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How Do You Measure a Game's Worth?
RamblingJosh writes "Video games can be very expensive these days, especially with so many great games on the horizon. So I wonder: how exactly do you get the most gaming entertainment for your dollar? '... the first thing I personally thought about when approaching this was money spent versus time played. Using Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions as an example: I bought the game for about $30 Canadian, and played it for roughly 85 hours. That comes out to 2.83 hours per dollar spent, a pretty good number. In this case, the game was a lot of fun and it was cheap, and so the system works fairly well. There are so many other things to think about, though. What if the game wasn't so good? What about the fact that it's portable? ... What about the new content? Multiplayer?'"
The new Silent Hill game for the Wii, Shattered Memories, was amazingly good; innovative, deep, intelligent... and maybe 8 hours long. $7.50 an hour. Absolutely worth it, in the sense a great movie is, even though it fails the $/hour test.
On the other hand, a good strategy game, like any of the incarnations of Fire Emblem, can easily top a hundred hours. The metric has to be total enjoyment... and fond remembrance of the game counts into that total. Hell, the game is probably worth an extra quarter if it generates a decent slashdot post.