My wife got me a set of Lord of the Rings dvds for Valentine's Day. In it was a coupon that gave me $20 of products from a site that sold Lord of the Rings miniatures. The products were all outrageously priced (much more than walmart anyway) but it had a feel of high quality, rare items. Though they probably don't sell billions I could easily see them making a ton of money. Even if they made some exclusive brand that was just dragons, orcs and elves without the LotR branding.
If you marketed well and gave screen shots and demos of intense scenes that you don't see every day at walmarts across America people could easily start to see yu as a deluxe collector's edition type brand instead of some cheap store brand.
EBGameStop is going to be the only place to buy it.
Does EB stand for ebay, because if the games are any good it'll be hard to keep people from buying it there. Of course they probably don't care a bit how much of what they sell ends up on ebay.
I agree that the points aren't that bad. I'm a fan of Guild Wars and I'd particularly recommend Nightfall if you're thinking of playing with your wife/girlfriend/buddy/whatever. With the addition of the Heroes, it's not too hard to play difficult missions with just your partner and both of your heroes. With the original Prophecies chapter, sometimes it would be hard to find a good group to join for the most difficult missions. You can still hook up with 8 other people to play some mission but if you just want to get started quickly and have fun for a half hour without waiting, you can much more easily do it with the heroes.
If you've got enough credit you can order a giant bundle from Walmart and once it ships, walk into your local Walmart and return the games you don't want. You'll only be out the shipping costs.
Guild Wars was able to avoid the grind to some extent. You max out at level 20 and it doesn't take terribly long to get to that point. There's also not a whole lot of expensive and essential equipment. You can fairly quickly pick up what you need as monster drops along the way.
There's still specialty stuff that might cost a pretty penny or take a lot of random fighting until you get the drop you want, but that's totally unnecessary to being successful at the game. Unfortunately, they may have taken a step back in that regard. In their latest chapter, Nightfall, you have to earn points to gain in rank for certain quests. It's not too much of a grind but it's not quite as open as their original chapter was in that regard.
This is true of anything that becomes popular. If it becomes popular enough you'll eventually have to buy a McDonald's Happy Meal to have a "complete set".
Not everyone knows they want one yet. Others want one but aren't sure it's worth the price of dealing with a shift in addresses. My brother just recently accepted my invitation to gmail after getting fed up with all the ads on hotmail. I'd invited him long ago but he didn't want to have to tell everyone of his new email address. He's gotten to the point where it's worth switching and just occasionally checking up on his old address for the few that never got the notice of his change in address.
I'm not a lawyer but that doesn't sound entirely right.
What if I get a copyright on some novel I write and publish it online. I make a statement on my site saying that it may be distributed freely as long as people attribute it correctly and don't modify it.
Now if someone ignores my request and changes a few words here and there and adds in a kinky sex chapter in the middle and sells it online, do I have a copyright case? It's a different work now. It's not an "accurate" depiction of my work...so I don't have a copyright case?
Both the DS and PS2 sold great but how much profit does Nintendo and Sony make from each sold?
The PS2 is probably old enough technology that it's very cheap to make nowadays. DS came out later but Nintendo is known for making a profit right out of the gate on units. It'd be interesting to hear the actual numbers.
Larry Douglas said his younger brother, Tony, and Shawn were best friends and often went skateboarding and biking. He said Tony had no idea of Shawn's real identity. Larry Douglas said his family was not allowing his brother to speak to reporters.
Before Tony Douglas' family made him unavailable to the media, he told Fox News that on three occasions, police stopped the two for being out beyond curfew. Officers gave the boys a lift home, unaware of Shawn's real identity, Tony said.
The Post-Dispatch cited another encounter between Shawn and police that occurred Sept. 29 when an officer stopped the boy, who was riding his bike about 11:20 p.m., about a mile from the apartment.
The police report stated that Shawn told the officer his name was Shawn Devlin and gave a birth date of July 7, 1991 - 10 days off his actual birthday. Shawn told the officer he was biking to the apartment after visiting a friend's home.
''He was wearing dark clothing and didn't have reflectors on his bike,'' Glendale Sgt. Bob Catlett told the newspaper. ''The officer stopped him to find out who he was.
''He said he was Shawn Devlin, and we had no reason to doubt him.''
Tony sometimes spent the night at Shawn's apartment, but rarely spoke with Devlin. Larry Douglas said his brother saw no indication of abuse, or clues that Shawn was a captive.
The Ownbys said authorities had asked the families of both boys not to speak about their time in captivity. That left open the mystery of how their captor kept them from escaping.
EarthLink and the provider of the free service will be required to fully disclose their privacy policy. This ensures that all users are aware of the privacy policies."
What it ensures is that users are overwhelmed with the amount of text and quickly click "Okay".
My sister was told by a kmart official that the people up top decided to keep shipping to the coasts until they stopped selling out and only then ship inland. It seems like I've heard from a lot more people in Washington/Oregon area with experiences of multiple wii consoles on the shelf than out here in Utah. I guess they decided to save on shipping or something. *shrug*
I agree with you. As long as there's no downside I'd be happy for those features. It wouldn't be a huge selling point (to me anyway) but it's a nice extra. Although, if they tried so hard to add MORE features that they didn't have time to get any of the features anywhere near polished, then I'd consider that a downside. Not necessarily a huge downside if they could quickly improve those features through updates...but it's still a downside to take into consideration.
Or the demo disks? Why does everyone assume that a lockup must mean an overheating issue of some sort? I don't get BSOD because my computer isn't ventillated well enough. It's the software. It could very well be the software in this case as well.
That's a good point. The rep could have just been messing with him because he was annoyed.
What's interesting is that the store clerk decided to just turn off the system rather than deal with repeated freeze ups all day long. I'd be more interested in an article about how often something like that happens. Is it just a bum unit or demo disk or is it a more widespread problem?
Yes, but that is ONLY the browser as far as I know. I don't have a wii but I've heard it also has a free weather service, news service, and maybe a few other things. I can't remember exactly but the point is, if a game system has an additional feature, as long as it doesn't decrease the ability to play games or increase the cost significantly I imagine most people wouldn't mind and would be happy with it.
Even if Nintendo changed their mind and decided to make the browser permanently free I doubt it would change the price of the system or the quality of the games. I guess it uses up a certain amount of memory but I'm also guessing it's fairly negligible and you probably also have the option of removing it.
Exactly! I'm all for adding additional features if it doesn't slow down the games or increase the price. If the weather feature ran in the background and popped up in the middle of games to give me updates I'd be screaming bloody murder...whether it happened on a nintendo product or a sony product. If they had to raise the price another $100 to add in news feed functionality I'd be just as annoyed.
Adding a browser to the wii doesn't seem to have much of a cost as far as I can see. It probably cut into Nintendo's profit much more than it added to the final price of the wii. They'd sell it for $249 with or without a browser. The deal they made with Opera just bought them goodwill not a real justification for a higher price.
But the PS3 probably could have cost a lot less without the blu ray. Personally, I'm fine with them including it. Let them be the high end system that I'll buy cheap years down the road...but I can understand why others might be annoyed or complain about it.
The PSP is another matter. It seems that the addition of movie capabilities actually hurt the GAMES and not just the price. I don't own one but I've heard that the UMDs seriously create a load time problem for games. It's hard for me to see how any serious gamer would think that the additional functionality is worth it.
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It depends on how it's marketed.
My wife got me a set of Lord of the Rings dvds for Valentine's Day. In it was a coupon that gave me $20 of products from a site that sold Lord of the Rings miniatures. The products were all outrageously priced (much more than walmart anyway) but it had a feel of high quality, rare items. Though they probably don't sell billions I could easily see them making a ton of money. Even if they made some exclusive brand that was just dragons, orcs and elves without the LotR branding.
If you marketed well and gave screen shots and demos of intense scenes that you don't see every day at walmarts across America people could easily start to see yu as a deluxe collector's edition type brand instead of some cheap store brand.
How much does 4GB of ram cost? I don't know the cheapest places to buy RAM but a quick search put a couple 2GB sticks at $450-500 ($225-250 each).
Before Vista came out you could easily get a low to mid-end XP desktop computer for $500.
I agree that the points aren't that bad. I'm a fan of Guild Wars and I'd particularly recommend Nightfall if you're thinking of playing with your wife/girlfriend/buddy/whatever. With the addition of the Heroes, it's not too hard to play difficult missions with just your partner and both of your heroes. With the original Prophecies chapter, sometimes it would be hard to find a good group to join for the most difficult missions. You can still hook up with 8 other people to play some mission but if you just want to get started quickly and have fun for a half hour without waiting, you can much more easily do it with the heroes.
If you've got enough credit you can order a giant bundle from Walmart and once it ships, walk into your local Walmart and return the games you don't want. You'll only be out the shipping costs.
Guild Wars was able to avoid the grind to some extent. You max out at level 20 and it doesn't take terribly long to get to that point. There's also not a whole lot of expensive and essential equipment. You can fairly quickly pick up what you need as monster drops along the way.
There's still specialty stuff that might cost a pretty penny or take a lot of random fighting until you get the drop you want, but that's totally unnecessary to being successful at the game. Unfortunately, they may have taken a step back in that regard. In their latest chapter, Nightfall, you have to earn points to gain in rank for certain quests. It's not too much of a grind but it's not quite as open as their original chapter was in that regard.
If the source is in the U.S. then we have other options.
I can't even get to the site ( http://mediadownloads.walmart.com/ ) on Internet Explorer.
This is true of anything that becomes popular. If it becomes popular enough you'll eventually have to buy a McDonald's Happy Meal to have a "complete set".
Not everyone knows they want one yet. Others want one but aren't sure it's worth the price of dealing with a shift in addresses. My brother just recently accepted my invitation to gmail after getting fed up with all the ads on hotmail. I'd invited him long ago but he didn't want to have to tell everyone of his new email address. He's gotten to the point where it's worth switching and just occasionally checking up on his old address for the few that never got the notice of his change in address.
I'm not a lawyer but that doesn't sound entirely right.
What if I get a copyright on some novel I write and publish it online. I make a statement on my site saying that it may be distributed freely as long as people attribute it correctly and don't modify it.
Now if someone ignores my request and changes a few words here and there and adds in a kinky sex chapter in the middle and sells it online, do I have a copyright case? It's a different work now. It's not an "accurate" depiction of my work...so I don't have a copyright case?
Both the DS and PS2 sold great but how much profit does Nintendo and Sony make from each sold?
The PS2 is probably old enough technology that it's very cheap to make nowadays. DS came out later but Nintendo is known for making a profit right out of the gate on units. It'd be interesting to hear the actual numbers.
My sister was told by a kmart official that the people up top decided to keep shipping to the coasts until they stopped selling out and only then ship inland. It seems like I've heard from a lot more people in Washington/Oregon area with experiences of multiple wii consoles on the shelf than out here in Utah. I guess they decided to save on shipping or something. *shrug*
Now if only the prices would drop for the wii and people started returning them to stores so I could find one.
I agree with you. As long as there's no downside I'd be happy for those features. It wouldn't be a huge selling point (to me anyway) but it's a nice extra. Although, if they tried so hard to add MORE features that they didn't have time to get any of the features anywhere near polished, then I'd consider that a downside. Not necessarily a huge downside if they could quickly improve those features through updates...but it's still a downside to take into consideration.
Or the demo disks? Why does everyone assume that a lockup must mean an overheating issue of some sort? I don't get BSOD because my computer isn't ventillated well enough. It's the software. It could very well be the software in this case as well.
No, but it seems odd that it'd require a store clerk to manually reset it to get it working again.
That's a good point. The rep could have just been messing with him because he was annoyed.
What's interesting is that the store clerk decided to just turn off the system rather than deal with repeated freeze ups all day long. I'd be more interested in an article about how often something like that happens. Is it just a bum unit or demo disk or is it a more widespread problem?
Yeah, him and the upcoming Democrat congress.
Yes, but that is ONLY the browser as far as I know. I don't have a wii but I've heard it also has a free weather service, news service, and maybe a few other things. I can't remember exactly but the point is, if a game system has an additional feature, as long as it doesn't decrease the ability to play games or increase the cost significantly I imagine most people wouldn't mind and would be happy with it.
Even if Nintendo changed their mind and decided to make the browser permanently free I doubt it would change the price of the system or the quality of the games. I guess it uses up a certain amount of memory but I'm also guessing it's fairly negligible and you probably also have the option of removing it.
Exactly! I'm all for adding additional features if it doesn't slow down the games or increase the price. If the weather feature ran in the background and popped up in the middle of games to give me updates I'd be screaming bloody murder...whether it happened on a nintendo product or a sony product. If they had to raise the price another $100 to add in news feed functionality I'd be just as annoyed.
Adding a browser to the wii doesn't seem to have much of a cost as far as I can see. It probably cut into Nintendo's profit much more than it added to the final price of the wii. They'd sell it for $249 with or without a browser. The deal they made with Opera just bought them goodwill not a real justification for a higher price.
But the PS3 probably could have cost a lot less without the blu ray. Personally, I'm fine with them including it. Let them be the high end system that I'll buy cheap years down the road...but I can understand why others might be annoyed or complain about it.
The PSP is another matter. It seems that the addition of movie capabilities actually hurt the GAMES and not just the price. I don't own one but I've heard that the UMDs seriously create a load time problem for games. It's hard for me to see how any serious gamer would think that the additional functionality is worth it.