Another Side

This blog has a title. The title is Gaming and Technology. If you have been following this blog you will have found that there has not been a vast amount on here about gaming, none at all in fact. So now lets change that, lets have a gaming installment to add to the ever growing list of blog posts. Well here we go.
2011. More specifically, 2011 in games. We have had an elephantine collection of titles to chose from first person shooters to I'm-not-leaving-the-house-until-I-am-done role playing games, we have had any genre we could want smacked across our face. As we don't all have the hundreds of pounds needed to purchase all of these games on their release day we have had to pick and chose between all of these games. Some have been better than we expected, for example Portal 2, and others much worse than we expected, for example Duke Nukem.
Duke Nukem. A name that has been key to the games of 2011. All the hype, "13 years in development" etc, for what. If this game had come out in 1998 then maybe it would not be seen as so bad, but no. Categorical proof that this game was an unmitigated failure is the fact that it is now £5.25 on Amazon. For a game that hasn't even been out a year that is bad, you pay more than this for a DLC map pack. We must ask ourselves; WHY? How could this have been aloud onto a disk. We can safely assume that those 13 odd years this game has spent in development were not to well used, watching them must have been like watching some retards try to play poker in the dark. A badger that has been force fed weed could have done a better job by just rolling around on a keyboard. Enough of this blip in a year of some very good games.
2011 was the year of the threes. Uncharted 3, Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 and Gears Of War 3. This year of sequels was great for the gaming industry as it caused competition, this competition had two key competitors; Battlefield 3 and Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 3. Both of these games are first person shooters, both have a huge online aspect and both had relatively short campaigns. Such fundamental similar games yet such different experiences to play. One offers an online that attempts to include the the player as part of a squad giving a much more satisfying and realistic experience. Whereas the other is very different. The other feebly tries to make you 'team players' and fails entirely. It can have its games over in 5 minutes rather than 30 minutes. But more importantly one can be described in charades as a pile of excrement and the other cannot.
Now, we must appreciate the best of the horde. I think we both know what, very original, yes you guessed it. You do know it right. Can you feel the TENSION? Portal 2. This game has ticked more boxes than a delivery man on speed. With it's cross platform online and completely-original-game-idea it had to be number 1. Any game that can keep you up for 3+ hours playing co-op split screen must be good, not good but great.
In summary, this year has been good. We've seen LA.Noire's new face technology. Some new gaming engines (Frostbite) and some that have been abandoned since it's forth game(Call of duty). We can expect an announcement for a PS4 and an Xbox 720 at E3 so it could be a truly revolutionary year in gaming.