It appears the election has stirred something within myself as tonight has been the most tweets as it were for anything. It’s almost as if I’m working, reporting on the “Jolly Election” as old David Dimbleby, the lord of Britain just put it.

Tomorrow, let’s see if we get what we need, not what we think will work as that hasn’t worked before.

Or am I just dreaming again and in reality, nothing will ever change in the wonderful bubble of the political world?

And now, an update from the end of June 2010: Perhaps now some time has passed, it’s best to comment on what had occurred that fateful night as far as the television went.

The BBC decided to stage the election in it’s “election studio”, something which was mentioned about once every 3 seconds, and was a cross between “Mission Control” and one of those evil lairs where the new Bond villain might be hiding in. All the usual suspects were on board to talk pointlessly to people for the first few hours about what might happen etc, then they just sit back and relax as people count all the pretty pieces of paper.

Oh and we had to have the celebrity knees-up every few minutes to see what people off the telly thought. Well certainly the impression I got was; cheers for the beers Mr. BBC!

But that was boring to the point of being in danger of contracting the disease from 28 Days later, so off we went to Sky News, with Adam Bloated, before he went nuts, almost everything you were seeing was being interrupted by a whoosing sound. If someone stood up, there was a whoosh, if someone had a chart to show, there was a whoosh. I swear there was a whoosh when someone farted….

And so to the main event of the evening, almost overshadowing the event of those funny people who pretend they know what they are doing, the Channel 4 Election Night, which in paper promised to be an excellent of crying over the nightmare which would follow, but alas, what we ended up with something, that was borderline a war crime.

One of the main reasons to watch was good old Charlie Brooker, a man who in the past has looked at countless hours of television news and mocked it beyond compare. It seems he was on the naughty step most of the time, as he had to stand at the back of the class, while Jimmy Carr labored through jokes so badly written, he’d been better off dangling his keys instead to get a better response.

At this point, my tweeting as it’s known in the fashoinable circles was at a all time high for one evening, being clever with lines like “Labour wins a seat. They get to take it home afterwards.” and “Oh no! People turned up to vote. What will happen next? (money is on a man running through the room on fire.)” in response to the fact that lots of people tried to vote then couldn’t.

I suppose when you have to start making your own entertainment up on an important evening, when all other avenues fail, you know you’re on a loser.

In the days that came afterwards, we still had Flash Gordan in Number 10, probably stealing the walnut cabinet holding the expensive scotch, while people argues about the fact that no-one was good enough to win outright. I thought it was one of the best results really, as no-one had really showed they knew what to do about the naughty that had happened beforehand.

After intense sexual pressure, We got a “buy one get one free” collation…collection….coal…..bunch of different people to run our fair country and it’s been a few weeks since they all took offices (and other things) and all we know so far is, they are just as corrupt as before (oh yes, already had a great scandal with that fellow fiddling his expenses to not tell people he’s gay, bless him) and stuff is going to be more expensive and puppies are to be drowned en mass as they don’t contribute to our GDP.

A victory for us all indeed.

After getting up on this fine Saturday morning, had some breakfast and a poo (not at the same time), watching a bit of the news, you know how dull people’s lives really are for the most part, I sat down to play some games (yes, instead of going outside into the city streets, with every increasing numbers of ladies wearing less now that the summer is coming). Steam, Valve software’s all singing all dancing money making distribution machine decided I needed to know about this;

Can you feel the dried up old boob that is now the Call of Duty franchise being milked again? 5 maps, three new for 12 quid after the “speical” pre-order price comes to an end. The mind, as they say, is blown.

This is not the first example of people getting overcharged for over hyped rubbish of course, look at the Apple maxipad, where thousands of fan-boys (and ladies in need to keep their underpants clean) went mad for it, only to discover slight problems with it days later with the wireless connection. The world is coming up with more and more pointless ways you can waste your cash.

The sad thing is people will buy it anyway….Come on! What happened to us men, spending our ill-gotten gains after pressing buttons in an office, on prostitutes, yogurt and other naughty items? That reminds me….must dash.

Tonight, for once, I took time out to watch the telly for a change and focused on watching an episode of the famous Panorama on BBC1, a show which looks at various issues occurring in the world today, like Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe programme except far less amusing nor containing any swear words for added effect.

But once more I felt the nerd rage build inside me, even prompting me to enter a blog entry for the first time in a while, for this programme was about the “net police” coming to get you for ripping off material you didn’t pay for,, due to a new digital rights bill moving through parliament right now.

The show mainly focused on the music industry, you know, those lovable rogues that fuel the wages of many mainstream artists and of course brought us the likes of Simon Cowell. Yeah, them lot. Already we’re not on their side.

Because I prefer to comment on such things that actually doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, here was a comment I left with them, of course if it got published on the site, I’d be amazed:

I absolutely laughed at some of the comments being made and also could not believe how much was left out.

However in concentrating on just the music industry, and not even really highlighting anything on the TV industry, where waste also reins as much as in music, Video game piracy or some of the solutions being put forward to see where habits could be changed for instance, like Spotify to any great detail, nor even think about the reasons why people do it for free (focusing on students or kids, it’s not exactly difficult to see why they do it.) it feels a great disservice has been done by only covering a tiny portion of the overall situation and something like this, would need a lot more air time to look at everything.

Perhaps the portion with Stephan Timms MP could have been better articulated really….By them, I did infer the government, however the point has probably gotten lost by now.

To be honest, I felt like I could have made a better programme using cling film and a vomiting dog, and for god’s sake, please stop showing us the Pirate Bay on these programmes, there are countless others as well but I suspect the researchers on these lovely jollies never bother looking at anything else.

A bit more research, questioning and perhaps not try to cram everything in a 27 minute film would perhaps go further for the legal cause than what this did tonight.

Boo hoo, why have about 2000 people only got invites to a beta test of a computer game that lots of people seem to care about, and I’m not part of it, I went to all the shows, paid thousands of pounds travelling round the world to turn up in a hotel dressed as Frodo, only to then be laughed at because my ears weren’t real enough, oh the torment, the horror, this is not why millions dies in countless wars so we are denied to play against people who fry in sunlight, but can move and build huge armies using the power of their minds instead.

Christ. That was a long winded sentence.

The thing is, I actually never traveled anywhere looking like a reject from Lord of the Rings, nor paid lots of money like others in the world, yet somehow, I was one of the lucky first few who got to play the first round of the Starcraft 2 beta, and the overjoyed look on my gleeful face having got home after a long hard day of sleeping, you could have used as a Christmas card.

And what would a post like this be without some pictures just showing the fact that I have it and you don’t, like the snide little small minded ba****d I am:

Well aside from the fact that I’ve been able to log onto something that others haven’t been able to, mainly due to the fact that they care very little and have other things to do, what could I possibly tell you about this beta experience of the sequel to one of the very best real time strategy games ever created?

Well, for a start, not a lot. You see, you are effectively thrown in at the deep end of the multi-player only for this testing, with the single player content, the part where most people’s interests will lie firmly remaining out of sight for the time being. You have to create a primary and secondary name to be seen by people, link that to your battle.net thing and then you start pushing buttons to start losing.

I say losing, as that’s what you’re going to do for the first ten matches in either 1 vs 1 or 2 vs 2 because I felt all cocky having got the chance to play and I lost within 4 minutes of playing the first game, as my opponent at the time chose to “rush.”

When I say “rush”, I don’t mean “rush to the bus stop as it’s just pulled up”, or “rush your homework by colouring in different doodles and hope that gets you a pass for History.”

No, I mean “rush” as in build lots of one type of a unit, normally the first one you get to build that has a gun or something, then go to the other guy’s base and destroy everything before he’s had a chance to put down some lovely carpet and do up the kitchen in the command center.

Games like this are a regular occurance at the moment, with one time the excuse given to me when I asked why he just “rushed” was, “I chose a random race, you have to just win when you select random.” Well, the idea of playing against someone is to win, but surely that just means it’s down to whoever builds the one lot of units first and races to your exact location. Like the strategy there.

The other current method of play is racing up the various technology options and then building one huge armada of the big mother f**king ships and the simply fly in and destroy everything. In nearly 4 minutes.

If this type of thing happens 10 times in a row before you can then placed in the special needs league for each type of game, you can bet your bottom dollar, that people are simply going to leave the multi-player content like the first game, where basically the Koreans using every limb possible took over the universe, (well one of them died on the toilet after taking over the universe) and then taking to the warm comforting safety of the single player and then walk away after it’s all done.

The new units, I’ve not really had the time to get to grips with as you have to try them out when you’re playing against a real person, so nine times out of ten, you don’t know at the present moment, what unit is good for what situation, hopefully they all have guns and they hurt the other evil people more than they can hurt me. There is a mode where you can play against the computer, however this mode is so easy to win here, even I can win here. The only way to get better is to play against others.

And that’s only dependent on how long it is before you throw in the towel and go back to w*nking. At least you win in an empty way, every time.

Yes, instead of focusing on the now, which as I type consists of listening to ambulance sirens bellowing out their ever-increasing wails to non existent traffic outside, let’s have a post dedicated to that year which no-one remembers fondly: 2009, the a**hole of the noughties.

(Note: Must find out what this decade is going to be referenced as by those silly radio shows.) And now for a brief news rundown of the year, complete with sarcastic remarks;

Meanwhile back here at Ooh Sometimes, if any of the content was to go by, very little actually changed over 2009. The number of posts were still down, the lack of anything substantial of note proved to be the deciding issue amongst money struggles, visits to Spain were the most in any one year, setting a new record for….err….something.

The best month for actual fun and frolics was indeed March, though that was more due to the over eagerness to write about 2008, more than then current events such as the discovery of a YouTube video where a turtle get his freak on with a shoe, and wondering why there was so much built-up anger most of the time about, well, anything as it happened.

The further discovery that Sweden can do Vampire Horror while also making us laugh with cats, only made the situation more bizarre to grasp what was actually going on here at all.

While there were some posts about the films of the year, Star Trek being on of the better films of course, Gamer’s Corner all but dried up with content, only coming back in some for towards the end of the year, and there was no sign at all of the Ooh Sometimes Podcast to be heard. Mr Voice Over Man has long since assumed that Europe had been destroyed in some accident involving beans and went to tend to his farm in Texas.

The highlights for sure had to be meeting Mr. Micheal Ironside with Mrs Jewel Staite, with the second best being annoying to the Spanish prostitutes in Madrid, taking photos and running away. The Eurogamer Expo also ranks highly.

And that’s it as silly as all this is, 2009 was actually a bad year for most people, and there was not a lot of fun to be had other than repeating the same routine every day, getting fatter and lazier than ever before and become perhaps far more cynical about everything than a 27 year old ever should.

Therefore, this single crappy (note the header of this post has one less p in it, thus perhaps insinuating that it’s so crappy, it can’t even be spell checked properly) post should be taken as is, 2009 was indeed a year to forget in many ways.

What’s worse, 2010 has not started out any better, with the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Haiti, more terrorism alerts, even more silliness with the MPs because they still want our cash to get into office, more people are inquiring about divorce… the list goes on and it’s only the 25th of January.

Nothing has changed at all then, we are all even doing exactly as we all were before the end of last year. That new year, new start rubbish has indeed proven to be entirely that; rubbish.

Man, I used to be cheerful.

So to business in the strange bit between Christmas and New Year, and though this may not come as a shock to many people, it has come as a shock to me, having torn myself away from the digital world for a short time to spend away with the folks eating my way through 17 tonnes of food, metal and puppies while having a drip in my arm for the cider.

British Television is crap.

And not just even a little bit crap, I mean crap to the point where in a thunderstorm, you fall to your knees and shout “WHY?!?!?!” to the accompanying dramatic orchestral overture signifying that hell has landed on Earth and there are no Big Macs left in McDonalds.

Let’s examine what was put on Prime-time shall we? Endless repeats of shows older than I am, all demonstrating that TV was better in the 70s, Harry Hill’s TV Fart, where they look at all the TV that’s on and make fun of it with being that funny (and somehow that in itself, funny enough to have won an award or 12), Ant and Dec’s Boxing Day Disaster, where lots of people we care very little for show up and say something while dribbling, at which point all the animals in the audience cry out for more.

Let’s even remark on the human tragedy that is the All new Mr and Mrs on ITV, with which you are presented with three celebrity couples, all of whom you want to see how long they last with a chainsaw between the eyes. They were all so sickening to see, gushing over each other just to ensure that you know that they have everything wonderful in life and you don’t.

I want to call them all a bunch of hairless f**kers, though perhaps that’s just me being bitter that people with the intelligence of dried prunes are worshipped these days, and therefore nine times of ten it’s not even worth getting out of bed.

Oh, and to satisfy those noisy pr*ts that read trash like Heat magazine, we got to witness the most embarrassing facts like to be that the man watches football and the woman goes shopping, or owns lots of one thing. STOP THE PRESSES…I want to get off. We’ll also leave the X factor annoyances to one side as frankly it pretty much shows itself for what a frightening abomination it is.

The usual accompaniment of Soap Operas also did their best to invade the schedules like the boozy uncle which comes for Christmas and ends up staying till July or he’s burnt one of the kids.

The brief glimpses of both the major contenders on British TV, seemed to share the exact same plots now, perhaps now sharing the same writing team for cost reasons where basically if none of them have wailed and hit each other for 10 seconds, it’s considered a slow episode. Dallas was considered to be of higher educational value than any of this.

In fact, the news that an insane Nigerian was successfully halted from blowing people up by heroic passengers aboard an internal US flight came as a welcome change from finding out that someone had slept with someone else while having several other hundred relationships with various bits of fruit (not all of them human), and just on that subject as a quick aside; let’s see how long it is before the British are blamed for this tw*t by the Americans who should have been paying attention a wee bit more rather than having their 5734th burger of the day.

Back to the TV (much as I don’t actually want to) Channel 4 did its best with repeats of the Peep Show, where only 4 or 5 of the shows are actually worth watching, with huge amounts of Come dine with me, where everyone on the show you soon want all to die from Food Poisoning, thus slowly solving the world crisis on over population.

Finally on Channel 5, Heads or Tails, where contestants literally flip a coin to win Justin Lee Collins, an Ewok from the west country from what little I can tell. And maybe some sludge, who knows what is actually on Channel 5 these days?

Oh and we didn’t even get onto the endless adverts for perfume to make you smell worse than a pub toilet and numerous appeals to sponsor polar bears, pandas, African children, Prince Charles, tins of beans etc.

I could actually carry on the endless list of absolutely awful drivel that graced the screens, which we were forced to switch off the box and enjoy silence instead (none of that conversation nonsense here thank you very much, talking to other people, what will you come up with next?), but alas perhaps we should contemplate boycotting the whole lot?

Quality shows like Spooks, Screenwipe and the odd sitcom from Channel 4 are lost now forever it seems in an endless stream of made up reality shows and third rate celebrity loving train-wreaks so stupefying, I honestly believe people are becoming of lower intelligence as a result, thus all that bleeds into real life and makes the rest of us that don’t actually know about these shows question whether the idea of Natural selection is really just a load of twaddle.

But coming away from scathing remarks now, it appears the multi-channel age has finally come unstuck, where the television executives have too much air space to fill and now are forced to scramble absolutely and I mean this, absolutely anything together on a budget of £3.50 and a packet of crisps to keep us from going off to do something else. Like masturbating. Again.

Perhaps one way of solving this, is now start reducing the number of channels, thus reducing the airtime and thus ensuring that higher standards of programming, to entertain and perhaps on occasion educate have to be met in order to grace our screens given the fact air time will once again be at a premium.

After all it will mean more money will be channeled into few, better programs, rather than spread so thinly over 700 channels with nothing good on, something which given most of the channels are cutting back with at present due to budgets being tight, something else which surely will have influenced this year’s programming.

Maybe in this day and age, less will be more?

Or maybe now is the time to pitch that idea I’ve been saving for a rainy day; have like two pigs in a duffle coat fly to Egypt to fight crime. This time next week it will be on BBC One, just watch, if you can that is.

Now this is going to appear to be something of a bizarre topic to bring up at this time of year, given the fact that those turkeys aren’t going to eat themselves and Grandma needs throwing on the fire, nevertheless, this evening it was something I felt compelled to write about and given the fact after two days in and out of bed exhausted, finally the time has come to put finger to keyboard once more.

Something came up at work (oh yes I’m still employed by a real firm you know, well at the time of writing I was anyway) recently and one event that has been at the back of my mind a fair bit, was the fact that we all had to adhere to a new “Blogging policy” which is a new thing to have to consider really when you’re a happy go lucky chap on the internet writing about how many time you went to the toilet in one day or the questionable smells from your armpits.

There are now for the first time ever, official guidelines I now have to follow, perhaps out of something truly horrible happening like business being lost, or perhaps even people avoiding working for them, for hearing the latest in a long line of spooky stories at the haunted corporate building. Who knows why they materialised, the fact is that they are there.

Then I started wondering more about the whole area of “enforced” censorship as a result of who you work for, and not for the first time either, this subject came up a while ago: How to write a Blog without losing your job… from September 2007 in fact, when a female worker got fired from Nintendo for being thick and I learned about the existence of “Blog Change Agents” working for companies writing to people who write about them negatively to try and change their opinions via one means or another. Maybe it’s time to revisit the subject and see if things have changed and perhaps now find way around the minefield that is blogging freely while under the company rules.

Well even at the arse end of 2009, not a lot has changed in many ways. People still get jolly upset legally when you mention them with their PR people having a look over first and it appears someone did just that recently as we were all warned recently by various managers to not knock the company you work for to other people outside your family as not only does this reflect badly on the company, but also yourself as a person. Though….surely that’s obvious.

I mean not the “badly on you” part, let’s be honest, raise your hand if you’ve moaned about work to anyone outside your family. There we are, we’ve all done it and it’s part of conversations that people have on a daily basis.

But the stupidest thing to do is this: writing down your annoyances on the internet for all to see. Then frankly you’re asking for it and you deserve to get your arse handed to you with a lovely P45 tax sheet to hand in at your first day at Burger World.

As much as we all would love to write a 70,000 word novel on the whole subject of why our workplaces are located in the 7th layer of hell including a couple of chapters bad-mouthing everyone who steals our oxygen, wondering who the hell stupid people advance to positions of authority even though they could be outwitted by a dead badger, while earning 17 times what you do, while you struggle living in a bin etc etc, what purpose would it ultimately serve?

Granted it’s a release of anger, pent-up aggression that one seldom can excise in other ways other than a good hard (woooh there, can’t put that in), in the long run you will only serve to damage your employment chances, which given the fact we are still in a depression, is just as bad as teasing a lion by putting your head in it’s mouth while flicking it’s love spuds with a wet towel. So what good actually does get served from writing about what you do?

The odd exception aside from long and boring technical manuals or equally dull autobiographies which springs to mind was the work created by Belle de Jour, aka Dr Brooke Magnanti, the woman who wrote about her “work” in the Secret Diaries of a Call Girl, which led to the series where Billie Piper made sexy noises a lot and got her breasts out for ITV2.

In a strange sort of way, this writing served to highlight what it was like to work in a certain industry, the highs and tragic lows along with strange situations which can occur even when doing the job on a regular basis, in this case, the naughty industry. It’s the only exception that springs to mind at the moment that had become popular and sold very well as a result. But again this was all still cloaked in an air of mystery as to who it was that was writing such material, only the fact of who wrote it came out this year, way after all the material had been out on the public domain for some time, and her finanical future was assured.

Given the fact that there is the worry about writing the wrong thing these days, here is a link to the EFF that was given to me recently with tips on How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else) and a lot of the tips revolve around being anonymous. That’s it. The key to the whole freedom of speech bit is be anonymous.

It seems to protect you from a lot of things and in a twisted fashion you could end up becoming a blogging superhero, working by day as a binman, but at night, armed with a keyboard, you destroy the festering corruption that is coming from the local council’s bin management policies and put an end to 17 different bins being used for the same thing. Provided you are smart about the whole thing, you could change things for the better or, let’s be honest, get what you really wanted; a column in the Guardian.

It seems to work for a number of miscellaneous writers who appear in the newspapers, commenting on the City’s daft financial practices while buying another boat for themselves as a treat or those stupid twentysomethings just writing about their love lives which are almost always utter failures, oh boo hoo…..To me, they’re all tw*ts.

But really a lot of us will not achieve anything from such writing and therefore in most ways it’s just better to shut the hell up. The UK, though behind America in setting up policies based around what you do outside of work, is fast catching up, and it won’t be long before it’s the new standard that you sign a form stating that you will not talk about anything work related unless authorised to do so.

Should we be actually be concerned that more and more, your workplace can dictate what we can and can’t say on a medium that’s meant to be free from restraint? Well the simple truth is you should be more concerned about the X Factor, the cost of wonderbras or the fact that global warming is occurring as a result of your excessive farting instead. It’s actually less likely to attract the wrong kind of attention and won’t be an issue on your ability to keep that cardboard box over your head at a time where career options are limited.

Unless you’re a hard working prostitute, in which case, I salute you and look forward to reading about all it.

No sooner had I had posted about Christmas, how little things change unless you push it as well as New year being this point where people pretend that things are going to change, a new start if you will than my spies in the underworld in between playing with themselves and throwing pies at the homeless alerted me to point my browser at this foul thought from humanity:

I had no idea it had already started. Sometimes it does make you wonder about the species we’re a member of….

Yes dear friends it is that time of year….again.

As you can see at the moment, it was time to dig out the old images and theme settings for yet another dose of christ-all-mighty-mas cheer, the same old bloody songs being repeated and sold for the same price as last year, almost as if the record companies and radio stations think it’s the first time we’ve all heard Noddy Holder shout “It’s Christmas, it actually is, honest, I’m not kidding this time.” since yesterday.

The thing is, I rather don’t like Christmas. After last year’s beginning of the credit crunch goodness, things haven’t really changed at all.

You still have to worry what to get people, as you look like a complete and utter rag that’s been tossed all over by Hitler if you fail to turn up with anything short of something amazing, like the cure for cancer, or a remote control house. You got me a jumper to keep the cold out….bastard!

You still end up attending office parties which are just as painful as being in the office as the same people are there, only this time armed with drink, all pretending to like each other but deep down all of them secretly wanting to take out a gun and re-enact the columbine school shootings and may be get a better score.

You have put out 20 year old decorations round the house making the place look more like a council estate complete with burned out Ford Orion than at any other time of the year, buy too much drink and food along with stomach pump, all in the effort to get into the spirit of things. Maybe get a big telly to make sure that the time spent with your loved ones is watching Doctor Who instead any amount of human contact.

Remember as well, you give thanks for everything you have, friends, family, a roof over our heads and food to fill our over sized bellies, basically underlining the fact we’re putting off death for a little while longer while others can’t really do so.

More and more adverts come onto the goggle box, telling us to buy 127874 varieties of bloody toilet water that you’re meant to drown yourself in, plan for our death thanks to June Whitfield, and maybe get another £45,000 unsecured personal loan which sounds like a great idea if it wasn’t for the fact that it was that kind of thinking which got us all into dire straits in the first place.

It’s the time of year you get a few days off, eat and drink and p*ss. Magical.

Perhaps I’m getting a bit bogged down, but here in the dungeon of solitude aka the studio flat with attached shower room/toilet/cupboard/spare bedroom as I type away, there is still nothing really to say this is a special time of year any more.

There are lights up and I swear I’ve seen signs up that Christmas is coming, but…well…nothing else. It’s all got lost in the grey wilderness that is London, and in the meantime, there is still much work to do, so get to it or Tiny Tim will die!

Christmas; It’s just hollow, the majesty of it, the atmosphere, the good times, does anyone else think that now we all meet up, complain, eat , get drunk, complain about being drunk and then say bye for another year then return to the caves we came from?

New Year’s for instance is actually worse, in that for that little bit of time, people think it’s a new year, which means new me, achieve goals, lose weight (oh yes, remember all those f**king fitness DVDs will be on sale at one minute past midnight January 2nd) whereas we all know it’s bulls**t but we can kid ourselves for a few weeks where this is the year we change our career, move somewhere else, or meet that special someone.

Well stop it.

Stop it now.

Unless you really going to do something, keep it to yourself and you won’t hear anything from me in return. Jolly good.

Ok, that was a little harsh, but perhaps my mood has not been one of anything other than sobering realities of recent times and perhaps the wisdom of age is starting to creep in that in the grand scheme of things, this is as good as it gets. Really, as strange as it sounds, this might be the high point of our lives right now, and then that’s it.

Groundhog year will repeat until it doesn’t for you any more.

Hmm, maybe if i got some ghosts visiting me then it might come as a welcome change to what actually happens. Me getting off my arse and doing something laudable in life?Humbug.

In the last few weeks there has been strive among the gaming community about the “so-close, you can smell the napalm” release of Call of Duty: Mighty Fart 2, mainly the PC people at large to be honest, after being told the beloved multi-player mode would not have dedicated servers, no modding of the game at all, 18 players maximum on a peer-to-peer basis with the only difference between the console versions and this would be you can use a keyboard and mouse to play, and can turn the resolution up a bit more.

Add the insult of being charged more for it anyway for very little extra and also even if you have the disks now, you still cannot activate on Steam yet till release day while the Xbox and PS3 people happily lark about online as I type this, even to the point where the Xbox 360 version was the first one to be pirated and out for all to test with, and to be honest, even the old saying “All publicity is good publicity” seems to be getting stretched a fair bit.

What’s more silly was this sight today as i walked back from the local supermarket, carrying 30 packets of super noodles and a dirty mag;

That’s right, already, even before the proper street date of Tuesday 10th, (12th for PC thanks to Timezone differences on Steam) there are second hand copies of the game to be had, at the bargain price from this particular chain of Computer Exchange for £75. That’s just the standard version as well kids, not the fancy ones with a baked bean tin or Night Vision goggles you’d struggle to get the NHS to help pay for (Even if they are prescription).

There you have it, it was pretty much more than enough proof that the cash cow has reached the slaughterhouse. I even balked at £34.99 for the PC versions pricing as being too much for really, not a lot we actually do have any knowledge about bar a couple of videos and here were the console versions for £40 more in a shop window.

That is the problem we as gamers now may have to face. The industry is now competing with the films, music and other activities on an even playing field, and is where the money is there to be made, as people have been going out less, staying at home and investing in home entertainment, rather than spending every weekend at the local Yates, standing in the “Dirty Old Man” corner with their tongues hanging out at the teenagers pretending to be women….oh dear, I’ve said too much.

Activision know this from their money spinning of the Guitar Hero and COD series before, and have gotten to the point where enough actually isn’t enough, They now require your first born child too.

They know people want their products, even if it’s the same thing over and over again. Now they are raising the prices, and now starting to hold back more so you will end up paying for more in the future. DLC is a great way to keep the cash flowing way after the initial release of a product on the market, and that is what all this stinks of. Hell I’d be amazed if the next Call of Duty in 2010 doesn’t come with a £120 plastic gun controller with £50 optional sight to stick on top and other things to be purchased for “the ultimate experience” such as handle-bar mustache.

There’s profiting as a business and then, there’s taking the piss.

My PC will not see COD: MW2 for some time until there is a sale on Steam, or something else which convinces me this actually is a must buy like Call of Duty 4 and World at War (which to be fair was getting a bit long in the tooth Single Player wise until you got to the Nazi Zombies). Sorry, but even I have limits as to how much to pay for things, and right now Left 4 Dead 2 offers more value, something which is important now when we are still struggling to keep our jobs and keep other things going instead as well as having to just stay in as a result of not having the cash to do otherwise.

On that note, I bid you all good day, and will keep the money for MW2 reserved for a few dances from eastern Europeans down at the local bar. See, already looking for value!