Shit-slinging is a pretty big and entertaining part of gaming culture, particularly where games played over the Internet are concerned. Competition combined with the relative anonymity of sitting behind the computer or television screen, rather than face to face with the person you’re insulting, can breed within even the nicest of people a sense of uncontrollable nerdrage.

Personally, I like it.

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Many gamers have their preferred method of getting their digital entertainment fix. Quite a few are blessed to have the means to be quite eclectic in their collections.

Myself? I just can’t do consoles.

Personally, I’d rather spend a good portion of my paycheck on a new, decked-out PC gaming and graphics design rig. At least I can multitask its usage into both entertainment as well as marketable products for my clients.

Fuck that $500 Xbox. And its extra controllers for more multiplayer fun. And the hard drive for downloadable content. And the downloadable content that costs extra. And the XBL fee.

It’s not paying me back.

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One of the most horrible, frustrating and agonizing enemies of gamers these days isn’t a boss.

It isn’t pixelated, doesn’t have HP, has no corporeal form, and it is invincible. It strikes without warning, especially just at the moment you engage in combat, and the result of its onslaught is usually death.

It speaks to gamers in the harshest tongue, more hideous than that of Mordor. It says, “You have been disconnected.”

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I can enjoy a good single player game as much as the next gamer. In fact, being by myself can sometimes be cathartic. But only sometimes.

Having an added interactive personality or two to spice up the time you spend with your favorite pixels? Why, who could resist? Friends, and people in general, make gaming multidimensional. They point out things you may have missed, spend joyous hours entertaining you, share the journey of your characters from one point to another, and make you feel like not so much of a geeky gamer freak because hey – you’ve got friends who play too, so spending twenty hours a week or more on an activity atypical to most people in society isn’t quite so lonely an affair.

My personal favorite? Arnold Schwarzenegger impressions on Ventrilo during PvP combat.

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So, Guy Somberg, a programmer for Flagship Studios working on Hellgate: London posted a now-removed blog entry last month about the game’s epic fail. Its failure to keep its staff, that is. He completely overlooked what a terrible conglomeration of shitty code the darn thing is.

Please, cry more about the community who assaulted your team with their ridiculous demands.

Demands for a playable game.

Completely ignore the possibility that if the game didn’t have such a surprising amount of problems, the playerbase would actually be spreading some positive word-of-mouth about it.

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Many of us have dreams of the silver screen. And according to Uwe Boll, Simon West, and Corey Yuen, our favorite video game characters do, too.

Unfortunately most of the currently available video game-to-film adaptations have been worth neither our time nor our money.

Maybe it’s because Cloud, Lara, Rayne, or Ayane, for example, were just simply too green in the performing world. As far as I know, Cloud came too early in the Final Fantasy franchise to have experienced acting lessons through the Tantalus Troupe, and Croft certainly fails to strike me as the type to truly enjoy “faking it”.

But I digress…

I wouldn’t be particularly miffed if the fascination with this genre died out completely.

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