The mouse is not just a pointing device, it’s a gaming tool that allows PC gamers the kind of precision that console gamers only dream of. Congratulations go out to Logitech on their fantastic accomplishment. You’ve helped make the gaming world a better place.

However it will have a few minor differences.  It will include Nvidia’s PhysX , game physics, which will allow for higher interactive situations. in the meantime, there are some 2-D flash games available on the PC.  Or you can just go out and play the game on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation three if you have either of those systems. Also, there will be some downloadable content made available in January in the form of some mission-based time trial levels. While this game’s reviews were office charts.  This could be a fun addition to anyone’s library, especially if you are a PC gamer and don’t console.

As a gamer I have mixed feelings about the situation. On one hand I like seeing innovation and interesting ideas being pushed out, especially in the RPG space. However, it seems that the only thing that works in MMO RPG are World of Warcraft clones. Of course, you could argue that World of Warcraft sells was really just an ever quest clone done much better. On the other hand, everything I read said that this game is mediocre. What we all should take away from this is that mediocre games don’t sell. Developers would do well to stop making mediocre games and trying to sell them to the gaming public. It just doesn’t work.

If MMO RPG developers continue to try and best Blizzard with shinier versions of the same tired, broken experience, they are doomed to fail. Whatever happened to innovation in this industry? The license for this game is fantastic and they could be doing so much for it, but a graphical update for a game that Artie looks fine? It seems like a waste of time and precious resources.

My guess is that gamers will quickly move on to either World of Warcraft, Warhammer, or Fallout 3. That seems to be the trend. Either gamers want a richer experience like they get in Fallout 3, a different experience that solves some of the flaws of World of Warcraft in Warhammer, or maybe they just want more of the same but with new content in the latest expansion of World of Warcraft. either way it’s not good for Age of Conan, that’s for sure.

When this launched originally, it wasn’t really a competitor to Second Life as much as it was just a graphical chat room client that created an interesting 3-D world for you to chat inside. I never really understood why people would want to be there chatting in a little virtual world, but then again companies like Sony are working hard to create what amounts to the exact same thing so clearly we haven’t seen the last of these fancy chat rooms. What I think we can all take away from this is that a chat room is still a chat room and putting fancy avatars inside it doesn’t make it any more interesting. People still just want to chat. Last time I checked there were about 1 million different ways you could do that on the Internet so adding one more chat client to the pile seems like kind of the waste.

Nice try Google but it again to the day I think it makes more sense to make a game be a game and a chat client via chat client and don’t try and blur the line unless the game meets chat or the chat needs a game. better luck next time Google.

Also, pre-orders are now being taken for the Entrenchment micro-expansion for the game. It is being priced at $9.99. The pre-order will also enable you to try out the expansion in beta form before the actual release date, which is a nice perk. As usual, Stardock delivers fantastically to its customers.

To put that into perspective the last expansion pack Burning Crusade sold 3.5 3 million copies in its first month. This time around some people expect the new expansion to sell over 5 million copies in its first month. Once again these are astonishing numbers but not exactly surprising ones. Running World of Warcraft seems to be a license to print money and the developer can do no wrong at this point.

Ironically, I stopped playing this game just before the expansion in spend a lot of time playing Fallout 3. Clearly I’m in the minority and from what I’ve heard once again Blizzard has delivered a fantastic expansion to an already fantastic game. Even still, I’m absolutely happy with leaving WoW for greener pastures. Of course that won’t stop them from continuing to sell huge amounts of games and I would imagine that this time next year the total subscriber base might even hit 15 million.

It will be interesting to see how this game fares against the other fantastic game releases in the last month also available such as Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, and Left 4 Dead. I’m still absolutely 100% addicted to Fallout 3, so I’ll probably be playing catch-up all the way until this spring. Joy.

If you want a great game that has a fascinating and interesting single player experience there are absolutely tons of great games available. I could name them but that would take way too long. So, this game isn’t going to make it out this year but even if it had I don’t think you would’ve had a very good launch against games such as World of Warcraft and Warhammer. It’s really too bad because this game looks quite interesting at one point.

This year has really been a breakout year for Steam. Granted, there have always been the great Valve games released on Steam, but this year it seems like a lot more companies are putting their absolute best games on Steam. This says to me that steam is here to stay and that digital distribution is also here to stay. That is great news for everyone involved because if you experience losing a CD or trying to reinstall without the proper serial number or even just a scratched disk, you understand how absolutely frustrating physical media can be.

Kudos to both violent arrest of the game industry for making digital downloads a reality in a way that is not as painful or ridiculous as they could have tried to be.

What’s really neat about all this is that without Half-Life we wouldn’t have so many things that we take for granted now such as the Steam platform, Counter Strike, Left 4 Dead, Half Life 2,  Portal, and probably some other games I’m not even thinking of. It’s really quite astonishing what one small game built by a few former Microsoft employees has become in this gaming industry that we have today. One has to admire the company for what they have accomplished in only 10 short years and it makes you think and wonder what they can accomplish in 10 more.

If nothing else this shows that valve is absolutely committed to the idea of cooperative play on the PC platform. Since consoles have a much easier time of doing a whopper of online play via the services such as Xbox Livethose games tend to have intelligent cooperative play built-in as almost a standard feature anymore. For example, Halo 3 had fantastic cooperative play that work through the entire campaign. In fact it even worked over the Internet which proves that online co-op or to play can work and a game like left for dead is absolutely perfectly suited for cooperative play. It’s actually designed around it.

I’ve even been reading that the game’s single player is not nearly as good as the cooperative play in the cooperative play is how was actually designed and intended to be played. Thus, Valve offering this deal is not only brilliant but perhaps even necessary to the future of PC gaming as a platform that can compete favorably with console gaming.