My gf is picking me up a copy of this for my birthday under the advice of my xbox live friends. It looks interesting and perhaps more emotional than most of the shooters out there. I'm really hoping that game studios are getting the message that we are aging dammit. We want a good story, good writing and less comic book hero cheese.

I read something online that said they wanted you to get attached to certain characters in the game and then feel something for them when you made choices that got people hurt based on some sort of variable. What I really want is a variable choice system that doesn't feel like a choice system. I want to play the game making choices that suit me with out having to think about what the stupid end clip is going to be.

Various shades of grey choices would bring gaming a lot further than this good / evil thing we have now. Fallout made a weak attempt at it but I didn't find it made much difference.

If I want a good story I'll read a book or watch a movie. In games all I care about is shooting stuff or solving puzzles...anything else is a waste of time.

The key is to make it transparent. None of this choose your own adventure stuff. Dev's can put in key events without the user knowing. But you will feel / experience the consequences good or bad as the story develops which would be key signs of acknowledgement of prior events occurring.

Nothing's more annoying with today's gaming technology than plot devices which all but stop the game and make themselves obvious. I prefer the sort of thing where you might not even realize what you've done until later down the road when you think to yourself "Well crap, maybe I shouldn't have shot that guy after all..."

There's no imagination any more. Games used to be great. Now they take an old idea and change it a little, then pump the game out as quick as possible.

So the launch day was a big fail. The servers for Xbox were all overloaded. They lied about a lot of things. One of the interviews with the developers I was reading talked about how they wanted to do less killing in to help you get attached to humans in the videogame. Well the first level has you mow down probably 300 baddies right off the bat so that was a lie.

They talked about starting the resistance with garden variety weapons from big box stores. You start with some amazing AK style weapon.

That was my experience so far... the rest of 1.5 hours of trying to get into a multiplayer game and having it kick us out of lobby. The twitter feed said they didn't realize how many people would try to play it the first day. Excuse me, but if you launch a game, why wouldn't you have servers ready for every preorder and copy on the shelf for the first day? You are only going to sell more copies as the weeks roll on, so you may as well have that much power available to you right off the bat. The professionalism really bothered me as well. They stated only on twitter in an "oops we didn't have enough servers" kind of fashion about the outages.

They also insert one of those game codes that you have to enter. So if you buy a used copy of the game, you can only reach up to lvl 5. If you want to get past lvl 5, then you gotta pay. It's shit like this that makes me think about going back to piracy.

I also read that the single player campaign, while good, is only like 3-5 hours of gameplay. That pisses me off, because I have no interest in multiplayer for games like this. Oh well, yet another game I won't be buying.

I haven't purchased a new console game since Red Dead Redemption...