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It's not often that I get depressed but guess what? I am. One of my friends from my old school got busted over something stupid. stare After a lot of reading the bible and falling asleap in the bathroom I've gotten over that issue and moved onto sulking about grades... Two Fs in one interim it pushing the envelope. I swear my teacher is trying to kill me for some reason. Anyways foo of that nonscence... why THE CRAP DO MY TEACHERS HAVE TO BE WOMEN SAVE FOR THE ANNOYING LAZY a** MR. WIELY?! God, I hate my school, a little help if you please, like some spontaneous combustion?

My sister told me about something this morning that has ruined a perfectly good day (perhaps week, or even month, or more) prematurely... In the most unexpected and absolutely THE worst news I've ever heard from the gaming industry in my lifetime, EA Games (the hand of the devil himself in the world of gaming, creators of crap-fest sequel after sequel, formulaic money-factory game publisher, and destroyer of franchises everywhere) announced yesterday that it is buying BioWare (the glorious crusader responsible for keeping the Western RPG genre alive and kicking with great, epic games for so many years)... oh, and also some little studio nobody cares about called Pandemic, which BioWare had the unfortunate foolishness to team up with when trying to grow (a lot of good it did them). Despite this sickly-sweet interview with two BioWare's leaders on the deal with the devil (in which they go so far as to say "we're one big happy family" wink , it still doesn't change this fundamental fact:

The game company I LOVE the most is now owned by the game company I HATE the most.

I feel like someone just ran over my cat. A part of me just died. EA, you can rest assured that simply because you now own my favorite game developer of all time does NOT endear you to me in the slightest. I will now lift my boycott of your products ONLY for BioWare games, but if/when I see your huge retarded EA logo (you know, the one that takes up about half the box) welded to the front of a BioWare package, I will hate you like never before. In fact, I can assuredly say that the burning, passionate fires with which I hate you have now increased a thousand-fold. I wish I could hate you to DEATH. DIE, DIE, DIE!

In case my readers aren't sure how evil EA Games truly are, here are some things they've done in the past:

- Gained a complete monopoly over all sports games ever created (as if I care, but still) with EA Sports.

- Purchased ownership of Maxis, creators of the SimCity franchise, and forced them to make nothing but endless expansion packs to The Sims, over and over and over and over again. Recently, when EA decided it might FINALLY try publishing another SimCity title, they refused to let Maxis have the job and instead seeded it out to some no-name company who has never done crap. The new SimCity title, they say, will bear little or no resemblance to the originals in terms of gameplay, concentrating entirely on social structures instead of cityscape planning and building. Word is that they are trying to incorporate it more closely with, you guessed it, The Sims! That's another point for the devil.

- Purchased the right to make all games based on the Lord of the Rings (both the movies AND the books now), and then wasted that ability making nothing but utter steaming piles of crap. Want me to go over them? First, two quick, mindless hack-n-slash titles to cash in quick on the popularity of the movies. Surprisingly, these may have been their best LotR games to date. Followed by one crappy RPG that despite all common sense was based on the style of Japanese RPGs instead of Western ones, thus resulting in a laughable Final Fantasy clone. At the same time, a mediocre and simplistic strategy game (and I use "strategy" loosely since the game hardly included any) that was simply a re-skin of their previous yawn-inducing title, Command & Conquer: Generals. The ONLY interesting LotR game they were producing was the White Council, finally a Western-style RPG in LotR format, but EA cancelled it, thus assuring that they had no intention to do anything remotely good or worthwhile with THE LORD OF THE FRIGGIN' RINGS, the original inspiration to all fantasy RPGs ever.

- Edited the Wikipedia article about their company, erasing past controversies, eliminating the name of the company's original creator (surprisingly, it was not Lucifer), and playing up the role of the company's current chairman, whose name I feel no need to publish here. It also, even more surprisingly, is not Lucifer.

- One of the past controversies they erased was EA Spouse, a blog post made by the wife of an EA employee about the company's evil methods. If you don't have the patience to read it, she basically says that her husband and his coworkers were pushed into "crunch time," a super-hard-working mode usually only reserved for a few weeks before a game's release, for the entire period of the game's development, even though it was going on schedule. Underpaid and overworked, they had no life and no passion to be creative or inventive.

- Purchased countless other companies and franchises as soon as they came up with anything that sold well, only to squash all creativity and innovation in said possessions, requiring them to churn out sequel after cookie-cutter sequel, turning them into mindless, soulless money-factories. For example, they made a sequel to the highly-praised James Bond title GoldenEye 007 called GoldenEye: Rogue Agent, and unless you've played it, you'll never understand how bad it was. They've also corrupted and destroyed all of their own franchises. Need for Speed, for example, became Need for Speed: Underground (now with ATTITUDE!) to cash in on the street-racing punk craze, and even though I'm not interested in them anyway, I've talked with many other gamers who say EA has driven both the Medal of Honor and Battlefield series into the ground.

All of this was why I had boycotted them entirely for several years.

And now they have BioWare in their clutches.

BIOWARE.

No doubt the slave collar has already been placed around their neck, and soon they will be a mindless zombie with zero creativity just like all the other companies EA has destroyed. I pray to anyone who is listening that EA Games will NOT take a hand in controlling BioWare, but instead let them do their own thing, and I pray even more that EA Games will for some reason be destroyed (perhaps the government could chop up its gaming monopoly? Please?). The ONLY, and I mean ONLY good thing I can think of coming out of this terrible tragedy is that BioWare could make a Lord of the Rings RPG now... much like the one ("The White Council" wink that EA Games was supposedly developing but cancelled (showing how much EA hates its consumers).

If EA gets BioWare to make (on their own, with no intrusion by EA) a Lord of the Rings RPG with an art style based on the Peter Jackson movies, then I *might* just be convinced to forgive them. Maybe. Here's praying they do.

PS: Some people have raised the point that BioWare has been "under the control" of Microsoft for years now, being forced to create Xbox-only titles since KotOR. Well, guess what? I didn't mind that. In fact, if Microsoft had bought out BioWare, I'd still be concerned, but not NEARLY this concerned. Because unlike EA, Microsoft has published many of my favorite games of all time... Let's see: Age of Empires II, the Halo series, even the original Dungeon Siege. Microsoft, I like.

Here's the crap mentioned in the before hand rant.

http://www.destructoid.com/bioware-and-pandemic-comment-on-ea-deal-through-new-platinum-teeth-48752.phtml
http://media.www.mustangdaily.net/media/storage/paper860/news/2007/02/22/Columns/Ea.Sports.Its.In.The.monopoly.Game-2735517.shtml
http://www.joystiq.com/2007/08/16/ea-staffer-plays-history-revisionist-on-wikipedia/
http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html