Matt's Somewhat Serious Bit
Every so often, you will hear one of those 'hardcore gamers' go on about how much they spend on games, and how games should be cheaper - obviously so this person can purchase more games, which they will inevitably play for a couple of minutes before tossing them onto an ever growing pile which will probably last them until retirement. This problem of the gaming backlog may not be familiar to all of our readers - the problem will become clearer as you develop a steady stream of income - but I know that some of you definitely are not happy with the pricing standards of the industry at this point in time, and things definitely do not look as if they will improve - especially with a new generation of consoles on the horizon.
There are a few solutions to the problem of the price of gaming, and the main portion of this edition of Easy Mode will look into three of the methods that I personally have been trialling since moving out of home and being forced onto a limited budget.
Solution 1: Wait. Not the most popular opinion amongst some of the more dedicated amongst you, but unless you can pin some sort of monetary value on playing a game before everyone else, you should get out of the habit of Day One Gaming. My research in this area hasn't been as consistent as I would have liked - there is a high dependence on external factors. One must be able to pinpoint whether a game is going to be a retail success or not.
If a game has a solid retail performance in it's first month, you can guarentee that waiting at least 3 months can yield a saving of up to $40 - sometimes you can save $10-20 initially by just waiting for catalogue sales (K-Mart, Big W, etc.) to start. Games with big print runs or tie-ins (True Crime and Spider-Man 2 are great examples) can fall to $29.95 just 6 months after release. Finally, you can wait for the official Platinum/Classics/Player's Choice re-releases - for those of you who are anal about box art, most places usually keep a few original versions of the game buried, or you can always go hunting and abuse price matching policies.
Retail failures and games with small print runs can be tricky to predict, with discounts varying from publisher to publisher - the bigger ones are more likely to discount an unpopular title, while others will be very stubborn, and leave it at $99 or £35 forever. The best strategy here is to wait for the mid-year and end of year sales, though some of them (Hello Ace Combat: Squadron Leader) may never drop in price.
Solution 2: Import. Importing used to be something for serious hobbyists, but anyone can do it now thanks to the ease of online shopping. Getting your systems to play games from overseas can cost a bit of money - you can either go with a full modification, a swap modification, or you can just go the whole hog and buy the system overseas. With the recovery of the Australian Dollar over the last few years, the money that the Aussies amongst us spend on getting our systems to play these games will be regained quickly with the money saved on each title, which ranges from $10 to $40 - though if you buy the system overseas in the first place, you're likely to make a large initial saving, though you must be prepared to always import your titles (though some Australian sites, such as DVD Crave, sell import titles at very competitive prices). This can lead to one missing bargain opportunities at home, but international stores, particularly in the US and Canada, have a tendency to lower their prices much more quickly than Australia. Just remember that you didn't read about modding your console at PALGN, because it's very, very naughty.
Solution 3: Ebay. Most of you could probably testify to the fact that Ebay is pretty good for picking up deals on older stuff, but you can save around $20-$30 just by going to Ebay 3-4 days after a game is released, if not sooner. Ebay can be a little harder to predict, being a secondary market, but most of the popular games follow this trend. If you're prepared to wait 3-4 months, you can almost guarentee that the game will be down to $50 or less - just watch out for snipers. Also, PALGN and myself will not be held liable for any greivances that arise as a result of Ebay addiction.
You know what really grinds my gears? #1: Unoptimised Save Files
A lot of people seem to like it most when I'm angrily ranting about what I hate in the games industry, so I've decided to dedicate a recurring segment of this article to those little bits.
Memory cards have always been a bit of a hassle - they're not particularly cheap (Sony wanted $69.95 for a memory card at the PlayStation 2 launch), some of them have a tendency to drop data, and friends tend to love to wipe them and then not tell you about it. However, the thing that really fires me up is that some companies refuse to limit the size of their save files. In some cases, large save files are justified - I don't mind giving a meg and a half to a Madden game, knowing that it has a fairly deep stat-tracking feature. In other cases, you have to wonder how the games passed the Sony approval process.
Cricket 2004 is a great case - the game required over half a memory card, yet offered very basic statistics tracking for a cricket game. WWF Smackdown: Just Bring It also required half a memory card, yet the amount of non-created wrestler data actually required to be saved and loaded was negligible. This problem is being improved slowly, with some developers managing to squeeze down the size of their save data, yet increasing the amount of data saved (GTA: San Andreas for one), though it looks as if the upcoming widespread mass storage solutions for the next generation of consoles are going to assist in solving this problem, at least for starters - my guess is that they probably won't optimise save size until after it has become a significant problem, or until the licensees step in.
Once you play it, you can't unplay it #1: Cliffhanger
In the infancy of my reviewing career, I used to get a little bit of acclaim from my peers about how I used to handle reviews of bad titles - usually resorting to attempts to humour the reader (I don't seem to think I'm funny, though). I do still like playing the occasional bad game though, so I thought I'd devote a section of my editorial to some of the bad games we don't always see on the Top Ten Bad Games Lists of other sites.
The Summer (well, Winter here) movie season of 1993 will always be remembered for the smashing success of Jurassic Park, but box office success was not limited to dinosaurs that year. Sylvester Stallone was still high in the Hollywood power rankings, and his latest action movie vehicle was Cliffhanger, directed by Renny Harlin (of Die Hard 2 fame) and co-starring John Lithgow, with Sly himself sharing the screenwriting duties (he's no stranger to writing, with 17 movies under his belt, including the 1976 Oscar winner, Rocky, and two more in production). Cliffhanger raked up $255 million at the combined worldwide box office, which was actually considered really successful 12 years ago. Unfortunately, the trip Cliffhanger made to home consoles was an unmitigated disaster.
Knife Guy believes that his BO is a more effective weapon than his blades
Cliffhanger starts innocently enough, with a small scene that sets up the story before it dumps you into the land of the turdburgers. The game appears to be broken up into three parts, with the ever popular side-scrolling beat 'em up (where Gabe's arsenal is a mere 5 moves), the wall climbing bit (where being touched results in plummeting to your demise, despite all those nifty acrobatics in the film) and the rather strange snowboarding bits. Not one of these sections controls intuitively, with very limited actions and poor collision detection rendering the game almost unplayable. Graphics are rather appalling, and the soundtrack sounds like someone's toddler went wild with a bunch of teaspoons.
Sony Imagesoft seemed to be one of those studios with rather erratic output ranging from memorable titles like Sky Blazer to woeful tripe like Hook and Cliffhanger. We will probably never know what the story was behind these games (Sony Imagesoft doesn't seem to make games anymore), though one can assume that they were required to bash out their film license games in a matter of weeks or months. In-house software development certainly improved at Sony once the PlayStation launched, but the same can't be said for Sly's movie career, which is in dire need of a hit. Perhaps the backlash from this crappy piece of code is what doomed his career? It's an outlandish claim, but think about it.
Things that make you go "WTF!?" #1: Brady Bunch Kung Fu
The mobile phone format has unlocked another door for indie and garage game developers, with games once again being able to offer simpler, but more addictive experiences. As phones get more powerful, the games begin to reflect the increases in power, and as such, we get slightly prettier games. With few mobile phone games actually appearing on shelves, developers have a little bit more freedom to toy with licenses, and as such, you can get a few odd ones.
Here's the story / Of a lovely lady / Who kicked her children's asses with kung fu
Obviously, all those years of petty squabbles have taken their toll on the Brady Bunch, and as such, they've decided to air their greivances using good old-fashioned fisticuffs. The game is entirely tongue-in-cheek, with some rather outrageous character designs and little references to the show - arming Marcia with a football is rather amusing. Mike Brady will not be making an apperance due to license issues, and will be replaced by Alice. Some of us at PALGN are disappointed at the omission of Cousin Oliver, who we all agree could use a good beating.
Somehow, we feel these aren't the types of family values Sherwood Schwartz wished to convey
One has to question what the Brady Bunch license holders are wishing to achieve with products such as Brady Bunch Kung Fu and the rather cheesey Brady Bunch movies - some of the themes present in these post-cancellation Brady Bunch products seem to go directly against what the show's creator was trying to achieve with the innocent suburban sitcom. Still, it will probably worth a look for a few chuckles when it lands on mobiles in a few months.
The views expressed in the Easy Mode article are those of Matt Keller, and are not shared by PALGN, its affiliates or its advertisers.
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