Where have all the good games gone?

[The Ghost of MG]

Here is a story told from MG's point of view...

Once upon a time, MG had a big-bad computer. He ruled cyberspace and crunched numbers like.....Old Skool did? His new computer had the clocks, it rocked (but it was obsolete before he opened the box). One day, he needed a tinyer one, so he could travel around with it, and not be stuck on the big-bad PC which was too big and too bad to go anywhere. So he searched out ye olde computer shoppe, run by his sneaky brother. After some moments of discussion, they hammered out a deal. MG turn over his copy of Tribes 2, and procure a copy of Lord of Destruction for him. This in turn led to the crafty brother borrowing the biggest, baddest comptuer in da house to play Tribes 2 on (since his weeney Celeron (or, to be precice, the TNT2 that is stuck on his mobo) was no good except for playing Diablo 2 and Unreal). So MG walked off happily with the tiny computer, and left the big-bad one to his brother, for the time being. After getting kindof annoyed that there were no good games to play, expecially after Steffa had confiscated his Playstation, he decided to take a peek into the Shifter games of old. And so he did. But he didn't realize how much things had changed... the old servers were gone, the names were changed, and no one had even heard of "shifter 3c". It was fun, it was what made Tribes (original) fun to play. But is it gone now, replaced by the beacon-dependent "shifter 6" and insane "shifter X". Dismayed at these results, he searched and he filtered... and so he came upon the last, lonely shifter 3c server. It had only 5 people playing on it, but that was not the worst of it. Once he joined the game, he started to realized that things had changed... the lights were heavier, the heavies were EVEN HEAVIER, and most depressing of all: the Tactical Nuke had been removed. Now when he found this out, it hit him like a ton of bricks. He couldn't contain himself and had to leave the server. After that, he got all nostalgic, about how games *used* to be. But the only thing he realized was that it wasn't the game itself that makes it fun, but it is WHO you play the game with that makes it fun. War/Starcraft with Brad, Half-life and UT with BlackDragon (and his bots), Tribes with Steffa and Shogo (aka DeathAngelForte), and now the ever-popular Diablo 2, played with many friends in many places, incuding BD, Laurelin, Tyguil, D.A.F. and others. It's not the game that counts, it's the people who you know that play the game like it was meant to be played that makes it fun. It's these community-oriented games that really hit the spot. Just think of the communtiy aspect of Tribes and Diablo, which brings me to my *other* point. There are two games coming out that look so amazing, I might actually play them! The first one is Neverwinter Nights, a rendition of D&D for the PP, but done well. You can even cluster servers to make huge worlds - it's just cool. The second is Dungeon Siege, an RPG which seems to combine some elements of Diablo, Vagrant Story, Half-life, and Rune all together to make a cool-looking and I bet cool-playing RPG. BUT both these games have something in common: a big multiplayer element. It is what I look forward to in a game. You see, Oni, Homeworld, and many other games had clunky (anyone from the LAN party remember Rage of Mages?) or non-existant mulitplayer. This is OK if you have only a 33.6 to play around with, as I did earlier. But upon getting my fast-DSL, there is a whole new genre of games that could never (or very laggyly) be played before. This is what the internet is for: communication. The information aspect is just a added effect. Once you can reach out to a world of people, who are just as willing to do the same, you can never stay cramped in your own box again.