Tiberium Rage

I’m Angry. Not foaming at the mouth angry, but angry nonetheless.
It’s like Game developers know that 99.9% of gamers will never play their games to completion, so they cheap-out on the endings.

And now I need a T-shirt that says "I completed C&C3's Wrath of Kane Global Conquest mode and all I got was this lousy T-shirt" T-shirt.

I mean there wasn’t even a congratulatory cut scene?

And after all their other ham-fisted FMV sequences.

Yeah, I deserve a T-shirt.

I mean, I was going to talk about how today is the 10the anniversary of the last conductors on Melbourne Trams. And since that particular piece of union busting our public transport infrastructure has been in steady decline. And how after over a 100 years of a stable ticket system, the last 10 have seen three Ticket system revamps, all of which have become fiasco's with the "Scratch ticket system being one of the biggest political bungles since Hitler said "Lets fight a war in Germany on two fronts." In fact it's reported that the cost, to taxpayers, (of a ticketing system that lasted barely a year and resulted in massive land-fill of the unused tickets) was enough to keep conductors on trams for the next 20 years.

(Make no mistake; this was never about 'improving' the system)

In fact, I was originally going to offer a convincing argument that showed the best way to improve Melbourne's failing Transport woes, would be to make public transport FREE.

After all, this is a service which by its very nature does not make money. And at its heart it's not really meant to. There are a mountain of important social benefits that the service provides (such as alleviating strain on our overcrowded roads, creating jobs for the drivers, and helping to move those of us who can't drive, ie - getting schoolchildren to school)

Now I 'm not saying the system didn't have faults 10 years ago, and perhaps needed a little fixing, But now the system is so broken that if it was a horse, it'd be flopping about in a pool of it's own puke begging you to put it down.
(10 years of failing to reinvest sufficiently in its infrastructure and driving away any and all competent staff will kind of do that)

So between privatisation, and hideously expensive, tax-payer funded, ticket system revamps, we're left with a truly abysmal system.

But like I said, I was going to offer the convincing argument that this can all be cured, by in part, making travel on public transport free (because on a pure dollars and cents level, it would actually turn a better profit that way, or at least not be a terrible sinkhole of expanding costs)
But then my Broadband got speed limited, and it cut me of from my usual source of online entertainment (no, not porn, you smut-addled fools, MMORPGs!) and so in response I turn to my favourite gaming genre, RTS to keep me occupied. The otherwise pretty darn spiffy "Mark of Kane" expansion for Command & Conquer (which comes with a spiffy chance to Beta Red Alert 3. which I want to do, but will probably procrastinate over till it's too late.)

And so, after having finished the epic new missions, revelled in the glorious new units, and endured the FMV sequences I turn my hand to the included "Global conquest mode" (because the entire new mission stream are ALL Nod based missions, a lot of fun, but the coolest new unit is definitely the GDI's MARV tank.)

And there, at the end, it offers little more to let you know you've won than a lousy "victory" graphic, which is exactly the same as the one you see after every other damned succesful mission.

Woo-hoo!

Meh,

Still, I guess I haven't played the new Scrin side yet, so perhaps I'll boot it up again anyway.

Till next time,
from the far side of Heck,
-Kale