june gloom on 31/12/2010 at 11:12

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most inane and useless post/poster of 2010: too many to list but Scott Weiland is an 11th-hour contender

SubJeff on 31/12/2010 at 17:25

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Nah, you can call dethtoll lots of things but he ain't no Scott Weiland.

Nameless Voice on 5/1/2011 at 22:30

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After some thought, I can only think of three 2010 games that I've played this year, all of which were good.

My best game of 2010 is easily Starcraft 2, which is an amazing game despite a few lingering balance issues that still need fixing and the huge trainwreck that is Battle.net 2.0.

Metro 2033 was the most atmospheric game of 2010, boasting a great and atmospheric setting but suffering from many gameplay issues that kept it from being as great as it could have been.

I haven't really played enough of Fallout: New Vegas yet to rate it properly, but it seems very good from what I've seen so far, and definitely seems to have a better fleshed-out world than Fallout 3 ever did.


My award for Non-2010 Game That I've Spent The Most Time Playing In 2010 definitely goes to Team Fortress 2 - that game is horribly addictive.



Edit: Wait, I also played Bob Came in Pieces. It was decent, but I wasn't amazingly impressed by it.

Nameless Voice on 6/1/2011 at 04:40

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The core of it, the actual matchmaking system itself, is fine, but the whole thing has some serious issues. The main one is the complete lack of cross-region play, meaning that it's completely impossible for me to play with anyone in the US, Asia, etc. (I don't actually know anyone in those countries who'd play SC2, but that's not the point.). Blizzard claim that the ping would be too high and that their infrastructure can't support it, but that's clearly nonsense, as all their earlier games let you freely choose which region's server to connect to, and never had any issues. Add to that the fact that people in Europe or Asia can purchase a copy of the game from the USA, which will then be set to play on those servers, and these people have no issues (a lot of the pro gamers do it.)

Another major issue is that the custom map system is a complete mess. In earlier Blizzard games, you just copied the maps into your maps folder, or connected to a game using a map and it was automatically downloaded there for you. In Starcraft 2, maps can only be played by publishing them on Battle.net - you can't play custom maps from local map files at all (except by running them through the editor). Each account also has a limit to the number of maps it can upload (I think it's 10 maps? 25mb? Not 100% sure). Worse still, the account has free reign to remove the map, and since they're not properly downloaded to the clients' computers, that means that the map just disappears. This is a fate that happened to a a particularly good custom map that I played a few times ("Falrinth's The Thing") - the author pulled the map down, and now it's just gone. Blizzard have also been monitoring and potentially censoring the maps. I heard about one popular map (I think it was a tower defence map) getting deleted without warning because the streams of incoming enemies formed a symbol that looked a bit like a swastika on the minimap. It's beyond ridiculous. They claim they really want people to be using their engine and editor to make things, yet they also claim complete ownership and control of anything anyone makes in the editor... :tsktsk:


I made a long thread about all of this, and a few other issues, on the Battle.net forums. I can't find my thread right now, since it got locked for some idiotic reason, but here's where someone helpfully copy-pasted the entire post for me into the new thread for the topic: (http://eu.battle.net/sc2/en/forum/topic/261716187#18)

gunsmoke on 6/1/2011 at 16:27

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Thanks both of you (NV and koki). I guess my first experience with Battle.net 2.0 will be Diablo 3, so I was curious to see what I was in for. Again, thanks.

BTW, NV, I love that your nick on that forum is simply Nameless. Awesome.