Gears of War: Your Dead to Me (Online)

I'm never playing Gears of War online again.

I've played it the last couple nights with some friends, most of whom I've met online in Gears. But when we first met, it was good.

With todays online games, you're completely at the mercy of the developer. You bought their game and now they have the means to do whatever they want to it. Early on, Gears had a few glitches that people used to break and, while at first it was annoying, it was pretty bearable. It wasn't until they tried to fix the game with it's first mandatory update that the game started to go downhill. They did stop the glitching, which people quickly found new ones, but they also altered other things. Things that made the game seem completely different.

When you have a game that exists in such a vast sea of 1st person/3rd person shooters, the smallest details not only make or break the gameplay, but change the core feeling of a game.

Imagine buying a car and then one day you get in it and see a note that Honda came by and took out your sunroof because it leaked, changed the idle setting, took the window tint off, and changed the color of the interior. It all still works. Somethings are better. Somethings are just different. And sometimes I don't like different.

So I'm never going to play Gears again until they make it work like it should. Which would involve way more than Epic is prepared throw at a two year old game. It's too bad too, because Gears is a universe that I really like and look forward to playing future versions. And reading the novel in August.