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Greed. One of the seven deadly sins. A simple five letters, yet no one seems to be able to talk about greed properly in the gaming world. We constantly hear about the greed of big companies like Microsoft and Sony due to their apparent desire to charge us out the ass for everything.

Early this week, news broke that Microsoft was raising the subscription fee of its Xbox Live Gold service by ten dollars, and the G word began to fly around. Microsoft is obviously driven by nothing but greed. They’re out to screw over the consumer.

I don’t think you understand what greed is.

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Sony Computer Entertainment big boss Kaz Hirai said this week that he believes that a PlayStation console supporting 100% digital distribution is over ten years away. As expected, this opened the floodgates of discussion, with topics ranging from the desire for more downloadable games to net neutrality and the worldwide internet infrastructure. Obviously, this is a multifaceted issue.

But I’m interested in a hypothetical situation here. Assuming that the infrastructure were in place today, and we could quickly, painlessly, and easily download all of our games, would we? When will we, the consumers, be ready to switch to 100% digital distribution?

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Adventure, as a genre, doesn’t really exist anymore. We have some studios like Telltale who make nice, traditional adventure games that not many people play. Aside from that, you could ask a random gamer what the last adventure game he played was, and he’d probably look at you weird and ask, “You mean like God of War?”

Honestly, I’m not in any rush to see “adventure games” make some sudden, miraculous resurgence. Instead, I’m much more interested in those games from other genres that still feel like grand adventures. You know – setting out to explore a huge land, meeting eccentric inhabitants, and generally feeling that sense of adventure that never fails to excite.

But even the sense of adventure seems to be disappearing, and it’s quite troubling.

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Last year, I played H.A.W.X. for something like three hours. It was an experience that I have to struggle to remember, buried amongst the many superior experiences I had that year. I found myself impressed more by the graphics on the ground than the action in the air, which was far more uninteresting than I ever imagined flying a fighter jet could be. For me, it was the final straw. Air combat was over.

However, a trailer emerged just a few days ago that changed all that, rekindling the flame of excitement that I felt was lost forever. The short announcement trailer is full of visceral action, enormous explosions, and even helicopters! I want to play the game I saw in that trailer, and I want to play it now.

The question is, will I ever play that game, or will I just play the lifeless, tired game that the trailer is meant to conceal?

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A few short years ago, we hadn’t even begun to fathom the idea of downloadable console games. We previewed our games by subscribing to official console-branded magazines that included demo discs, and we awaited new console releases with a measure of uncertainty, asking employees in stores like Babbage’s when their stock would come in.

Today, games exist that cannot be preordered, resold, or placed on our shelves. They’re becoming as much a part of our gaming lives as major disc releases, and their quality is often comparable. Yet a strange thing occurred to me recently: I don’t think the gaming world is ready to crown a downloadable game as the year’s very best game, even if it is in fact the best.

Well, why the hell not?

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I continue to be astounded by the things that people say. It seems that whenever a videogame company announces a new product, or announces a price to go along with it, angry people come frothing forth hoping to get a slice of the “I’m a spoiled brat” pie.

This week, official news of Microsoft Kinect’s final price point appeared, and at $149.99 USD, absolutely no one was surprised. But pissed, yep, they were definitely pissed. The funny thing? The vast majority were, and are, pissed for stupid reasons, and it’s just getting pathetic.

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No videogame genre can survive without evolution. Hell, nothing can survive without evolution. Over time, something bigger and better will appear, and survival of the fittest dictates that one must adapt or die. There are no exceptions. Whether it takes a year or a century, the weak will fall and the strong will take their places.

So, what videogame genre is in greatest need of a lesson in natural selection? There are countless answers, and your own is likely colored by your own experiences. For me, it’s the fighting game. Despite a couple of somewhat important evolutions, my own preferences are issuing an ultimatum: try harder or lose me forever.

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I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a total hypocrite when it comes to videogame difficulty. All at once, I find myself wishing that games presented more of a challenge, yet whenever I play an especially difficult game that makes me lose progress, I feel that my time is being wasted. One thing I know for sure is this: even when trudging through an especially difficult game, I rarely feel truly threatened.

In modern experiences, the simple fact is that true feelings of danger are hard to come by. We’re given experiences with the ability to save anywhere, liberal checkpoints, and overall low difficulty, and in many ways, I wouldn’t trade this for anything. Given this, how can games at the very least achieve the illusion of putting us in grave danger at every corner?

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We’re all busy people, and it’s no surprise that we don’t tolerate a lot of the bullsh*t that games feed us. Recently, one writer for a popular game site refused to review Nier because he couldn’t figure out a fishing minigame, citing that “you shouldn’t tolerate games that waste your time.” Well, that makes sense, doesn’t it?

Aside from his inability to fish in the correct spot, his argument isn’t quite as straightforward as it may seem. While I didn’t exactly love my 20-hour affair with Nier either, and while I agree that games have no right to waste our time, the reality is that even a bad game can be worth our time.

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The Electronic Entertainment Expo has a long and strange history; the event achieved an attendance of 70,000 people in 2005 before dropping down to about 5,000 for the two invite-only years of 2007 and 2008. This year, attendance was estimated to be about 46,000, which is a far cry from 2007-2008 levels, yet just over half of the size of the 2005 show.

So the question is: What is the current state of E3, both for the attendee and the non-attendee? After attending this year, I can say one thing for certain. E3 still has a lot of room to improve if it’s going to remain the one event that gamers anticipate all year.

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Gamer Limit user Keith commented last week about Red Dead Redemption’s hydrophobic protagonist, whose life is extinguished without warning whenever he encounters water more than, oh, waist high. If you’re anything like me, your first time discovering this was accidental, maybe stumbling off of a dock. In my case, the next moments were spent staring at my screen asking, “Really?”

I actually find myself asking the question “How is this still acceptable?” rather often when I’m playing games. There are certain design flaws or failings that just seem like they should have been fixed eons ago, yet they still crop up, and often in some extremely high quality titles. So let’s all put on our bastard hats and tear into those design flaws that are well and truly unacceptable.

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With games having an increasingly narrative focus, it’s natural that some common storytelling themes have begun to emerge. No, I don’t mean themes like “saving the world.” Games are beginning to be about things, tackling themes that are more personal to both the game’s creators and its audience. They’re demonstrating a level of personal involvement in the narrative that seemed to be absent from gaming for quite some time.

It’s only natural that some of these themes overlap, and that the industry as a whole might follow some sort of narrative trend, putting games on the same path, though their journeys may be quite different. I’ve already noticed some that recur in some wildly different games.

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