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imperative in the sense that in all the games I've tried, except for CoD, I've always chosen my own servers. I only play created matches in Wipeout. In any case, my examples are definitely flawed, even though I don't understand the remark about Killzone ^^

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I give it a nice five, the thought/review above, sweetly postmodern, can easily have its place on the homepage. I believe that Debaser can be this too...

The issue of the lack of dedicated servers is true, but it only concerns Call of Duty and a few other titles; it's not the exclusive overwhelming trend for consoles. I play Unreal Tournament on PS3, and all things considered, I think it holds up quite well against the PC version. And thinking about the online experience of Killzone 2, I don't believe we console users have gotten so used to it being that bad...

Nerd for a day too. (after) Yesterday I was in Berlin, I’m going to pick him up today :)

I only read the first paragraph, and I find all of this very nauseating, to use a better term. I saw the trailer in the cinema, almost as ugly as the film I would soon watch (Parnassus). This is not a "event" film simply because it is being released as such, to satisfy the still unquenched anthropophagy of those who have gorged on all those speculations you mention, which I have simply ignored. It’s almost an imposition. A reality film about a concert that never happened, a cinema made of rehearsals and setups, incomplete and haphazard, that aims to be an epitaph. I would say it has something in common with Parnassus.

@s4doll: absolutely true, now the market is at its peak, every game is potentially "for everyone" and niches barely exist anymore. I think of Grid, from the (now defunct) notoriously difficult TOCA developers, which is a maximum simplification of that complex motorsport world made up of simulation and (often) frustration, in favor of maximum possible accessibility: maybe that's the only "problem" :) Okay about Mirror's Edge, (even though if you want to be overly picky, it could be defined as a mix between an FPS, due to the viewpoint, and platform games...) I would also add Metal Gear 4 and Little Big Planet, for various reasons. But having such powerful hardware forces, in some ways, a heavy focus on the cosmetic aspect to stand out from the competition, which requires considerable effort and costs, leaving aside the gameplay aspects that inevitably end up taking a back seat.

@lux: beautiful killer instinct, but it was basically a carbon copy of mortal kombat, with glacius (my favorite) in place of sub zero :)

s4doll: what you're saying undoubtedly has its truth, but in the past, games revolved entirely around a core idea, which almost always coincided with the gameplay itself. In today's video games, there's a lot going on (take Fallout 3, very hard to classify as just one genre); there might be less "game" and more "experience"; many games are a mix of a thousand and more genres, which perhaps causes them to lose their identity, combined with the absent feeling that there's a nice central idea giving meaning to it all. The idea of a "total game" buzzes in the minds of many developers, perhaps at the expense of characterization and uniqueness of style. The main limitation of video games right now is, if we look closely, related to the way we play, using practically the same game peripherals as 15 years ago (except maybe for the Wii). In any case, there are definitely too many FPSs, and the lack of willingness to take risks is due to the need to cater to the demands of a market that encompasses a myriad of categories of gamers. Sorry for rambling :)

I remember just a little, but when I was little I always went to my rich friend's house with the SNES, spent hours and hours on Killer Instinct and all that. Those games seemed so beautiful to me, even though I generally don't agree with the opinions about current titles. A few years have passed, now consoles are in every home, leading to an expansion of the audience, but there’s still a lot of fun to be had after all.