Gabe really does have a bat! A real bat, just hangin' up in the eaves and devourin' thousands of insects every night. You might be surprised to learn how codified the process is for keeping and encouraging bats, I wasn't aware this is something one did, but I'm overjoyed to live in a world more interesting than I previously thought. There are those who find their impish faces and split noses vile, but that's not my demo. Bats are my favorite mammals by a wide margin, and yes, I'm aware that humans are mammals.
I have a high opinion of Gametrailers' video reviews, which is to say that I usually agree with them, that is to say they agree with me, which makes them seem "right." I have sufficient meta-cognition to know that this doesn't make them right on some kind of universal scale, but then, I'm not entirely sure there's such a thing as truth.
We really could go on like this for some time.
The Gametrailers review of Final Fantasy XIV is as, um, "direct" in its speech and presentation as any assessment I've ever seen. It doesn't sound like a review at all, it sounds like an indictment - a formalized recitation of the facts in evidence. An MMO seems like such a strange thing to review, even under the best conditions. Did you catch the world event, did you interface with the right social framework to invest the generally quite mechanical gameplay with meaning, did you stumble on something organic and real in some disused corner of the simulation?
Even if the game had been ultrafresh, literally banging off the hook, I'm not entirely sure the model FFXIV is based on even exists anymore on PC. We'll see how the game is received on the Playstation 3, because the dynamic is very different: this genre doesn't infuse every micron of the console space, and there are people who want an experience like this and can't have it. On the PC, I couldn't begin to list just the free games available to enrich your leisure hours. I don't have the cilia to number them all.
For the second time, Turbine has taken one of their traditional Massive offerings and retooled it from the ground up as an "F2P" (nee "K-Style") offering. Also for the second time, and you'll see that the number two is very important to this story, they doubled revenue by doing so. Even two years ago, I would have said this didn't work "here," even while games like Gaia Online, Farmville, and MapleStory were busy establishing the full extent of my ritualized myopia as a resplendent cardinal of teh hardc0r.
(CW)TB
