My turn to rant after reading ShrapnelBlog

[Neophyte]

I just read the blog entry regarding the demise of the gaming store due to internet shopping. After reading the whole article, I realize that the article was about non-puter gaming stores, but the headline made me think about the state of the puter gaming industry.

It seems like the market is flooded with RTS and FPS games, which, if you like those games, could be a good thing. However, for those of us who yearn for the good old days of turn-based strategy like The Operational Art of War (blast Microsoft for not making XP compatible with this classic) or RPG's such as Fallout (does anyone know if that recent Fallout clone was any good?) and Arcanum where power advancement of the character was nice, but you really kept playing to find out the story of the game, this glut of RTS and FPS is not a good thing.

An exception is KotR (and 2) - the real time graphics and soundtrack was so well done that one could sit back and just enjoy the lightsaber combat that one setup in the pausable order issuing phase. But for the most part I don't buy games from the physical store anymore simply because most packages don't even bother to say whether they are RTS or turn-based, etc., and most manufacturers seem to think that Diablo style games are RPG's - I almost want to purchase games labelled action-RPG for their Diablo style game just to support the naming convention.

Having said this, I'm thankful for independant game distributors such as Shrapnel. One thing I would like to see is purchase by download - when I ordered Dominions II I wanted to play turn 41 right away, not wait the three days it took to get here.

Anyway, I just wanted to vent a little, and since I said so in my subject, I don't feel the need to apologize.

Lastly, a big thank you is in order for Shrapnel and associated mfr's for making games for us people not in the mainstream and for providing this server space for my thoughts to be shared.

I hope everyone has a good holiday season, whether it starts now or in a few weeks.