Click here to read this week\'s twoplayer game comic.We\'re approaching the last days of Ghost Recon 2, now.
Summit Strike just came out, and already I\'m nearly ready to move on. Not because the game is bad. Quite the contrary; Summit Strike has provided us with another opportunity to repeatedly express our anger against an enemy who responds with a bullet and a complete lack of sympathy. What I mean is that Ghost Recon 2 is about to be replaced; Rainbow Six Lockdown is scheduled to hit the shelves midmonth, about the time that the President of Nintendo will be addressing the audience at the Tokyo Game Show. I\'ll be playing that from here until the Xbox 360 comes onto the scene, and then Ghost Recon 3 takes over. No matter what, I figure Ghost Recon 2 is on its last breath. It\'s sort of sad that great titles can be left behind just because there are so many other great titles coming down the line, and we\'re not even addressing games like Nintendogs and Advance War.
Speaking of which, anyone that doesn\'t take the Nintendo DS seriously by this point is simply in denial. The touch screen has proven itself in enough titles to be able to confidently shrug off anything that even remotely means the same thing as gimmick.
That comment is specifically for our Editor-in-chief; it\'s a long running discussion between us.
The recent comments by Phil Harrison of Sony about the Nintendo DS\'s touch screen being nothing more than a gimmick strikes me as another line of crap in a long string of the stuff. The first E3 Sony Press Conference I ever attended ? before the launch of the GameCube or Xbox ? left me with the impression that Sony was purposelessly and mistakenly arrogant. They talked bad about their competition, made statements that the console war was over when it was obviously just beginning, and basically walked around spouting words that ? when you rearrange the letters ? spell crap.
It\'s a strategy that Sony has maintained, and you see it in the dismissive way that they address their competition in public. Gimmick, indeed. Microsoft not being a threat, indeed. It\'s an instinctive self-defense mechanism on a corporate scale. I wish they\'d move beyond it.
In other news....
Two weeks ago we made the change from the server that has run in the background of GamesFirst since November of last year, and transferred to a more flexible system under our direct control. You might have noticed it, because all the colors changed and we got rid of those annoying flashing ads. Our ads will never again induce seizures, of that we\'re sure. Since that server switch, though, a lot has happened. We\'ve launched the GamesFirst podcast - extremely well received - transferred to an internal programming team, and implemented a modular design that lets us add features almost on a whim. Already we\'re able to utilize news postings and screenshots to a greater extent than ever before, and you\'ve probably noticed the difference. GamesFirst is now also fully skinable, though our readers won\'t be able to benefit from that until we have multiple designs to choose from. Not to mention things like writer profiles, better search support, and better internal tracking.
Thing is, we\'re only halfway there. Our goal in this launch was to transfer servers and reproduce the features we already had, and we ended up adding all sorts of extras. There\'s more down the road, more in the coming months. I won\'t spoil the surprise.
But trust me, it\'ll be good.