Well, it turns out that there is actually a way of emulating the XBOX360 controller for individual games and without overwriting system files. The Xinput controller emulator (with vibmod) simply translates direct input commands to xinput and makes any gamepad work seamlessly with XBOX360-supporting Games For Windows titles.

Sadly, while I got it working flawlessly, I could never get used to a gamepad in this title either. I mean come on. FPS game with grappling, parachuting, jumping, aiming, rolling and god knows what else all at the same time. My proficiency with a gamepad remains extremely low and I don’t foresee learning to use one any time soon.

Unfortunately the beta server has a tightly regulated uptime schedule. Just a few hours per week. Don’t know why. Perhaps because they monitor the game closely, for reasons of game testing or to keep the airwaves free of non-kiddie friendly language. Running a game like this must be several degrees more complicated compared to an adult title. I guess.

Addendum: I played the game some and I have to say that so far it has all the signs of a legendary turd. The interface is confusing (to an adult even). Missions and mission management are both awkward and uninspiring. Frame rates seem awful at times. Inventory management is a joke. The plot is weird or non-existent. Travelling from zone to zone is backwards as hell. And that is all besides the predictable glitches that you expect from a beta, but in this case take far too long to fix. The game is just evolving too slowly. What is their ETA anyway? Two years from now? Is it going to be free to play? If so, it’s alright. But charging money for this pile of crap seems downright criminal. I just don’t see how they’re going to salvage this unless they start working double-time. It’s a beta after all. Not some early alpha sketch. If it has fundamental flaws now it’ll never work.

In fact I’d go so far as to question the morality of making MMOs targeted at children. Especially if they’re this shallow and fraudulent.

The game is a lot like Grand Theft Auto and Red Faction Guerrilla in many ways. But unlike GTA this is fun to play. Something that GTA lost along the way. So, JC2 might have its flaws but in the current gaming climate it still is one of most innovative and remarkable games to come along in years. Repetitiveness and lack of finesse in some parts hampers the end result but for now, JC2 is king of the hill.

Also, kudos for keeping the game small when most games are 7 – 15 GB these days. Fast loading times and smooth graphics don’t exactly hurt either. And as an added bonus, the game was designed by Swedish developer Avalanche Studios.

The whole experience with the island hopping reminds me a lot of one of the first sandbox games ever released, Hunter. That was sheer brilliance back in the day.

One final word of warning though. The game seems to be heavily favouring Nvidia hardware. Too much to be a coincidence in fact. Could be another rigged game. Just saying.

Setting aside the fact that some aspects of the game felt somewhat shifty and that you only get to experience a fraction of the single-player campaign I still came away liking it. Sort of. Even though it’s a different game altogether from SC1 and SC1:FA.

A great many things seem to have been simplified. There is now a tech research tree instead of factory upgrades. And there doesn’t seem to be a bonus to constructing certain buildings next to each other, like energy generators next to factories. SC1 had complex base building theories originating from this little feature. I like how factories only come in one flavor, and can build all units that have been researched. But I do miss having three different generators, three different mass extractors etc.

Also I am unsure how resource management really works. Seems you just pay once for structures now, and that you no longer have to manage power consumption of shields, defensive guns etc over time as they come online and you lose generators in combat. Also I am unsure of whether you actually use energy and mass storage facilities anymore. Plus, at least the one experimental unit I did build constructed a lot faster than I remembered. And it doesn’t seem to be possible to use multiple engineer units to speed up construction of buildings and experimentals. Assigning an engineer to speed up construction at a factory still worked though.

Bottom line is that a lot of the focus has been shifted from base management to action and combat. But SC2 still holds a lot of promise … and besides, when was the last time we saw a good or even passable RTS? Most people seem to be waiting for Starcraft 2. I couldn’t care less as I never liked the first game. And especially since Supreme Commander 2 runs beautifully and scales on any hardware and Starcraft 2 is reported to run like ass even on the fastest system.

I really want to like this game. But I don’t know. Will it work out or will SC2 be yet another example of consoles (in this case the XBOX 360) ruining and "dumbing down" PC gaming? I guess we’ll find out in a few days. Also looking forward to a version with no Steam and less unskippable intro videos.

Edit: Got the final game and I’m sorry to say that I was underwhelmed. It’s an Ok game but nothing more. The more I play, the more annoying I find the game’s signature unit spam. And as far as the AI is concerned it’s either stupid and easy or stupid and hopelessly difficult. There is no middle ground. Even though I don’t play RTS multiplayer and never will, I can imagine that MP sessions will be short unless you pay attention. Just build a handful of fighter/bombers and sic them on the enemy ACU and you’re done. No one can withstand a nuclear explosion in the middle of their base early on after all. I reckon the problem is that units are simply too fast and easy to build in SC2 and that games resolve far too fast because of it. Which also means that you’re unlikely to ever have time to advance within the tech tree. Just upgrade your air units with more health and shields if possible and keep spamming. Air units after all don’t depend on fuel anymore as they did in SC1 so you can use them liberally. I’d go so far as to suggest playing MP games without air units.

Verdict still stands. WotLK is the grindiest game ever. Leveling my top three characters to 80 was easy enough once I had done it once and could buy "cold weather flying" plus swift flying mounts for the other two. I also changed some professions around. Leveled mining and jewelcrafting. Then finished leveling enchanting and took up inscription. Finally leveled alchemy and kept herbalism. No point in keeping skinning since it isn’t profitable anymore.

Still as inaccessible to casual players as ever. Refusing to do instances goes without saying of course. But then there is the camping for rare spawn pets. Or that mount. Or grinding reputation. Or scanning the auction house for hours, undercutting, cancelling and reposting. Getting jewelcrafting recipes will take months, unless you vacuum every last piece of titanium ore at the AH for prospecting (at almost 400 gold per stack!). In particular, inscription is undercutting hell. Nothing you make at skill 400+ will make any money. You end up posting the same couple of hundred old glyphs over and over and over … I had to move all of that to a special alt just to keep the mailbox clean. Ahahaha, and people wonder why there are gold sellers in WoW. Try making the game a lot more casual and less grindy and I’m sure things will change.

I think I’ve had enough for now. Perhaps I’ll be back in Cataclysm.

Verdict: Not my cup of tea (surprise!).

Too realistic, frantic and messy. Plus you basically need teamplay to survive. Plus the demo "assault" type map puts even more emphasis on teamplay. I should probably put more time into the game seeing as I was admittedly overwhelmed by the sheer complexity of the gameplay. I’m more of an Unreal Tournament or Battlefield Heroes kind of guy. Where everything makes sense and you can cut down the entire opposing team without any help from your so called teammates.

Another thing that greatly irked me was the lack of a proper HUD. Sure you have a minimap, ammo counter etc. But no health bar. The relationship between mud and blood on your screen and how much health you had left wasn’t exactly self-explanatory to say the least. I greatly prefer games that give health statistics as a bar or a number. And where you actually see how much you’ve damaged someone in exact numbers. Bad Company 2 has far too much of shooting blindly (until your ammo runs out anyway) into thick vegetation for my liking. Plus there is a whole cryptic department of upgrades and stuff in-game. From what I can tell they’ll all be free (paid DLC?) with character experience, but even so I’m not fond of the un-even gameplay they create. Jumping into a game I found myself facing high ranking players with who knows what kind of abilities. Plus there looks to be some nasty copy protection on this game. And there is punkbuster of course.

Having said that, if teamplay is your thing you’ll probably be thrilled. The graphics where also pretty impressive and I do enjoy the destructible environments greatly. Walls, building and trees get blown to smithereens in a way what reminds me a lot of Crysis.

Left 4 Dead 2: The first person shooter equivalent of Space Invaders. Seriously. I’ve seen cattle in a slaughterhouse feeling less herded than the unwitting player of the L4D series. Linear like a 2D scroller. And dumbed down as well with console-like controls and abilities.

And how about Dragon Age. Role-playing. Cute. Massive install anyhow. Not for SSD owners certainly. I just don’t have the patience for games like this anymore. Half-baked interfaces and backwards inventory systems. No thank you.

The only game recently that I’ve been able to play for more than an hour is Borderlands. But even that got boring after a while. Fat chance that you’ll ever take the time to replay the game using any of the other characters.

It’s interesting though that many of these games, including the dreary Modern Warfare 2 now have co-op in some form. Too bad it obscures any effort to make single-player last a little longer.

Looking forward to a new year of utter dismal releases. Only now in DX11. If we’re really lucky, Battlefield 1943, Assassin’s Creed II and Mass Effect 2 may not totally suck.

Oh and props to EA or DICE or whoever finally screwed up Battlefield Heroes. I guess someone got greedy and figured they could make people pay to get ahead in the game. Even though they promised this exact thing would never happen.

What a time sink. Wow indeed. And I’m a CASUAL player. The account was created back in early 2007 fyi. And yeah, I know, I ran out of good nicks after a while. Good nicks are typically short, snappy and not over the top.

My main gripe of course is that the game crashes before getting to the main titles. Just to be sure it wasn’t my l33t pirated (and TPTB ripped) version I downloaded the demo from last month. It also crashed to desktop at the exact same point. Error was the familiar "memory could not be read". Windows XP SP3.

But that would have been a pretty short review so I booted up Windows 7, unpacked the game once more, got into the actual game and found a ton of other gripes. The biggest being that the game isn’t particularly fun. Kind of like Lego Star Wars or whatever without the puzzles. Hard to control, clunky, cheap, monotonous and iffy. And with tons of annoying tutorials that clog up the screen and break the momentum. And speaking of controls, I couldn’t use my Logitech Rumblepad 2. This is obviously because "Games for Windows" encourages devs to implement support for the XBOX 360 controller. The one I didn’t buy but kind of wish I had after I realized the shenanigans behind the scenes. Kind of like when you start using your ATI card and realize the Nvidia has actively worked to sabotage games across the board for anyone not using their hardware.

Then the game crashed. But I was able to start up again and continue from the last save point fortunately. Oh and another little detail. I didn’t get any sound in the game. Just in the videos. Couldn’t be the rip so I’m betting this is a bug. Way to go.

Street Fighter IV, currently the highest scoring game by metascore, should hardly impress anyone. Wish it had been more like the stuff they show in the intro video instead of a visit to the toy store. Stiff, clunky 2D fighting like it’s 1990 but with added useless 3D gloss that brings any modern PC to its knees. Shows you just how redundant fighting games have become since the dawn of 1st and 3rd person 3D shooters. Compared to a fighting game that is actually fun and wont make you fall asleep, like say Devil May Cry 4, this is just bogus. Now, One Must Fall 2097 or Metal Masters, those were real fighting games (in their day).

Another pointless console conversion that I had the misfortune to download was Fuel. Piece of shit racing game with tons of more style than substance. Bring back Carmageddon 1 already. Clutch almost did, and I applaud the effort, even if the game falls flat in any comparison beyond that. As for Sims 3 it goes without saying this is the biggest pile of manure this side of Myspace. Didn’t even have to bother downloading that one. If I wanted a simulated social situation I’d get friends.

And then we have the tons of "retro" games, like Braid, Plants vs. Zombies, Trine etc that have been concocted for digital distribution. Zeno Clash, despite its hideous size, ought to be in this category as well. Perhaps I’m being too harsh, but I didn’t find any of these games interesting. Particularly not Zeno Clash and Braid, which were both in my opinion totally retarded. If this is the new face that will save PC gaming (and in some cases work on underpowered netbooks) we can just as well quite before we embarrass ourselves.

The only game that impressed my, despite its many faults, was Mount & Blade. It has two parts that are both equally captivating. There is the strategy side and then there is the 3rd person hack and slash combat part. Reminds me a bit of combat in the classic Die by the Sword. Except you can’t hack body parts off. Wow, I wish that snoozer Empire Total War had a way to resolve battles in 3D hack and slash mode.

Complete and utter fail! Wow, I mean, now we’re getting Direct X 11 with Windows 7, but by the time that has been deployed on both the software and hardware side we’ll all be playing 3D Tetris or something … downloaded from Steam. On our Netbooks. If we’ve not regressed to having the Iphone as the main gaming platform by then. Dark visions of the future indeed.