Recall to arms

Tom Chick on the Firing Line:

The Top Ten Takebacks in Gaming

This Firing Line was going to be a list of the 25 Most Underappreciated Games That Were Overhyped But Underrated While Also Being Overlooked, but I think Gamespy already covered that. If not, I'm pretty sure it was a long thread on Gone Gold's forums. At any rate, I’ve been too distracted by all this recall business. Recalls aren't just for defective cars anymore. They're for Californian politicians, TV shows with bad ratings, poorly cast actresses in Terminator sequels, and even the games business. Another site has been recalling its reviews lately. Demos get recalled all the time, often with disclaimers like 'That was an unoptimized beta released to the European press for them to use for their review'.

Full games even get recalled for various reasons. For instance, a game might screw up your hard drive if you uninstall it, it might have a virus on the CD, or it might have too many bugs. I'm just kidding about that last one, but I can dream, can't I? While I'm dreaming, here are ten recalls I'm proposing. If California recall financier Darrell Issa will stop blubbering and kindly return my phone calls, maybe I can make some headway on these things.

1) Halo: Combat Evolved for the PC

It still has the same clever AI but no bots for multiplayer games. There are no changes to the single player game, even where they might have been appropriate (such as in the saved game system). We get a new weapon and a few new multiplayer maps. We also get a much dodgier framerate, which is quite an accomplishment for a game that ran smoothly on my Xbox 2 years ago. What we don't get is one of Halo's greatest charms: co-operative gameplay. I'm sure there are compelling technical reasons why Gearbox couldn't do this, but likewise there are now compelling reasons why we should recall the PC version of Halo. If this is combat evolved, I'll take the more primordial version, thank you very much.