In the normal spirit of my birthday. I figure take a break from MW3 and BF3 to state it's my birthday today. There's nothing really more to say than that, so onto the games.

I've decided this time, since the majority of my posts manage a tl;dr from today's BYOND users, that I'll sum it up directly under the title. Just to make you happy. Just remember, if you didn't make it to this paragraph to get this information: You're the worst kind of person in existence.

Note: My judgements for these games is based off the games I've played online enough to make such a comparison: Jedi Outcast, COD 2, Medal of Honour: Allied Assault, COD: Black Ops and Codename Eagle. My opinions from these two games is based off comparison memories of these games. So if I sound like an idiot, it's because I haven't been an online gamer to any extent in some six years, so I don't know what's
cool or not. Deal with it.

A bit of both:
A paragraph that didn't fit anywhere else.

Okay, I'll be fair. I never played the single player campaign of MW3. I've been playing single player games for the past six years and I'm kind of over them. So with that in mind, I've been ignoring everything in B3 and MW3 except my favourite game type next to CTF: Domination (which is kind of like Headquarters and CTF mixed, with the added enjoyment of Tickets in B3).

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3:
Complete waste of money.

People can cry and have a sook at me all they want for what I've just typed. But ultimately it is the truth. It isn't worth the $60.00 the americans who buy it off Steam are complaining about, and it wasn't worth the $100.00 I bought it off Steam for (yes, that makes sense to me as well. Gotta love that different 'priceage' for digital media. Especially considering my dollar is worth more. I briefly checked around and I couldn't find any evidence of a pre-order bonus or special edition I might be buying by mistake with this much price difference).

Honestly. I found online play to be identical to Black Ops. Which was mostly spawn, get spawn killed by a guy in a helicopter, wait 10 - 15 seconds to spawn, get killed by a spawn camper, wait 10 - 15 seconds to spawn, get killed by a guy in another helicopter, etc. Seriously, those perks, I thought they'd make the game really fun, they seemed to spice up small 4 player LAN games quite well, but no. Oh dear Windu no. They are awful. And seriously, whomever came up with that flood timer thing, seriously need a good kick in the rear. As do the people who continue to implement it.

It's not so bad in dedicated servers. MW3 has one thing over Black Ops in this regard: I don't need to level up to play how I want to. I can have any weapon I want straight off the bat. I'm extremely contented with this.

However, because all MW3 dedicated servers are "Unranked", none of the "hardcore" COD players seem to want to play them, as there's no real benefit from it. This is good, 'cause the remnants seem to mostly be people like myself, the "squeeze in a game here and there" kind of gamer. This is bad however, 'cause it leaves the serves often feeling a bit empty until school lets out. And that's kind of depressing.

That is of course negating the fact that in order to SEE the dedicated servers, you have to enable the menu item in your Options menu. What the hell man? (See console vs PC debate in the Summary for more.)

Honestly, if I thought there was any hope of there still being a few popular COD 2 servers active in Australia, I would instantly dedicate all of my MW3 time to it. But that could also be because I just prefer WW2 when possible.

Intermission (Origin vs Steam):
Inessential rambling of the unimportant variety.

I will say first, I was extremely sceptical about installing essentially another Steam. I mean, I hate Steam. I really hate Steam. I think it is the single worst thing Valve could have released upon us all. And Origin, well, it's just EA's knock-off of Steam. Or so I thought. Let it be known that Origin runs far better, and produces maximum download speeds far superior to that of Steam (with Steam giving me a maximum 920kb/s compared to Origin's 2.2mb/s), and runs far smoother and easier than Steam ever has (my computer actually seems to struggle with Steam, way more than a machine with this much power should). So at the very least, this was BF3's fist extremely bright glowing star in the sky. I had it within a small few hours.

The big shade which covers that star is what seems to be either some extremely terrible second half of Origin or just some extremely bizarre DRM for B3 called Battlelog. Which launches in Firefox and essentially uses it as a catalyst to launch various parts of the game. I know Firefox is taking steps to tone down it's memory consumption, and as I've said, a machine like this should be more than enough to handle running them both. But, well, I'm extremely anal about running applications I don't need to be running while playing games. And past history has taught me that Firefox is generally not an application you want running while playing games...

I'm certainly not going to change my browser to appease these people. So this whole browser-make-launch-game-thing is just not on with me. What the hell guys? You've effectively killed single-player for people who might just not have an internet connection for a bit and feel like playing it. Not cool man... (Actually, that's if it even HAS single player. I just realised I honestly don't know if it has... Disregard the single player part of this paragraph if it doesn't. The browser thing still remains valid!)

For the record, no amount of argument will change my mind on this. It doesn't mean I'll stop using Steam, I'll have to if I ever want Half Life 2: Episode 3 (how many years have I been waiting now? Five?) or any other brilliant games Valve release (hey, I love their games, I just hate their delivery system).

Battlefield 3:
Best online gaming experience I've had yet.

I must say, BF3 loses to MW3 in two ways once you actually get into multi-player (see Intermission). First is similar to Black Ops, I need to level my character up in order to unlock the more powerful guns (while playing against people with more powerful guns 'cause they've already done so... I understand the logic, I really do). This isn't my idea of fun. I don't care about K/D Ratios or how much time of my life I've invested in games. I just want to get in, kill people for a bit and leave. Why am I being hated on? =(

The second way isn't really so much a loss as I just suck. I'm not afraid to admit it, I'm horrible. My stats for B3 state I'm a laughing-stock of gamers. In fact, I should write to EA and demand that generate that kind of status message for stats like mine and people below me. But yeah, I'm finding it extremely hard to level up. Like extremely hard. It might have something to do with the fact I can barely see the enemy until they've already shot and killed me. Either I have a giant red box around me on their screens or setting the best possible graphics on an HD 27 inch monitor just isn't gamer enough for this game. Okay... That was unfair. But it's not far from the truth for a couple of them, I'll wager you that. I've seen some pretty suspect looking K/D ratios in that game.

Ignoring the above however. The game is spectacularly fun. And intense. Extremely intense. As soon as the game starts you're met with 31 other people sprinting towards their vehicles of choice, each one starting up or taking off, you'd swear you're actually on a battlefield (I see what they did there). I normally either run to the closest flag on foot or hitch a ride in the nearest multi-person vehicle (and get the hell out before they get there, just to stay alive).

The maps are huge, destructible and reasonably detailed. There's more detail than I would normally put in a map, but I am extremely lazy. I was upstairs of a building with a machine gun, next to a sniper, a tank caught sight of the sniper and started laying into the building. He fired until it had penetrated the wall and killed the sniper (who was taking cover on the other side, I went unnoticed). That in itself I feel, was brilliant.

The game-play itself is also extremely fun. As I mentioned earlier, I suck out loud, but that still doesn't mean I don't enjoy every second I'm aimlessly wandering around the map between deaths. Although I have to level up my character, it still does a reasonable job at catering to people like myself. I can at least stumble upon the better weapons of those who died in the area before me.

Summary:
As much fuel for debate in this line as the rest!

One thing I do like about Battlefield 3 is how much it reminds me of Medal of Honour: Allied Assault (surprisingly not of Battlefield 1942... odd, I know). I managed a headshot on someone and all I got was instant nostalgia from MOH:AA. It was a brilliant feeling.

Perhaps I'm just not fast enough for MW3. But MW3 takes something I've been hating about the games I've started playing since I started playing Black Ops back when it was released (single player). And that it's mostly the games feel like they were designed for the console audience then roughly thrown back together for PC. Borderlands, Dead Island, Black Ops and even to some extent CoD: WaW (drastically less extent than the others, but extent nonetheless) all are guilty of being a bits and pieces which seem more suited for your console player than your PC player.

That "Press Enter to Start" is so console. Most games I remember did all their stuff then booted directly into the main menu, like they should. That kind of thing was reserved for Consoles.

I think that about sums up these two games. I may have actually left out entire pieces of factual information, 'cause I left to play Battlefield 3 in the middle of writing it on accident, forgot what I wrote and only roughly read it before continuing. Ultimately, MW3 is for kids with no attention span. That says enough.

Now to other stuff.