When it costs more to download than to buy in a shop

And a third and final ripoff for the week – overpriced DLC.

Having just finished Oblivion, I was ready to give the “Shivering Isles” expansion a go.* But it’s more than $40 worth of MS points – and if you add in the “Knights of the Nine” expansion, it’s more than $50. Why add in the KotN expansion to that calculation? Because you can buy a disc with the two on it new for less than $50. Buying it over Microsoft Live costs you MORE than for a disc. A disc which has physical media, documentation, packaging, distribution, and retail costs included in that price – the version you have to pay for the bandwidth to download and that comes with none of that COSTS MORE.

Bethesda made a bit of a joke about the rip-off that was its “horse armour” pack by hilariously doubling the price for April Fools’ Day this year. Ha ha, we know we’re ripping you off, they jested. Whilst continuing to do it.

Shameless.

They can get away with it because no-one can come in on Xbox Live and undercut them: it’s a monopoly service. Which is a handy reminder why the actual game shops aren’t such a bad thing.

Solution: Don’t charge consumers more for DLC than the physical media version! In fact, there’s no excuse not to charge us LESS. We know your costs are reduced, and we know we’re not getting as much for it – so bloody pass on the saving to us.

I thought you, the publishers, were desperate for us to move away from the bricks-and-mortar model. Good job reminding us why that might be a bad idea.

*Also, they’ve cynically made it so you can’t get 100% on the game without buying it. Bastards.

Trade-in ripoffs

Talking of rip-offs – the game shops’ “trade-in” schemes. A Nintendo DS game that was $60 last week, they’ll trade in for $10. And then resell for $40-50.

It’s absurd. I’d simply ebay the things, except that ebay is broken now, too.

I’ll accept a $20 loss from new to old, and another $10 for the convenience of selling it straight away, but $50? A quarter of what they’ll resell it for? That’s just adding insult to injury.

Between their greed and eBay’s, you’d think the market was ripe for an alternative. If the free market worked, that is.

The trick of “points”

One of the biggest scams in gaming is major console manufacturers’ adoption of “point” systems for online commerce. To buy any games or upgrades over Xbox Live or the Nintendo Wii network (whatever you call it), you have to purchase blocks of points, set at arbitrary values that quite deliberately don’t match any form of real world money.

Why is this a bad thing?

First, you can never just pay the right amount for the item you want to buy. If you want to buy a game that costs 800 “points”, you have to buy a package of 1000 “points”, and Microsoft holds onto 200 “points” worth of your money until you come back next time. You can’t get it back any other way. The equivalent would be Coles only accepting fifties, refusing to give you change but promising to let you put it towards your next purchase.

(Just to rub it in, the multiples that Microsoft sells the points in – 500, 1000, 1500 – quite obviously don’t correspond with the standard price of content on Xbox Live – 400, 800, 1200. That’s not an accident.)

Second, the reason behind forcing to consumers to use “points” instead of proper currency is to make it difficult to determine just how much it is that you’re spending. Consumers have a pretty good idea in their heads of what they’re prepared to pay for games and downloadable content, defined with reference to other real-world entertainment products. All of which are measured in real-world currencies. The thing about make-believe currency like “Microsoft points” is that it feels like spending Monopoly money, and is harder to value properly.

Obviously the idea is to trick you into spending more money than you would have if they expressed the price in a form with which you were familiar.

So, in summary: they force you to spend more than the actual price of the item, and they conceal that price from you as much as possible.

It’s an entire system of commerce based on deceit.

And that’s where the industry is moving. Isn’t that wonderful?

UPDATE: I had originally included the PS3 in the criticism above, but am informed by people who actually have one that it lists products in real-world currency.

The All New Sonic the Hedgehog

I enjoyed the old Sonic games back when I was a teenager – the SEGA Mega Drive ones, that had come up with a fun mechanic (high speed two dimensional platforming where finding a smooth line was the whole point) and polished it to a spectacular sheen.

Sadly, while Nintendo successfully moved Mario from 2D to 3D and back again, none of the recent Sonic remakes have exactly set the world on fire. The demos have certainly not grabbed me. The mechanic doesn’t work as a platformer. It certainly doesn’t work as an RPG.

So what *can* the developers do with the Sonic IP?

Well, these reimaginings of the Sonic 2-D world however, by Orioto on deviantART, would be a great place for the developers to look for ideas.

Use all that modern graphics technology to make the 2D game beautiful, like a saturated painting come to life. Do what Nintendo did with “New Super Mario Bros” but even better and on a proper console.

I might not play a weird 3D Sonic, but I think I’d be interested in an old-school style 2D one that looks like that.

inFAMOUS fail

I was tempted by the new PS3 game “inFAMOUS” (although I don’t yet own a PS3, this early footage for Trico – a sequel to the awesome Shadows of the Colossus – came close to tipping me over the edge into buying a PS3) until I saw this:

Ah. It’s going to rely on those damned quick time events. It’s going to require me to HIT X REPEATEDLY REALLY FAST OR YOU FAIL! It’s going to drag me out of the game every time I get to a boss fight with stupid, RSI-inducing button-mashing.

Screw that. If everything else about inFAMOUS is decent, I might consider it eventually – but only after I’ve finished every game that DOESN’T rely on QTE bullshit.

Solution: Fire every programmer who has ever implemented a quick time event in a game (out of a cannon INTO THE SUN), and vow never to let anyone under your employ inflict that crap on innocent gamers ever again.

Sucky Lips

Yesterday we picked up a copy of Lips, Microsoft’s rip-off of Sony’s Singstar series. We took it home, put the batteries in the wireless microphones, and switched it on.

And spent the next half an hour battling with the bloody thing before we gave up in disgust.

First, the microphones switch themselves on and off and it’s not clear whether they’re on or off at any particular moment. When a song starts, it’s not possible to tell it in advance which of you is using which mike, or indeed that you’re playing vs rather than single player. (They’re the same menu option, mystifyingly.)

It’s not possible to link mikes up to different gamertags – if you’re getting achievements, it’s only the first person logged in who’s getting them for all of you, regardless of which person earns any particular one.

And the damn thing lags! My voice comes out of the machine at least a second after I’ve sung it, completely out of sync with the music.

And the game expects me to sit down and time by how much if I want to fix it.

Look, Microsoft, we know how this sort of game is supposed to work. We’ve been playing Singstar for years. All you had to do was design wireless microphones that work and make the game work with your gamertag system. And you couldn’t do that.

This is only the second game on the Xbox 360 I’ve given up on and returned, and the last one was because it was a second-hand copy and the disc was scratched. This is the first one I’ve concluded is a hopeless, painful, annoying waste of my time and actually taken back to the shop.

Lips – avoid it. It sucks.

Solution: Make sure your hardware works and if it turns itself off it’s easy to TELL when it’s turned itself off. Make sure your game works with the system’s player management system – particularly if it’s a console exclusive. PLAYTEST THE DAMNED THING.

Most. Annoying. Videogame. Character. Ever.

I was trying to sneak up on a Templar, you pushy bint, and now you’ve got the entire bloody city after me.

She certainly does need to be given something shiny. Perhaps something Altair carries under his sleeve? In the throat?

Although – maybe I’m being unfair. It’s not like the crazy people in that game are any less annoying…

Solution: If you’re going to put in characters who attack the player randomly out of spite, give the player something he or she can do about them – rather than just making him or her fail and have to start the mission again, hoping the annoyance won’t randomly appear this time.

Finding other players for old games on Xbox Live

One serious problem with older multiplayer “arcade” games on Xbox Live is that it’s almost impossible to find anyone to play against. Any search for opponents will simply yield an unhelpful “no matches found” message, leaving you none the wiser as to whether you’ve missed the last person by five minutes or five days. You can’t see which gamertags have played the game more recently, although those would be a likely place to start for inviting someone for a match.

Imagine what this was like when you could find a human opponent rather than cheating AI!

The upshot is that these titles – Settlers of Catan, Chessmaster, Carcassonne, and so on – are of considerably less value than their still-high price would justify.

Solution: Xbox Live should have a feature letting people see which gamertags have played a multiplayer game most recently, and how recently that was, so you can organise games with them.

When Games Shops Suck (specifically, EB Games)

Certain games shops – say, for example, EB Games – seem to believe that the way to increase their business is to trick people into coming into the store. They’ll have a big banner out the front advertising $125 DS LITE + BRAIN TRAINING – which sounds like a fairly good deal – and it’s only when you look very closely that you see the fine print that reveals that it’s the worst deal ever – “When you trade in a DS Lite”. Wow – all I have to do is pay you $125 and give you my old console and I’ll get an identical console plus a $40 game. WHAT A BARGAIN!

EB Games does this so relentlessly that no-one with an ounce of sense believes anything it puts out the front. It means I’m less likely to buy a game from them, because it’s such a hassle finding out the actual price (if I’m not willing to go the being ludicrously gouged route).

Tricking customers into the shop might get them some extra sales in the short term – which is all that this kind of business thinking is – but in the long term, it’s got to be harming the brand. Unless they’re COMPLETE morons, those shoppers will simply disbelieve the next thing you try to tell them.

The other thing EB Games and all the other retailers have been doing recently is putting up large posters advertising games that aren’t coming out for a couple of months. Eastland’s game shops are full of GUITAR HERO: METALLICA posters, and have been since early April, despite the game not coming out here until the 27th of May.

Nice work, distributors. You’ve made us wait for the game itself – the game’s been out in the US since last month – whilst constantly rubbing the pointless delay in the face of anyone who would’ve been interested. Hopefully by the time the game does actually come out the potential purchasers will have long since given up and your sales will be cut accordingly.

Thanks for wasting our time. Thanks for wasting our time with prices that aren’t real, and thanks for wasting our time advertising products you’re not selling.

Solution: STOP DOING THAT!

Solutions

It also occurs to me that you might be feeling that this site is a little relentlessly negative. I list a lot of problems with games, but where are the solutions? What are my positive contributions?

Henceforth, critical posts will have a proposed Solution: at the end.

The innovations never end!