Entry 02: Games after 2000 - Corporate greed and micro-transactions.

Money makes the world go round, well actually a combination of gravity and the atmosphere does but I'm missing my own point here. My point is money is extremely important in our current society for a variety of reason, so naturally money is the main desire of many, many people and thus we all work to obtain it. If you came up with a genius idea to make money quickly and easily with no effort wouldn't you, enter the evil (might be overstating) and greedy(might be understating) concept of the micro-transaction.
Micro-transactions are small purchases that can be made with in a game, usually for in game items as opposed to being a full expansion. Often micro-transactions can include in-game currencies, skins, power-ups and equipment such as armour, weapons and vehicles. Companies often use these to continue funding a game after all or most sales of the game itself have been made with little effort on their part to create new content, with many companies being accused of cutting content originally intended to be apart of the full game so it can be sold later as a micro transaction.
Much of the controversy surrounding micro-transactions comes from the general displeasure of having to pay for content someone should already have access to but that is still relatively harmless regardless of how dishonest it is, however micro-transactivisions can have a great effect on gameplay.
Several multiplayer games have tiered systems of weapons, equipment,etc. that can be exploited by micro-transactions or are even sometimes designed around micro-transactions. The reason this is a problem is that the 'best' players of these games will no longer be the most practised and skilled players but instead it will be some asshole who looks suspiciously like Casper the friendly ghost
who can simply just afford to purchase top tier equipment by throwing his wallet at the screen. This in turn ruins the game for many players, shortening the lifetime of the game and ultimately earning much less money than what they would if purchases were limited to something like skins, very much like what Riot Games has done with League of Legends which is a free game that has earned the millions of dollars.
Micro-transactions are the idea of a money hungry fat cats trying to scrape every bit of cash the can from their consumer and hoping they are dumb enough to fall for it, are you? Well yeah probably, I mean it's still happening. Look just do your best not to fall for this shit and maybe they'll stop, and maybe never download a game on your phone, like ever, just watch Southpark.

Entry 01: Games before 2000 - Id Software and 3d graphics

Nostalgia is a mans best friend, if your best friend is a highschool sports star who can’t get over how good he use to be, and seeing him brings a smile to your face but sends you into a spiral of regret and sorrow. Moving on, the 90’s still feel like they were ten years ago with its kickass cartoons, people in spandex fighting giant monsters , floppy disks and dial up internet connections but in reality the 90’s ended nearly twenty years ago and our favourite medium for entertainment has come a long way since then.

May 1992 Id Software released Wolfenstein 3d for MS-DOS. This was a breakout hit for Id Software and the gameplay inspired their next release DOOM (E1M1 At Doom’s Gate plays in head) in 1993. These two games were pioneers of gaming in this era making Id a household name (well at least in the tech rooms of college campuses) and created the ‘DOOM clone’ genre which includes such classics as Duke Nukem 3d, Shadow Warrior and Star Wars: Dark Forces.
Eventually the Doom Clone became the genre we refer to as the First Person Shooter.

Assuming anyone reading this has played or at least seen a first person shooter, you would understand that perspective and a 3d world would be necessary for the most important feature of the genre, looking through the protagonists eyes. And thus the limited technology of the time would have made creating this a very painful experience, how ever the programmers at Id lead by John Carmack (praise be unto him) used a technique called ray casting to make Wolfenstein 3d appear 3d and another much more complicated technique for DOOM which actually only work with 2d calculations, so that the old processors never actually calculate a z-axis in any of these games.

It wasn’t long after this when popular games began using actual 3d graphics, with the original Starfox being released in 1993 which used the Super FX chip to display polygons on the SNES and the original PlayStation releasing in 1994 (in Japan) bringing many games with 3d graphics before 2000, ultimately rendering John Carmacks Genius redundant, you know until he started building space ships, but we can still thank him for Call of Duty... um, I take that back.