(And I am at it again with the elipses.)

I just wanted to offer my apology for an earlier post, in which I basically just pimped out one of my articles from another website. I've done this in the past, but I've also tried a little more to make the blog post in itself a bit more worthwhile. Tonight I didn't do as much and several of you were forward enough to tell me it was kind of a dick thing to do.

I appreciate that and hope people will do it again in the future if I pull such crap. I also want to express my appreciation for the good and often constructive feedback I've gotten from the community. Destructoid is a great place, and I feel poorly for having mucked it up even just a little bit. I've since taken down the other post and in the future even if I've already written a review or something elsewhere, anything I post here will be original for Destructoid.

In the spirit of that, Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising is a good game, but it isn't what it could have been.

When I think of Operation Flashpoint: Cold War Crisis, I think of a classic PC game that I spent hours playing through. It is still one of the best games out there when it comes to devotions to realism, and I'm confident that were I to pop it in today, I'd enjoy it just as much as when it first came out.

Dragon Rising just left little to no impression on me. I enjoyed it for sure; the realistic, slower paced approach was a nice change from the wussified fragfest FPS's that have become the norm, but I was way too ready for it to be over when it ended. I just didn't want to play it anymore. A game shouldn't make you feel that way.

In short the gameplay would have worked fine if it weren't for buggy AI which at times feels like you're wrestling with the game. The biggest problem for me though was really the level of detach I felt from the events I was playing through. The story is almost irrelevant and at best uninteresting. This is a stark contrast to Cold War Crisis, which, while not being story of the year material at least provided a mildly interesting narrative with characters that were more then just faceless monikers for you to step into.

It's odd because I don't feel this way about some games. The Dark Spire was basically story-less, but I still love it to bits.With Dragon Rising though, it's poor narrative just rubbed me the wrong way.