Do we really need to look back at Far Cry 2? I didn't even look forward to it, but aside from that, what are we looking back at? They innovated in the department of system requirements, but is it really innovation if they've done it once before already? I guess the thing is pretty and got good reviews, but so what? Where's the insight, the brilliance, the revolution? It's not Doom or Quake or Half Life or Counter-Strike or Natural Selection or System Shock or anything remotely like any of those - there's nothing to see here, move along.

Also, I think it's been three months since release - is it really the time to compile a detailed introspective and take a time out to survey the ravaged field of their accomplishments, or are post-Christmas sales merely slumping? Surely the legacy of their awesomeness will need a bit more time to accrue.

But I thought the web was good?

WRONG! The web is bad! Well, sometimes, for some things... maybe.

There's a grab-bag of random thoughts there on some things that could be inherent problems in the web and some that are merely artifacts, and it seems neither here nor there.

The big guys always call the shots - who cares if it's browsers or operating systems, you're not going to tell MS (or Apple, just to be fair) what to do and there's no guarantee the next SP or random security patch won't bone all your effort with no notice or recourse, whether it's in-browser or on the desktop.

And the web UIs are a mess? That's nothing to do with the web - lots of people design lots of stuff, you get randomness. It's no different than on the desktop, except the long reign of some MS products and the fact that developing Windows apps you get to use some of those same form controls gets you the appearance of this magical consistency that's really just the consequence of monoculture. Open any full-screen app (read: game) and it's a brave new world, like on the web, because the pre-generated MS controls and constraints don't apply. But this is good, right, because you're not doing what the man tells you to do?

And the productivity argument... did he just need to reach 5? You can block the outside world coming in over the wire, it's not that big an effort, and then people will find other ways to screw around - hand-held devices are so powerful now the whole issue of limiting the desktop to work issues only is quickly becoming moot.

And so on and so forth... I guess it's redundant to say "you need to consider each usage case based on its specific merits," but then the decision-makers don't...

While I'm generally a paranoid person myself, I feel it is ludicrous to accuse Bethesda of leaving things out to use as expansions later, even hypothetically; that game is freaking huge. Love the game or hate it, you'll be hard pressed to find anything else these days that gives you so much to see and do, so many people to eat^H^H^Hinteract with.