It just hasn't been a good two weeks to be a gamer. Last week, if we wanted to buy used games, we were told we were no better than common thieves. This week, we find out that if we want to continue to play games on Xbox Live, we're going to have to fork over an extra $10 a year. Gaming as a subculture is in trouble. Gamers for years have been pleading with society to take them seriously, but that serious nature comes at a steep cost - the cost of doing business.

I never anticipated sinking low enough to jump into the gender war between idiot female gamers and prepubescent man-children, but so help me God, when one encounters this shit enough times, biting ones tongue becomes harder than standing on a block of ice with broken feet and crutches while fighting sexually frustrated grizzly bears.  These are the 5 unfailing phenomena, one of which I encounter at least once (If I'm lucky) for every 3 hours that I play a MMORPG or my beloved Team Fortress 2.

Yo!  So I was playin ball with my olda brothas when this freakin demo comes chargin into the field.  The guy was all ova' the place!  Wicked drunk!  You'd think the staggerin cyclops would be easy to drag off the field, but he starts 'targin' all around and I have trouble gettin a hold of him!  Eventually he charged himself right into the swing of my Sandman, but that's besides the point. 

It got me thinkin.  What's up with all the speed buffs from Mann Co. lately?  Equalizer, Eyelander, Pain Train, Targe...  What the heck is all this crap?!  When I enlisted, my employer told me it was my duty to provide one unique skill to the team...  The same ability I honed right here on the streets of the roughest town in the world.  Speed. 

If you're anything like me, you've been patiently waiting for what seems like an eternity for the Battlefield Bad Company 2 SPECACT pack to release on PS3. You're also probably sitting on small nation's worth of Dr. Pepper caps with promotional codes to use for said BFBC2 pack. Finally, our time has come and the pack has been released. We've only had to wait an extra couple of weeks then our 360 brethren, another tradition most PS3 players have gotten used to, but at least we'll all be able to revel in our sweet juicy justice of (almost free) DLC...at least, one would think.

Most of us have a routine.  In the late afternoon I work out.  Then I get a shower.  And I shave.... using Steam's razor sharp user interface to do the job.  Its precise steel colored edges are better than BIC and get closer than Gillette.  I mean, the Steam UI is SHARP!  The recent changes aren't all bad, but they've definately softened a bit.  Don't get me wrong, I still love it, but why does everything in the online world become softer, rounder, and more bubbly? 

With all of these games coming out on every platform these days, I thought I would be able to find some more information about this topic.  A Wikipedia page or at the least a heated forum discussion ending in an argument about the awesomeness of Runescape.  I can’t find a damn thing even mentioning something that touches cross platform licensing for games.  Maybe I’m not searching for the right topics, or maybe this concept is newer than I thought, but probably not. I mean, I’m just some random internet blog rambling douche bag.

Sorry for the lull everybody, winter breaks are productivity killers. Without further delay, we present the final list of gamers we love to hate.

We've all played with them. They exist out there and there's nothing that can be done to stop them. Some are funny, some are tragic and then there are those that make you sad to know that we share a gene pool. Grunge Gamer presents part one of the most loathsome multiplayer gamers.

Okay, to some extent the title is misleading and a lie. Actually, your review can matter, but for the most part, the majority of people who sit down and write these reviews are biased in one form or another.

'Oh no, D!' you say to me. 'I'm very open minded about my games!'

Yes, well Confucious said that 'If a mind is too open, everything falls out.' This is exactly the problem we're facing in gaming nowadays. People are open minded, liberal and will take ANYTHING the industry gives them.

I digress. Back to the original topic...

I don’t know if it’s the servers I play on or what, but it looks to me that 90% of the people playing tf2 are playing for their individual scores.  Maybe it’s because I play mostly on pubs because I don’t really feel like joining a clan.  Some of us actually want to win the game and it makes me want to jam rusty Phillips head screw drivers into my eyeballs when someone is only playing for themselves.

Just last weekend I was dead and in spec mode watching a demo-man standing next to the payload on Gold rush shooting out his little bombs at some sniper sitting up in the sniper nest, not killing him of course.  Mean while 2 scouts and a medic pushed the cart right past this retard to win the game.  All he had to do was turn around and bomb the cart so I could respawn and actually help out the team to WIN THE GAME.  That’s what it’s about isn’t it? Winning the game? You’d think it was, but apparently not.