Geoffrey Morrison

Technically, Planetside 2 isn't out yet (the full game launches November 20). So technically, this isn't a review. But I'm having so much fun playing it, I couldn't keep it to myself any longer.

The original Planetside was the first (and still only) MMOFPS. Battles raged, waged over entire continents, with hundreds of players locked in epic sci-fi skirmishes. It was glorious.

Then Sony ruined it. If the beta is any indication, this is one serious mea culpa.

The latest in the seemingly endless supply of add-on packs for Battlefield 3 is Armored Kill. The title is apt. There’re lots of tanks, airplanes, helicopters, airborne gunships, and massive, massive maps.

I wasn’t planning on covering yet another BF3 add-on, but the original game is one of my favorites of recent years and AK just isn’t. . . fun.

It started with Guild Wars 2: Random crashes, seemingly unconnected. Then it spread to other games. After a few hours with Black Mesa, a crash to the desktop. Occasionally, the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death).

No amount of driver updates fixed the issue. On the GW 2 tech forums the problem seemed widespread. When an Arena Net employee would bother to respond to one of the many threads about the same issue, they always just said, "Check your RAM."

Yeah, right. In 20 years of fixing and building computers, not once had I ever had a problem with RAM.

So what could it be?

One of my favorite authors, Robert Heinlein, had a form letter he sent to fans. To save time, it had all the possible options for correspondence, and he’d check the applicable boxes.

Being considerably less talented — and marginally less grumpy (arguable) — I figured this would be a fantastic way to deal with the 100+ emails I get each day.

So for all my tech journalist friends/colleagues/enemies, and for all my future fans/haters/curious minds, here is the eminently useful, infinitely adaptable, largely offensive, Form Letter for Tech Correspondence.