Looks like it's going to be a busy few weeks. Dragon Age Origins: Awakening, God of War III, and most importantly (at least for today) Final Fantasy XIII.

I have purposefully avoided reading any reviews, or looking into the features of the game as much as I could manage because I feel that these games are best learned as you go, instead of simply played.

The one thing I do know is that this Final Fantasy is supposed to be very streamlined. No more going back to town to sell, no boring back and forth and very linear, movie-like progression.

I think it will work. The Final Fantasy games have been leaning more and more towards "interactive movie with combat sequences" with each iteration, so to simply accept that fact and build a game around it instead of constantly interrupting that flow for the sake of nostalgia is probably a good thing.

Sure as a classic gamer I'll miss going to town, exploring, and actually having to figure out where to go next, but if the streamlining means I'll never have to experience anything like FFx's Blitzball again, I support it 100%.

Also, while I'm blabbering. Don't buy Alien Vs. Predator. It's fun, but it's not feature complete, you're better off waiting for it to be $10 on Steam, hopefully by then it will have more than 5 maps, and less than 5000 bugs.

The terms casual and hardcore get thrown around a lot when both insulting and promoting different play styles. To the hardcore crowd the word casual is nothing short of an insult. Calling someone a casual gamer throws their dedication and skill into question, while for the casual crowd calling someone hardcore is implying that they have no life and no social skills.

The annoying thing about this rivalry between the gaming world's equivalents of political parties is that the terms casual and hardcore are entirely fluid; completely defined by the person using them in relation to their own position.

So what is it that actually makes someone a hardcore, or casual gamer?

Most people's initial response would be playtime - If you spend more than say... 20 hours a week playing games, you're hardcore. While casuals would only play when the kids are asleep and the wife "has a headache".

I'm not really sure that this is the case. For example I have a friend, who rarely plays games, and they're borderline games like Civilization, but I would still consider him to be a somewhat hardcore gamer. What makes him hardcore in my mind is that when he does play games, he plays to win. Sure we all play for fun on some level, but to the hardcore gamers I believe that the fun comes with the victory while for casuals the fun is simply the act of playing.

That's not to say that the hardcore gamers don't enjoy the act of playing, but if there's no end game that allows them to really put their skills to the test, they will lose interest.

I have another friend who plays quite often, easily more than 20 hours per week, but I would consider her to be a casual gamer. She has no interest in the stress of direct competition or playing a level in a game over and over until she is able to complete it, she simply enjoys playing the game, and if it gets too challenging or frustrating she will move on to something else.

For a long time these two play styles could exist alongside each other with no real problems. If the casual gamer couldn't speed run through Mega-man, none of the hardcore players posting YouTube videos of them beating the game without taking any damage were annoyed by that. Both groups were able to enjoy themselves within the exact same game, and everyone was satisfied.

As games became more prevalent they had to start catering to both types of gamers, and this is where the gap started getting wider.

It was inevitable really, the hardcore gamers got better at games and so to give them a challenge that would allow them to enjoy themselves, games had to get more challenging. This was fine for a while but at a certain point games became so challenging that they started to require more time to complete. Hardcore gamers had to play more often because they had to in order to get good enough at a game that they could get satisfaction out of completing it. At the same time the casual players were feeling left out. If the game was too hard they wouldn't bother putting in the extra hours to learn and improve, they would simply go play something else that allowed them to have fun immediately, which for obvious reasons wasn't good for the developers of the harder game.

These days you cannot log in to any MMO without being spammed in one way or another with offers to sell you gold for real world cash. It is now considered commonplace in massively multiplayer games, but it wasn't always that way.

This post was written a few years back when the gold selling industry really started to take off. It's a pretty interesting read, explaining how these people and companies made inroads into our games, and how even now most of the sites we visit are generating money for the same people who are stealing our accounts, and selling the gold back to us.

The Truth About IGE and the Gold Industry

The question of whether or not gold selling should be against the game's rules is a tough one that ultimately is up to the developers to decide. Unfortunately it's becoming more and more obvious that the developers aren't against it in principle, only against it because they want exclusive rights.

After all, even if money did grow on trees, creating it by typing numbers into a database is probably more profitable.

There are two reigning schools of thought in MMO design. We have the more common amusement park style of game, and the long sought after, but notoriously hard to successfully implement sandbox style MMO.

In a sandbox game the idea is that the world is your sandbox and what occurs is up to the people playing in the sandbox, more than the designers that created it. Want to kill that guard? Go for it. Decide you want to chop trees for a living and kill anyone else who tries to get into the lumber market? Sounds like a plan.

Some of you may be back in town saying "All I was doing was trying to cut down a tree and some asshole killed me for no reason! Why should he get all the lumber?!" and as a supporter of sandbox style games I'd reply with a fireball to the face and the theft of all your remaining money.

It's a fantastic dream, but so far there have been very few successful sandbox MMOs due in large part to just how hard they are to create without being tough to get into, unbalanced or just completely unfair.

But don't worry! Some developers heard your cries and realized that the QQ crowd had no interest in this world full of murderers and just wanted to "play the game".

Enter the amusement park style of game where what you can and cannot do is pretty strictly defined. Full of "You cannot do that here" and "You cannot attack that" messages, it is a world where you are forced to play the role of the productive member of society. Everyone is equal and everyone gets their turn. There are no thieves lurking in the shadows, wandering groups of murderers or long lost caves that may or may not be discovered.

Everything that is in an amusement park game is put there for a specific purpose, and if you use it for any purpose that it was not intended, or benefit from it more than other people, you are cheating and it will be removed/buffed/changed/nerfed.

This is still a role playing game in purely mechanical terms, but the role you play is not up to you, it's up to the people that designed the ride.

I'll be honest. I completely forgot about this. Even after posting about it I was busy wiping to the Lich King over and over and it just slipped my mind.

Looks like it may have ended up being for the best though, glad I managed to avoid this craziness posted by someone who has actually been into the game for a while:

Bringing you up to speed on Allods Online's Launch Debacle

Trying to avoid any speculation, as I really don't know anything about either company, and I'm sure they have their reasons for doing whatever they're doing but it seems utterly ridiculous to break an MMO that is getting favorable reviews.

It's so very rare for an MMO in WoW's shadow to have reviews that say anything other than "It's like WoW, but worse!" that I can't help but feel like gPotato and their Russian developers made a bit of a miscalculation.

If you want to turn a profit making MMO's you have to get people addicted and then gouge them for profits, not the other way around! There's a Soviet Russia joke in there somewhere.