What grinds my gears

Apple was a true visionary when they developed their iPhone platform: Top-of-the-line smartphone with a huge-ass capacitive touchscreen almost the size of the entire phone, with a dynamic software-based keyboard that could be hidden and customized for each application type. Many people, including many other companies, expressed their doubts, but after the astonishing world-wide success of the idea, of course everybody else jumped onto the bandwagon. The next smart move by Apple was to allow users to develop software for the phone and distribute it through a centralized app store. This also proved an enormous success, and some developers saw their applications selling literally millions of copies. A curious phenomenon arose: The price of iPhone games were on the 1-2 dollar range, even when virtually the exact same game would cost at the very least 10 dollars on other platforms (and often even more.) I do not know why exactly this happened, but it did. This became the de-facto stan...

I'm a really avid consumer of computer games, but there's one broad genre of games that I simply cannot stand: Online multiplayer games in general, and first-person shooter multiplayer games in particular. During my life I have played probably over a hundred first-person shooter games. I wouldn't say I'm at the level of a pro player, but quite necessarily I'm quite good at those, even at the hardest difficulty settings. So it's not like I'm bad at FPS games. But if I try an online multiplayer version, it's a completely different story. It's not a set of computer-controlled enemies carefully fine-tuned to give a sensible difficulty level. No, it's human players with years of training. What happens is that I play for something like 10 seconds, and I die. Then I respawn in a random location, play for like 10 seconds, and I die. Rinse and repeat. In many cases I don't even see where they were shooting from. Sure, sometimes I manage to kill ...

I have written about this subject in my old "blog", but it deserves further discussion, as I'm playing their new Final Fantasy XIII-3 right now. In the 80's, and especially in the 90's, "Square" (and later "Square Enix") was pretty much a synonym for high-quality JRPG gaming. If a game had that company name attached to it, and especially if the name of the game itself had the words "Final" and "Fantasy" in it (although this wasn't a requirement), you were pretty much guaranteed to get a top-quality thoroughly enjoyable AAA game that not only would be fun to play, but would be certain to receive accolades and recognition. Games like Final Fantasy 6 (confusingly numbered 3 in its original US release) and Final Fantasy 7 are not only rather universally considered some of the best JRPGs ever made, but some of the best games period. (Any "top 100 best games of all time" list is pretty much guaranteed to have e...