If you thought you racked up big phone bills back in the day when you used 56k and there was no flat-rate ISPs around, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Found this amusing news article while randomly browsing the interweb: [link=http://apnews1.iwon.com/article/20060410/D8GT3T6G2.html]Man Gets $218 Trillion Phone Bill[/link]

Been reading [link=htttp://www.inktank.com]InkTank.com[/link] lately (the Angst Technology strip that I posted up previously), catching up with the new issues (I thought they had finished but looks like they started again) and in a particular panel they raise the point about there not being any decent co-operative multiplayer FPSes around lately and I totally agree.

On severaly occasions, myself and my real life mates have although brought up the subject, and to be honest, its quite dissappointing. The last decent multiplayer coop game on the PC (that instantly comes to mind) is the original Quake game. Quake 2 did reproduce a fairly good attempt at coop play but it was nowhere near as good as the original. Since then all FPS games have been about graphics and physics, no concentration on the gameplay whatsoever.

The only recent game to come close would have be Unreal Tournament 2004 with its “Invasion” game mode, and that can never fully quench my thirst for coop play and I’ve played Quake a tad-too many times. There are mods that are coming out for games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 that add cooperative play, but they are either still in development, buggy or have got the gameplay sorted but there are no campaigns with any decent stories.

The cooperative FPS market on the PC is so dry and there are so many gamers wanting another good cooperative hit title to be released I’m surprised the developers could be so blind as not to bother with it anymore. Surely if they included the idea of cooperative play fromt he beginning of a game’s design it would hardly make a difference to the overall game… its just accounting for the fact there may be extra players in the single player.

*Sigh*

Looks like I’m going to have to continue to wait for my holy grail

End of rant…

From one of the old webcomics I used to read ([link=http://www.inktank.com/]InkTank.com[/link]). Doesn’t look like they are updating the strip I most enjoyed. But I remembered this specific strip and definately illustrates how I feel about my final year project at the moment Enjoy
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