This Week in Downloadable Content

Both the Virtual Console and Xbox Live Arcade have some interesting offerings this week, and Microsoft has released word of a lot of new things to come via their community service. The day before yesterday saw the release of Punch-Out!!, Virtua Fighter 2, and Bonk's Revenge for the Wii's download service. No Mike Tyson in this version of Punch-Out!!, but it's still (as Kohler puts it) one of the 'best videogames of all time.' On the Xbox side, today sees the release of a 'double header' of games: Gyruss and 3D Ultra MiniGolf Adventures . Gyruss is a Konami arcade port, while Minigolf includes a course editor to distract you from the simple gameplay. As far as new XBLA content goes: The Daily show is already available on the service, along with The Colbert Report, Carcossonne will join Settlers of Catan and (apparently) Talisman in boardgame-to-Xbox ports, and Microsoft is looking for pitches for a television show to be shown exclusively on Xbox live. If you win the TV contest, you get to make it for them.

Comments

Settlers may be cheaper than board counterpart.

[hal2814]

After buying the Settlers of Catan, Seafarers of Catan, the 5-6 Player expansion and all the other odds and ends, it may be cheaper to just buy a 360 and play it online. Does the XBox Live Catan have a decent AI? I wish the Pioneers (formerly Gnocatan) AI could use their darn ships. Fish in a barrel...

Re:Punch-Out without Mike Tyson

[timster]

It's more like a Slashdot discussion without a metaphor. Maybe you'll miss it, but did you really need it anyway?

Re:Daily Show and Colbert report at 2 bucks a pop.

[GrayCalx]

If you have cable, why do you even care?

Sure I'd like consoles themselves to be cheaper, I think $500 for a ps3 as you say "is less than a novelty, its an insult." So I don't buy it. I wish my new house cost half the price. Gas is too high. Cigarette prices keep going up. Coffee from Starbucks is $4. And you're complaining about a downloadable TV show... that you've already seen... on cable... ooooo-kay.

Re:Daily Show and Colbert report at 2 bucks a pop.

[LordNimon]

Maybe he'd like to cancel cable and just pay for the shows he wants to watch? I canceled my standard cable service and downgraded to basic, saving me about $40/month. The only shows I was watching on those channels were Dead Zone, both Stargates, and occasionally the Daily Show. Now I wait for the DVDs of DZ and the SGs, but the Daily Show is another matter. When I hear that they'd be available on XLM, I got excited. That is, until I saw the price: $2 per 25-minute episode. Assuming 4.5 weeks/month, and 4 episodes/week, that translates to $36/month. How can you justify that cost? For that amount of money, I could get ALL of Comedy Central and about 30 other channels.

TV shows should cost about $1/hour. Even if you double that to $2/hour to account for lack of commercials, that still makes the Daily Show two times as expensive. And why can't we have commercials anyway? Even though most people will fast-forward through them, the price of the commercials could at least cover the cost bandwidth. That would make Microsoft's expenses almost zero.

Microsoft needs to do something to bring these costs down. The cost of a single show *cannot* be the same as the cost of an entire cable subscription. That's just ridiculous.