As horrible as the Mass Effect inventory system was, what I never understood was what rocket scientist decided that as you selected different weapons and manufacturers, instead of seeing the new gun, you got to see the fraking CRATE the gun comes in! WTF is that about?!? I understand not having a bunch of unique weapon models, but not having the gun at all in favor of a generic box?!? Huh? What?!?!?

Another contender for this list would've been the whole Xen section of Half-Life. That HL remains the greatest game ever despite the last 15% being "Super Mario Life" jumping puzzles on look-alike platforms that appeared textured with intestinal lining is a testament to its overall awesomeness.

I'm waiting for the amendment which protects gamers from wildly inflated review scores from magazines who are so excited to get exclusive first dibs that they tack an extra 5-10 points onto the score out of gratitude for being favored. Without this protection, poor gamers will be shafted by games like Doom 3, Hellgate: London, and most recently, Crysis, which is supposedly the best game ever made that's not Half-Life 2 or Alpha Centauri. *cough*

@kornedbeefy - "Ummm, I install my games and they work. So whats your issue? DONT blame the platform because something is wrong with your rig/s not the software."

I'm talking about REAL games, not the Peggle or Barbie Adventure Playhouse type games you play, Bub. Try going to the tech support forums for Epic Games and see the problems people have with UT3 and Gears of War. I guess you've never had to download beta drivers to work with your newly-patched version of Diner Dash. In your perfect Bejeweled world, if your dog doesn't bite you, it means that no dogs anywhere bite anyone. If you ever advance your gaming horizons past Minesweeper, you'll learn.

Your "anyone who plays console games is a traitor" attitude is juvenile and stupid as well. Someone going around bleating, "Anyone who likes the Beatles has no business listening to the Rolling Stones! If you eat Pizza Hut pizza, you're killing off Dominos!", would be institutionalized.

REAL MEN play what they want. Little children whine about the men not sticking to their clique. Boo-hoo.

How are we supposed to be "platform champions" when we know damn well that PC gaming is a shambles of buggy software, spotty drivers and endless nights of trouble-shooting and forum-scouring just trying to get the damn games to run at all, much less well? I can't get UT3 to run at all anymore on my PC and it was a crashfest before it totally died. My friend had to buy a new DVD drive to get Gears of War PC to install and he was rewarded for his trouble by having the widespread save game loss glitch wipe out his progress, driving him to uninstall and give away the game.

How can PC gamers in good conscience recommend forgoing the certainty of the console experience - put in disc and play - to those who probably aren't tech savvy enough to run down the various fixes? This doesn't mean they're stupid at all, but they just don't want to have to spend their play time being unpaid computer repairmen. It's sheer arrogance to think you're superior because you're able to spend as much time trying to get your PC game to run as a console gamer takes to beat the game. Imagine the PC gamer who has spent 10 hours trying to get CoD4 to run on their rig having to beg a console CoD4 player not to spoil the game for him because he hasn't gotten to play it yet.

Tyler_Lowe's comments about Crysis merit amplification because PC Gamer's unabashed shilling for this game has been a credibility destroyer on par of naming Stevie Case a "New Gaming God". PCG is so willing to hand an extra 5-10 review points over to any game dev which provides them the exclusive first review access, they've put their credibility down with Gamespot's. (Explain their Hellgate London review, which was 15 pts. higher than the Metacritic average when it shipped broken and failed within a year.) Crysis is the highest rated game ever when it's little more than a prettied up Far Cry?

It was amusing (and by that I mean disgsuting) to hear the PCG podcast as Gary Whitta and Jeremy Williams were howled down for daring to call out the game for what it was and to hear Dan Stapleton and Chuck Osborn bashing any complaints about the system requirements. "You should be thankful for such a future-proof game," sneered Dan, "You'll want to come back and play it again in the future when your rig catches up." BOVINE MANURE!!! It's nearly a year later and you still need to throw thousands of dollars at the game to get a marginal experience. Quad-core CPUs and video cards with 1GB RAM can eke 30 fps out of this game and we're supposed to be thankful? We should buy a game that exists as pure eye candy coating over a tired shooter mechanic with sketchy AI and then turn the detail levels down to Low and consider ourselves well-served? Double bovine excrement!

As a decade-long PC gamer who has easily dropped thousands in video card upgrades alone on top of custom-built rigs, that I've been driven to the point of preferring the gaming experience on my Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 because I know my time will be spent playing, not praying the game will work, shows just how in denial PC gaming cheerleaders are. Who would deliberately inflict the miseries of PC gaming upon people they consider friends?!? Unless they're already sharp technical people, I tell people to get an X360 and be done with it. It's cheaper, looks fine, and most importantly IT WORKS!!! (Leave the RRoD cracks out of it.)

PC gaming will grow when games aren't shipped broken, stop treating paying customers like thieves and inflicting a diminished play experience compared to what pirates enjoy, and just freaking WORK when installed on a PC that meets the min. specs.