The advent of PSN, XBox Live and the hundred and one PC variants of these services has been a great boon for gamers. No longer do we have to ring our buddies and get the IP address of the server they're playing on, or even have to go around their house to have a quick one on one splatter fest. With friends lists growing into their hundreds, on all services, there is always someone out there to play with and have fun with online. Community gaming is no longer a LAN party based in some god awful Community Centre next to the church, it's now acceptable.

Which is great. I go out and buy Unreal Tournament 3 and I'm not expecting a great solo game, I know it's all based on multi player, be they real or bots, same with Team Fortress 2 and all the other games of their multiplayer ilk. what I don't appreciate is when a great single player game is sacrificed for the multiplayer aspect - which usually does not even fit the game being played.

Take games that do multiplayer right. Grand Theft Auto IV has a solid multiplayer game, detached from the single player but still worthy in its own right, no-one could argue that the single player mode in this game has suffered. Burnout paradise, I know I'm about to get a lot of flak for this, has a very solid solo mode as well as multiplayer, it's just fun and that’s what gaming should be about. There are however some games which do this wrong.

Call of Duty 4. It has to be one of the best first person shooters of all time, it certainly is the one I benchmark the rest of its genre against. Its well paced, great fun but far far too short. The game just stops halfway through, and why? Well, one can only assume that it's because they spent the rest of their development budget on multiplayer. Don't get me wrong, the multiplayer on it is just as awesome as the main solo game, but when you charge me £40 for a game I need to feel like I'm getting my moneys worth. The first 3 Call of Duty games took me over 15 hours each to play through, so the mark had been set for the series, £40 - 15 hours - then some solid online play. COD 4 gave me 5 hours of play through before I had to go multiplayer, that just made me feel ripped off.

It's as if these games look at their competition and try to rip them off when in fact they have some of the strongest franchises and gameplay in gaming history, and I'm not just talking about CoD. When released alongside games such as Valves Orange Box, CoD 4 single player looks short and unfinished, even compared to its predecessors it looks like they stopped producing it halfway through, and you have to guess they did this because of the popularity of the Battlefield series.

I love the battlefield games, I've played and enjoyed everyone. Sure, I feel as though I'm being sold half a game, but they do exactly as expected. You pick em up, go online, get killed a lot until you eventually get better. I lump Battlefield alongside Teamfortress2, Unreal Tournament and Quake and this is not a genre I think the CoD games belong. For games designed from the ground up to be multiplayer you normally find that the entire focus is spent on making the online game awesome, with quite often there being absolutely no single player game. Solo games on the other had seem to see this "community" and multiplayer aspect and grab onto them splitting their development between both so that instead of getting a great game - we get 2 mediocre ones. When you live in times of even niche markets being filled with hundreds of iterations of the same idea, you cannot afford to be mediocre - you need at least one strong point.

What I’m basically saying is, please don’t try forcing community into what should be a single player game just because it’s the current buzz in the industry, a great solo game is still regarded as a great game, I still love CoD 4, I just wish it could have lasted as long as Half Life 2.