Ok I can understand wanting to make more money off of your games and I can even tolerate some of their shenanigans. But with this years sports games this is starting to get a little ridiculous. It started with Tiger Woods 10. At launch there was already a course available for download and it was 600 points just for a course. Number one it was overpriced and number two they clearly could have put that on the disc but just chose not to for some extra profit. How about at least make it a little less obvious and release it later. Then there was NCAA Football 10- great game by the way. They made that game where you can buy all these upgrades at launch to make the game easier on you like better scouts and things like that. I understand why they do this but its just a little wrong to say hey this is a brand new game and instead of giving you everything we could have were going to make you pay more for it. Then there’s Madden and the Madden shop which is pretty much the same as NCAA Football.

All these things I thought was ridiculous but I could at least tolerate. The last straw for me was NHL 10, I love the game just like the rest, this is by far the best sports year for video games. What ticked me off in this game is it takes it to the online portion to actually give other people an advantage if they spend the money forcing you to make the same decision of whether you want to deal with it and try and overcome it or buy it like your competition. In the game you can unlock boost packs (which increases your attributes like making you faster and better at scoring goals etc.)for your skater by playing the offline portion but some of these task take a long time and are really challenging like playing at least 40 games in three seasons and win the mvp in one of them. That’s 120 games! That will take you some time. So you can go that route if you want and get out skated by the online competition by guys with better stats because they spent almost 3 bucks or you can go their route and do the same. There is a booster pack for each kind of skater as well so if you wanted to change your type of skater the booster pack you bought wont translate to making your guy play better in the way you want him too if you want to switch positions. When DLC creates unbalanced gameplay and pressure for people to spend money to be able to play online it goes overboard. They force you to spend money to be on a level playing field.

For example wouldn’t it suck to play Street Fighter 4 online but the guy your fighting spent 3 dollars on DLC that makes his punches do more damage and his health bar is larger. Then what if almost every match you join people have bought this pack. You have to make a decision do I pay money to be able to play online fairly? Do I try and overcome those players and make a challenge out of it? Or do I stop playing because I don’t like to be told that I have to pay money to compete fairly in a game I just bought brand new for $60. Me personally I like to go the think of it as a challenge route. Keep the DLC offline where it keeps the pressure off and you can decide if the content is worth it or not and not have to decide if I need it to play the game. The best DLC is always when they add features or brand new content to a game after its been out for at least 3 weeks. I like DLC but I don’t like pressure and imbalanced gameplay. I look forward to in a few months finally being able to play on a fair playing field when I unlock the booster packs.