For example, it ask the question "What Console or Consoles do you or have you owned?" implying you can own more than one console. BUT, it's a drop down list. You can only select one console!
I put other and then just listed the consoles I currently use in the list. I wasn't going to bother adding the ones I have owned, ie Atari 2600, NES, Genesis, Turbo Grafx-16.
I also liked the 'paste your resume here' part. I just wrote 'none of your damned business, Im not applying for a job'. Then I clicked the submit button and it said it would submit via email, so I cancelled and said screw it.
The reason most of the people I know play games on consoles is because they don't have to keep the games up to date or worry about configuration issues. Why would we want a console that can download patches?
- Sony signed with many game developers. Many good titles were released early with the console. BTW Final Fantasy VII was the deciding factor for my PS purchase.
What were the launch titles for the Playstation? I bought my Playstation to play Tekken 2/3, Final Fantasy VII, and Resident Evil 2, but NONE of these games were 1st gen titles for the Playstation.
- Sony's marketing and brand recognition.
Their brand recognition was nil with gamers. They made the Walkman and overpriced stereo equipment, not games. This is the company that made Minidisc, afterall.
Think about Arnold Schwarzenegger getting a military Humvee before there was a civilian version for example.
Yeah, well Arnold's in a 70% bracket, and with how much he makes on a movie that's got to be several million in taxes a year;) Not to mention I'm sure they charged him at least what the Humvee costs them.
I think I'd rather have the Apex DVD player and the Xbox than the Xbox and the remote.
Yeah, I can see that. I currently have 2 DVD players (1 Samsung DVD player which I bought a couple of years ago, and a Samsung DVD/VHS combo player that I bought a few months ago after my VCR broke). I haven't bothered with the DVD remote yet, but if I see it at a bargain rate I might pick it up eventually. At the moment I use the PS2 for DVD playback from time to time.
At least that way if the Xbox or the DVD player broke I wouldn't be out both.
I try to limit my game systems to being used only for games (though, as I said above, I still use the PS2 for DVDs once in a while), simply because, as you pointed out, it's pretty cheap to replace a DVD player, but although both the PS2 and XBox are cheaper than when I bought them, they're not that cheap.
Hardly seems like there's any "Bonus" involved in buying an Xbox. I won't even get into the XBox live kit costing more than the PS2 network adapter plus a game...
hmm I don't know how much the PS2 network adapter costs, but that doesn't sound right to me unless you're talking about the 'greatest hits' games and the adapter runs $20-30 or less. Personally, my XBox games consist primarily of Halo and a handful of games that were released on 2 or 3 platforms but clearly had improved graphics and/or features on the XBox. I'm not buying the XBox Live kit until I've got a handful of games I want to play online, though, just like I'm not buying the PS2 adapter until I have a reason to (though maybe FFXI will be that reason).
Not to mention it costs money in terms of fuel and maintenance to drive one, and they would most likely require that you have an escort, which takes someone away from doing something else.
Of course, the cartridges would have to be more complicated, possibly making them more expensive, or maybe even slightly larger
And we all know that larger cartridges aren't a problem, since the original GameBoy and GameBoy Color cartridges are about twice as long as the GBA cartridges, and work perfectly fine in the GBA systems.
The "Virtua Tennis 2" threw me off - I assumed it was a new sequel coming out on the PS2, because the tennis game for the PS2, which was actual Virtua Tennis 2, wasn't called Virtua Tennis 2 but...oh nevermind.
See? Their marketing doesn't even have the sense to tell them to call the damned game the same thing in each market.
Actually, I personally get a bit of a chuckle at their expense, but it's not that I find what they claim to want to do funny, but rather fairly stupid. Of course, most of it also happens to simply be their international marketing team, so who knows, maybe things are just seen differently from my perspective than from the perspective of their markets.
As for the naming thing, I thought that there was quite a bit of a fan base for the first Virtua Tennis, so I don't understand why the sequel has a different name over here in the US.
I'm just pointing out some things as a fairly long-time broadband online gamer, and how these things seem to be handled in the US.
* Language: many different languages are not helping it: try to say "I'll kick your ass " in portuguese, german and polish... On the other hand many europeans speak english between themselves
Having lived in California when Diablo 2 launched and played the game for quite some time from there, I can say that this is rarely an issue for most people. The number of Koreans playing on the US West servers was unbelievable, and most of them only typed in Korean. Those that didn't speak Korean ignored them. It may not bode well for teamwork and may piss off a few people on both sides of the language barrier, but to some extent you either learn to communicate with one another or ignore it. This is where I think in-game localized macros can help out extensively. Look at the little online games that come with WindowsXP. They have a small selection of things you can send to the other player which have been localized for the different versions of Windows and they get most points across. Sure, you can't have a conversation with the person, but it does the job for the most basic things. I think this could be done with most games at some level, and believe this may already have been done with a few games.
* Broadband access: Even in rich countries like Switzerland and Germany, broadband is not quite the rage. And at least sony's offering is broadband only, no modems allowed...
Broadband penetration in the US varies greatly by region. Cable availability has a lot to do with it. That being said, I haven't seen a concentrated offering on Sony's part, and don't know what exactly they have in terms of hardware. I know that Microsoft's offering is broadband only, and that Nintendo offers both a network adapter and a modem for their console.
* PCs: people buy broadband because they have a PC, and guess what, they already play games on it (Half-life anyone?). They don't need or want it for their console (if they have one)...
I already have a cable router hooked up to share my broadband connection with multiple PCs. I'm currently considering getting a wireless cable router to hook up all of my consoles to it and then have them all connect to the main cable router through the wireless connection. The fact that I already have a broadband connection for my PC makes it *easier* to justify connecting my consoles. The only thing I'm really waiting for is to have at least 2 games for the XBox that I want to play online before shelling out the money for the Live kit. I may connect up all of the consoles before I'm even ready to play anything online simply to spread the cost out over time (much like I bought some of my GBA and GC games before I had the systems knowing that I would want to play the games asap, and knowing that I got good prices on the games).
Well of course you're also paying money so the company can profit. That's stating the obvious. My point was that the cash paid for your original purchase of the game goes towards the development costs and not server maintanence.
My point was that at some point ALL of the money is going towards profit and/or server maintenance, if the game does well. If the game doesn't do well, then chances are that they'll never recover the costs. Of course, it all depends on how well their initial sales go. However, if a game is one (such as Star Wars Galaxies) that is predicted to do well in initial sales, there's really no reason to pay $50 up front for the game. I can understand that up front costs are going to have to be paid at some level for the development and setup costs, but the level of profit that's coming in on these games far surpasses the cost of maintenance or development, when they can manage to bring together a certain number of subscribers.
The idea that any company needs both the initial $50 and a subscription rate from $10-15/month to support one of these games when other companies are doing something similar (though obviously not quite the same level) simply by delivering a new game every couple of years and charging no monthly rate implies that the initial price for MMO games could be dropped to a lower point if the company can deliver a solid product.
Of course, the one company that everyone likes to point to is Blizzard, and it's likely that they'll fund most of Battle.net's continued growth and development through WoW if it's a successful product.
I'm not trying to say that companies should not make a profit, I'm simply trying to point out that when people complain about the prices for these games, they're making a very legitimate point. Companies that can create and maintain very successful MMO games will continue to use this pricing, and even increase the subscription costs, so long as they don't feel they're losing a significant number of subscribers and/or initial buyers (though in reality the subscribers will always be more important than initial buyers once the product has had a successful launch), because within 4 months' time they can bring in the same amount (or more, since shipping, packagining, and such costs don't figure into subscription rates, though billing does) that another company would have to ship 2 fairly successful games to bring in.
People simply need to adjust their arguments in favour of these pricing schemes if they really want a solid place to work from. Frankly, whatever justifications are brought forward, regardless of how good they are, won't make me pay full price for one of these games until I see something that truly looks interesting and gets good reviews of it's actual launch (rather than reviews of the betas, I want to know how well the game handles hundreds of thousands of people hitting their registration servers on day one and hitting the game servers 15 minutes later, if they aren't prepared for that properly, they're going to be playing catch-up for at least 3 months). Very few of these games (even the most popular of them) have had solid launches, and while that could be excused with the early games (UO, EQ, etc), the ones that have launched in the last year or two, as well as those that will be launching in the future, really have no excuse until we start to see even larger numbers willing to pay this kind of money to play these games. Who knows, maybe Star Wars Galaxies will bring that kind of audience, but I haven't seen that kind of ground-level hype for the game yet.
Unlikely, the E-reader actually supports an enormous emount of data on a card (think the size of an NES rom, give or take a few bits), that being its biggest success.
I didn't realize this until I had read the article on the reader. It still sounds as if their primary mode of interaction with most games is through unlocking items stored on the games, though. Having read through and found out that you can actually buy entire games on cards that play without any other game makes it more of a question in my mind, but the fact that you can gain passwords to give to other players to unlock things without the cards or reader tends to imply this.
However, since the article on SMBA4 doesn't seem to give much detail on the features, it's hard to say whether they're add-ons that the game is simply built to deal with easily, or features unlocked by the cards. It seems that most of the games take ~10 cards anyway, which would seem rather tedious to me.
Well, I do, but the TV that my consoles are hooked up to doesn't;p
You're already used to the small screen on the GBA
That much is true. It doesn't take long to get used to it, and I quickly abandoned the magnifier that came with one of the accessory bundles I bought because it seems to distort the picture too much for my taste. Still, it would be nice playing some SNES style games again without having to pick up an SNES and some cartridges.
I don't know what kind of problems there would be with releasing other Zelda games, but there's a bunch of information on the games at http://www.zeldauniverse.net/main.php?page=add itio nalgames
including games that simply included Zelda characters (ie the upcoming GameCube version of Soul Calibur 2).
Normally I'd say "Good plan.", but why not put it out for GBA and GCN? For the portables AND the home crowd. Casual gamers would be more likely to buy their home system (which floundered this time, compared to their past ones) if they was a quality line of games for $29. Which, compared to most games, is a throw-away price. Barely more than a CD or DVD.
As the previous poster said, they could probably use it as promotion for the GameBoy Player, which is the add-on for the GameCube that let's you play GameBoy Advance games on the GameCube. In about 4 days the GameBoy Player goes on sale and will be bundled with new GameCubes. Most GBA games retail around $30 anyway, which, as you said, is a throw-away price for most games. I already have 5 GBA games (Metroid, Zelda, Castlevania Aria of Sorrow, WarioWare Inc, and Golden Sun) and I only bought my GBA SP a couple of weeks ago. I'm hoping to pick up the GameCube + GB Player combo in about a week so I can stop using the GBA SP so much at home (though I must admit a good part of that time is during commercials when I'm watching TV, which is something the Player isn't really good for).
My old DVD player is starting to act weird, so I'm considering an Xbox just for the DVD capabilities. That it plays games is a nice bonus.:-)
Don't forget the DVD Remote, then, because, unlike the PS2, the XBox doesn't play DVDs without the remote. Perhaps that's not a big deal to most people (it really isn't to me, either), but it just bothers me a bit that my XBox is sitting there with a DVD decoder I've been told (and shown) is better than the PS2 decoder, but I can't use it without spending US$30.
You pay for the development and packaging of a game - then you pay for the service provided by the company with their servers.
If this were the case, the initial price would drop off once the development and setup was paid for. The simple fact is that beyond X number of copies the $50 price up front is profit - packaging - (publishing fees + advertisement) - initial month's service. As past games have shown, though, the price only drops off when: a) the game is having trouble staying afloat due to problems or just lack of interest, or b) the game has been successful for well over a year and most of the players and the game world are well established at high levels, meaning the new player that bought the game at $20 finds the world overpopulated and overly exploited.
Even the expansions for a game like Everquest are developed on the funds from the subscriptions, and despite the $50 up-front cost the majority of profit comes from players that are subscribers for 6 months or more. You could buy a new (not bargain bin) game every 3 or 4 months on subscription fees, and I don't think there's a company out there that's been able to release a successful title every 4 months for as long as Everquest has been running.
believe me, I'm with him in having that song pop in my head but having no clue what Denver looked like or even what the show was about. Unfortunately, there's nothing good about that damned song going off, especially since it's most likely just that one line going through over and over again.
They still have a handful of skins on the site. Most of them are DC comics characters. Apparently either DC comics doesn't care, or Marvel didn't bother notifying DC (in other words, DC doesn't know).
While I think it's often fun to play games with super-hero skins, it's somewhat sad that the whole site is made up primarily of derivative works, rather than unique skins.
They could always license the trademark to the skins site for a token fee (say, $1) under certain restrictions (such as licensing downloaders only to use the skins for personal use, for the site not to sell access to the skins, etc.).
While this is certainly true, I think it's just slightly possible that this would undercut the price they're charging a game company to use the names and likenesses in a game that's currently being produced. This is most likely why they're just now going after people for skinning in the first place.
I think the reason for Vietnam games would simply be that it's the next obvious step, and is probably just becoming technologically feasible without being obnoxiously limited (ie the jungle missions in Rainbow 6).
That, and the fact that some people don't even know anything about the Korean War (or maybe just the fact that the Korean War is becoming a little bit more touchy of an issue at the moment).
We certainly saw a glut of WW2 games once all of the semi-realistic mods started becoming extremely popular, so it's only natural that everyone that's already built (or licensed) an engine for a WW2 game would go down the line of American wars to provide more cash cows to milk.
and the reason that you probably couldn't do this through modding is because the information on the card is most likely just a code of some type to unlock a level that's already on the cartridge, but isn't part of the original game.
How many people actually pay for WinZip? Nero? Trillian? Or the bevy of shareware apps available from places like download.com [download.com]?
WinZip is just bad software with the right name and timing. Sure, it does what it's supposed to do, but everything about it's interface is just bad. There're enough other programs out there that do the same thing better worth buying.
Nero I don't use, but probably more because I find Roxio Easy CD Creator to work perfectly fine 99% of the time. Nero comes with a fairly large percentage of current CD writers anyway, so most people probably already paid for it one way or another.
Trillian's one I've never used, so I can't really comment on that. As for download.com, if no one's buying that software, it won't be on the site very long, because you have to pay to keep your software there. Someone somewhere is buying it, or the author's just dumping cash on it.
Neither Diablo nor UT had incessant crashing for me, nor anyone I know, though. UT2k3, on the other hand, was very bad (and I played the demo before I bought it), not even letting me play the game because it crashed in the menu. I haven't tried to play that game in so long that the sequel is coming out, which I won't buy until 2005.
My guess on what hardware could be causing you problems would be the Radeon and maybe the SB PCI. The only reason I say that is because I've seen a lot of crashing problems with ATI hardware, and the whole SB PCI line has been flaky with various operating systems (not that I particularly like the SB cards anyway, but I haven't had any problems with games playing on the Live and Audigy lines, just some issues with Roger Wilco while playing under WinXP which I think are due to Creative's crappy drivers).
Stitching text files together is ridiculously easy; use cat (even if you're doing this under Windows, Cygwin will give you a perfectly good implementation of UNIX tools).
Or, instead of installing Cygwin for those people that don't already have that or Unix Services installed, use copy at the command prompt. ie copy/A page1 + page2 + page3 + page4/A book
The/A indicates ASCII text files, the same format can be used for multi-part mpg files, and basically any other file type that can be just stuck end-to-end and work properly.
We have an excellent free debit card system in place.
Most of the debit card system in the US is backed by one or the other of the major credit card companies, so the online systems don't know the difference;)
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For example, it ask the question "What Console or Consoles do you or have you owned?" implying you can own more than one console. BUT, it's a drop down list. You can only select one console!
I put other and then just listed the consoles I currently use in the list. I wasn't going to bother adding the ones I have owned, ie Atari 2600, NES, Genesis, Turbo Grafx-16.
I also liked the 'paste your resume here' part. I just wrote 'none of your damned business, Im not applying for a job'. Then I clicked the submit button and it said it would submit via email, so I cancelled and said screw it.
The reason most of the people I know play games on consoles is because they don't have to keep the games up to date or worry about configuration issues. Why would we want a console that can download patches?
- Sony signed with many game developers. Many good titles were released early with the console. BTW Final Fantasy VII was the deciding factor for my PS purchase.
What were the launch titles for the Playstation?
I bought my Playstation to play Tekken 2/3, Final Fantasy VII, and Resident Evil 2, but NONE of these games were 1st gen titles for the Playstation.
- Sony's marketing and brand recognition.
Their brand recognition was nil with gamers. They made the Walkman and overpriced stereo equipment, not games. This is the company that made Minidisc, afterall.
Think about Arnold Schwarzenegger getting a military Humvee before there was a civilian version for example.
;) Not to mention I'm sure they charged him at least what the Humvee costs them.
Yeah, well Arnold's in a 70% bracket, and with how much he makes on a movie that's got to be several million in taxes a year
I think I'd rather have the Apex DVD player and the Xbox than the Xbox and the remote.
Yeah, I can see that. I currently have 2 DVD players (1 Samsung DVD player which I bought a couple of years ago, and a Samsung DVD/VHS combo player that I bought a few months ago after my VCR broke). I haven't bothered with the DVD remote yet, but if I see it at a bargain rate I might pick it up eventually. At the moment I use the PS2 for DVD playback from time to time.
At least that way if the Xbox or the DVD player broke I wouldn't be out both.
I try to limit my game systems to being used only for games (though, as I said above, I still use the PS2 for DVDs once in a while), simply because, as you pointed out, it's pretty cheap to replace a DVD player, but although both the PS2 and XBox are cheaper than when I bought them, they're not that cheap.
Hardly seems like there's any "Bonus" involved in buying an Xbox. I won't even get into the XBox live kit costing more than the PS2 network adapter plus a game...
hmm I don't know how much the PS2 network adapter costs, but that doesn't sound right to me unless you're talking about the 'greatest hits' games and the adapter runs $20-30 or less. Personally, my XBox games consist primarily of Halo and a handful of games that were released on 2 or 3 platforms but clearly had improved graphics and/or features on the XBox. I'm not buying the XBox Live kit until I've got a handful of games I want to play online, though, just like I'm not buying the PS2 adapter until I have a reason to (though maybe FFXI will be that reason).
Not to mention it costs money in terms of fuel and maintenance to drive one, and they would most likely require that you have an escort, which takes someone away from doing something else.
Of course, the cartridges would have to be more complicated, possibly making them more expensive, or maybe even slightly larger
And we all know that larger cartridges aren't a problem, since the original GameBoy and GameBoy Color cartridges are about twice as long as the GBA cartridges, and work perfectly fine in the GBA systems.
The "Virtua Tennis 2" threw me off - I assumed it was a new sequel coming out on the PS2, because the tennis game for the PS2, which was actual Virtua Tennis 2, wasn't called Virtua Tennis 2 but...oh nevermind.
See? Their marketing doesn't even have the sense to tell them to call the damned game the same thing in each market.
Actually, I personally get a bit of a chuckle at their expense, but it's not that I find what they claim to want to do funny, but rather fairly stupid. Of course, most of it also happens to simply be their international marketing team, so who knows, maybe things are just seen differently from my perspective than from the perspective of their markets.
As for the naming thing, I thought that there was quite a bit of a fan base for the first Virtua Tennis, so I don't understand why the sequel has a different name over here in the US.
If the previous games are any indication, Virtua Tennis 2 is going to be a great game
Which, of course, is why they're doing this marketing campaign 7 months after it's release...
Oh, wait, I guess that's just because it happens to be the first Wimbledon after it's release, yeah, that's the ticket.
I'm just pointing out some things as a fairly long-time broadband online gamer, and how these things seem to be handled in the US.
* Language: many different languages are not helping it: try to say "I'll kick your ass " in portuguese, german and polish... On the other hand many europeans speak english between themselves
Having lived in California when Diablo 2 launched and played the game for quite some time from there, I can say that this is rarely an issue for most people. The number of Koreans playing on the US West servers was unbelievable, and most of them only typed in Korean. Those that didn't speak Korean ignored them. It may not bode well for teamwork and may piss off a few people on both sides of the language barrier, but to some extent you either learn to communicate with one another or ignore it. This is where I think in-game localized macros can help out extensively. Look at the little online games that come with WindowsXP. They have a small selection of things you can send to the other player which have been localized for the different versions of Windows and they get most points across. Sure, you can't have a conversation with the person, but it does the job for the most basic things. I think this could be done with most games at some level, and believe this may already have been done with a few games.
* Broadband access: Even in rich countries like Switzerland and Germany, broadband is not quite the rage. And at least sony's offering is broadband only, no modems allowed...
Broadband penetration in the US varies greatly by region. Cable availability has a lot to do with it. That being said, I haven't seen a concentrated offering on Sony's part, and don't know what exactly they have in terms of hardware. I know that Microsoft's offering is broadband only, and that Nintendo offers both a network adapter and a modem for their console.
* PCs: people buy broadband because they have a PC, and guess what, they already play games on it (Half-life anyone?). They don't need or want it for their console (if they have one)...
I already have a cable router hooked up to share my broadband connection with multiple PCs. I'm currently considering getting a wireless cable router to hook up all of my consoles to it and then have them all connect to the main cable router through the wireless connection. The fact that I already have a broadband connection for my PC makes it *easier* to justify connecting my consoles. The only thing I'm really waiting for is to have at least 2 games for the XBox that I want to play online before shelling out the money for the Live kit. I may connect up all of the consoles before I'm even ready to play anything online simply to spread the cost out over time (much like I bought some of my GBA and GC games before I had the systems knowing that I would want to play the games asap, and knowing that I got good prices on the games).
Well of course you're also paying money so the company can profit. That's stating the obvious. My point was that the cash paid for your original purchase of the game goes towards the development costs and not server maintanence.
My point was that at some point ALL of the money is going towards profit and/or server maintenance, if the game does well. If the game doesn't do well, then chances are that they'll never recover the costs. Of course, it all depends on how well their initial sales go. However, if a game is one (such as Star Wars Galaxies) that is predicted to do well in initial sales, there's really no reason to pay $50 up front for the game. I can understand that up front costs are going to have to be paid at some level for the development and setup costs, but the level of profit that's coming in on these games far surpasses the cost of maintenance or development, when they can manage to bring together a certain number of subscribers.
The idea that any company needs both the initial $50 and a subscription rate from $10-15/month to support one of these games when other companies are doing something similar (though obviously not quite the same level) simply by delivering a new game every couple of years and charging no monthly rate implies that the initial price for MMO games could be dropped to a lower point if the company can deliver a solid product.
Of course, the one company that everyone likes to point to is Blizzard, and it's likely that they'll fund most of Battle.net's continued growth and development through WoW if it's a successful product.
I'm not trying to say that companies should not make a profit, I'm simply trying to point out that when people complain about the prices for these games, they're making a very legitimate point. Companies that can create and maintain very successful MMO games will continue to use this pricing, and even increase the subscription costs, so long as they don't feel they're losing a significant number of subscribers and/or initial buyers (though in reality the subscribers will always be more important than initial buyers once the product has had a successful launch), because within 4 months' time they can bring in the same amount (or more, since shipping, packagining, and such costs don't figure into subscription rates, though billing does) that another company would have to ship 2 fairly successful games to bring in.
People simply need to adjust their arguments in favour of these pricing schemes if they really want a solid place to work from. Frankly, whatever justifications are brought forward, regardless of how good they are, won't make me pay full price for one of these games until I see something that truly looks interesting and gets good reviews of it's actual launch (rather than reviews of the betas, I want to know how well the game handles hundreds of thousands of people hitting their registration servers on day one and hitting the game servers 15 minutes later, if they aren't prepared for that properly, they're going to be playing catch-up for at least 3 months). Very few of these games (even the most popular of them) have had solid launches, and while that could be excused with the early games (UO, EQ, etc), the ones that have launched in the last year or two, as well as those that will be launching in the future, really have no excuse until we start to see even larger numbers willing to pay this kind of money to play these games. Who knows, maybe Star Wars Galaxies will bring that kind of audience, but I haven't seen that kind of ground-level hype for the game yet.
Unlikely, the E-reader actually supports an enormous emount of data on a card (think the size of an NES rom, give or take a few bits), that being its biggest success.
I didn't realize this until I had read the article on the reader. It still sounds as if their primary mode of interaction with most games is through unlocking items stored on the games, though. Having read through and found out that you can actually buy entire games on cards that play without any other game makes it more of a question in my mind, but the fact that you can gain passwords to give to other players to unlock things without the cards or reader tends to imply this.
However, since the article on SMBA4 doesn't seem to give much detail on the features, it's hard to say whether they're add-ons that the game is simply built to deal with easily, or features unlocked by the cards. It seems that most of the games take ~10 cards anyway, which would seem rather tedious to me.
You must not have picture in picture TV then :)
;p
Well, I do, but the TV that my consoles are hooked up to doesn't
You're already used to the small screen on the GBA
That much is true. It doesn't take long to get used to it, and I quickly abandoned the magnifier that came with one of the accessory bundles I bought because it seems to distort the picture too much for my taste. Still, it would be nice playing some SNES style games again without having to pick up an SNES and some cartridges.
I don't know what kind of problems there would be with releasing other Zelda games, but there's a bunch of information on the games atd itio nalgames
http://www.zeldauniverse.net/main.php?page=ad
including games that simply included Zelda characters (ie the upcoming GameCube version of Soul Calibur 2).
Normally I'd say "Good plan.", but why not put it out for GBA and GCN? For the portables AND the home crowd. Casual gamers would be more likely to buy their home system (which floundered this time, compared to their past ones) if they was a quality line of games for $29. Which, compared to most games, is a throw-away price. Barely more than a CD or DVD.
As the previous poster said, they could probably use it as promotion for the GameBoy Player, which is the add-on for the GameCube that let's you play GameBoy Advance games on the GameCube. In about 4 days the GameBoy Player goes on sale and will be bundled with new GameCubes. Most GBA games retail around $30 anyway, which, as you said, is a throw-away price for most games. I already have 5 GBA games (Metroid, Zelda, Castlevania Aria of Sorrow, WarioWare Inc, and Golden Sun) and I only bought my GBA SP a couple of weeks ago. I'm hoping to pick up the GameCube + GB Player combo in about a week so I can stop using the GBA SP so much at home (though I must admit a good part of that time is during commercials when I'm watching TV, which is something the Player isn't really good for).
My old DVD player is starting to act weird, so I'm considering an Xbox just for the DVD capabilities. That it plays games is a nice bonus. :-)
Don't forget the DVD Remote, then, because, unlike the PS2, the XBox doesn't play DVDs without the remote. Perhaps that's not a big deal to most people (it really isn't to me, either), but it just bothers me a bit that my XBox is sitting there with a DVD decoder I've been told (and shown) is better than the PS2 decoder, but I can't use it without spending US$30.
You pay for the development and packaging of a game - then you pay for the service provided by the company with their servers.
If this were the case, the initial price would drop off once the development and setup was paid for. The simple fact is that beyond X number of copies the $50 price up front is profit - packaging - (publishing fees + advertisement) - initial month's service. As past games have shown, though, the price only drops off when:
a) the game is having trouble staying afloat due to problems or just lack of interest, or
b) the game has been successful for well over a year and most of the players and the game world are well established at high levels, meaning the new player that bought the game at $20 finds the world overpopulated and overly exploited.
Even the expansions for a game like Everquest are developed on the funds from the subscriptions, and despite the $50 up-front cost the majority of profit comes from players that are subscribers for 6 months or more. You could buy a new (not bargain bin) game every 3 or 4 months on subscription fees, and I don't think there's a company out there that's been able to release a successful title every 4 months for as long as Everquest has been running.
believe me, I'm with him in having that song pop in my head but having no clue what Denver looked like or even what the show was about. Unfortunately, there's nothing good about that damned song going off, especially since it's most likely just that one line going through over and over again.
They still have a handful of skins on the site. Most of them are DC comics characters. Apparently either DC comics doesn't care, or Marvel didn't bother notifying DC (in other words, DC doesn't know).
While I think it's often fun to play games with super-hero skins, it's somewhat sad that the whole site is made up primarily of derivative works, rather than unique skins.
They could always license the trademark to the skins site for a token fee (say, $1) under certain restrictions (such as licensing downloaders only to use the skins for personal use, for the site not to sell access to the skins, etc.).
While this is certainly true, I think it's just slightly possible that this would undercut the price they're charging a game company to use the names and likenesses in a game that's currently being produced. This is most likely why they're just now going after people for skinning in the first place.
I think the reason for Vietnam games would simply be that it's the next obvious step, and is probably just becoming technologically feasible without being obnoxiously limited (ie the jungle missions in Rainbow 6).
That, and the fact that some people don't even know anything about the Korean War (or maybe just the fact that the Korean War is becoming a little bit more touchy of an issue at the moment).
We certainly saw a glut of WW2 games once all of the semi-realistic mods started becoming extremely popular, so it's only natural that everyone that's already built (or licensed) an engine for a WW2 game would go down the line of American wars to provide more cash cows to milk.
and the reason that you probably couldn't do this through modding is because the information on the card is most likely just a code of some type to unlock a level that's already on the cartridge, but isn't part of the original game.
How many people actually pay for WinZip? Nero? Trillian? Or the bevy of shareware apps available from places like download.com [download.com]?
WinZip is just bad software with the right name and timing. Sure, it does what it's supposed to do, but everything about it's interface is just bad. There're enough other programs out there that do the same thing better worth buying.
Nero I don't use, but probably more because I find Roxio Easy CD Creator to work perfectly fine 99% of the time. Nero comes with a fairly large percentage of current CD writers anyway, so most people probably already paid for it one way or another.
Trillian's one I've never used, so I can't really comment on that. As for download.com, if no one's buying that software, it won't be on the site very long, because you have to pay to keep your software there. Someone somewhere is buying it, or the author's just dumping cash on it.
Neither Diablo nor UT had incessant crashing for me, nor anyone I know, though. UT2k3, on the other hand, was very bad (and I played the demo before I bought it), not even letting me play the game because it crashed in the menu. I haven't tried to play that game in so long that the sequel is coming out, which I won't buy until 2005.
My guess on what hardware could be causing you problems would be the Radeon and maybe the SB PCI. The only reason I say that is because I've seen a lot of crashing problems with ATI hardware, and the whole SB PCI line has been flaky with various operating systems (not that I particularly like the SB cards anyway, but I haven't had any problems with games playing on the Live and Audigy lines, just some issues with Roger Wilco while playing under WinXP which I think are due to Creative's crappy drivers).
Stitching text files together is ridiculously easy; use cat (even if you're doing this under Windows, Cygwin will give you a perfectly good implementation of UNIX tools).
/A page1 + page2 + page3 + page4 /A book
/A indicates ASCII text files, the same format can be used for multi-part mpg files, and basically any other file type that can be just stuck end-to-end and work properly.
Or, instead of installing Cygwin for those people that don't already have that or Unix Services installed, use copy at the command prompt. ie
copy
The
We have an excellent free debit card system in place.
;)
Most of the debit card system in the US is backed by one or the other of the major credit card companies, so the online systems don't know the difference