.

PCs though are constantly changing. And it's not just your graphics card you must worry about. You'll wind up having to deal with increasing ram requirements, power supplies and mother boards. PC gaming isn't exactly as simple as changing one or two components. Most of the time you have to be on top of everything to get the best out of it, which admittedly I have no desire or patience to do.

And at that, PCs are notoriously expensive if you want the best. Yes, many PC game players can justify it, but I can't. Consoles are sold the way they are at a loss. I'm actually getting more for my money, but at that must sacrifice the ability to upgrade at all and am stuck with that 'configuration'. Which honestly is fine with me.

And it goes back to my original point, I grew up playing consoles. 2D action shooters and platformers are my bread. And now stuff like Uncharted and Ratchet & Clank are my butter. You can't really get that out of PCs. The best PC games wind up being western RPGs, MMOs, FPSs and strategy games. Of which I find I find one I love and stick to it.

When Maxis ushers out Spore and Relic ever gets around to developing Dawn of War 2 (or whatever it shall be called) and possibly a truly upgraded Sims 3, I'll likely upgrade to play them.

I'm not ashamed of any games I play (or anything for that matter).

I played an NES Barbie game as a kid, it was quite fun at that.

Being ashamed of something so trivial is a sign of immaturity.

It's probably Earthbound you're thinking of.

So having read that it's happened to not only myself, but others...

Does anyone know how many 360s have died right after downloading the update?

Because from what I've been reading this is getting a tad bit ridiculous, a bit too coincidental and just plain ugh...

Great update.