News Flash: Australia gets screwed... again.

A few months ago I spoke about Games on Demand for the Xbox 360 and I was fairly excited, well, not so much anymore, I held out hope the leaked prices were just place holders for a few weeks until the whole thing went live on the 11th of August.

Australia has a long tradition of getting boned with gaming pricing, Yahtzee calls it the nicest beaches tax, and hey, we're a realitively small market and shipping costs, so I could sort of understand it, even if I did hate the fact I was paying over double of what people in other nations were.

Then comes the stupidity of the Xbox live Games on Demand service, here is the most glaring example, the prices of games aren't set by a single office, which would make sense since its an Internet service, but by the local arm of Microsoft's xbox live division, who in Australia (link) think 24/7 access is worth $50 over RRP for a 2/3 year old game!

Mass Effect is an admittedly awesome game, I've played it through 2/3 times now on both the PC and Xbox, but it is not worth $99 in download form when it can be picked up new at any major chain store for $49.95, or even cheaper at some other stores, or cheaper still preowned, an option you don't get with downloads.

Now I was all sorts of keen when it came to downloadable games, after all my ISP offers free traffic to the Xbox live service, and its hellishly fast, but come-on, no disc, and no chance of resale later if you decide the game sucks the donkey.

Not only that, but its only $20 USD for US Xbox owners... that's about $25AUD, if I didn't already own Mass Effect, I'd of been willing to pay that for it, its a good price, hell I'd of even been willing to pay $30-$35 for it, but come the fuck on, $99 you have got to be fucking kidding me Microsoft!

Yes data server space costs more in Australia then the US, but not that much more! Stop fucking ripping us off!

TMNT: Turtles in Time

IGN does a pretty mean preview of the upcoming TMNT rehash, I remember playing this game on the SNES and loving it, and I'm glad they are just updating the graphics and leaving the game play alone :)

(FaceBook users click the link "Original Post" to see the video)

Motion Sensors: Why?

First let me just say this to all you people out there thinking that the Wii, Project Natal, and the PS3 thing are innovative and exciting; you're all morons!

Its been around for decades, and that's just in video games, who could forgot The Glove of Childhood Arthritis?

That isn't to say that these devices don't have some appeal or use, but frankly, I don't want to play a fighting game where I'm actually kicking and punching, I want the fantasy where I'm a ninja bad ass capable for kicking ass.

The Wii sports games are fun to play with friends, and I can see the appeal of games like Guitar Hero and what's its name golf on the Wii, but after trying to play Zelda on the Wii, a game series I love, I was begging for a controller.

I want to sit in my comfy chair and get drawn into the action, challange and storyline, what I don't want is the most challanging thing about the game to be the damn controls. I know its not a popular opinion, but I enjoy games for the fantasy, and its hard to get immersed in them if your arms are aching and your bum leg is acting up.

All that being said the non-game parts of Project Natal actually look pretty cool and I'll likely grab it for the voice commands and menu system, not to mention the video phone.

"Games On Demand" for Xbox 360

Whitten announced "Games On Demand" for Xbox 360, a feature launching this August that will allow users to download full retail games to the console's hard drive. Whitten called the the feature a "natural progression" of Xbox Live's current offerings. The service will launch initially with 30 games, including titles such as Mass Effect, BioShock, Assassin's Creed, Crackdown, Oblivion and Call of Duty 2. Prices will be in line with physical retail, and new games will be added regularly.
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=23865

Okay so impressive and cool and all, especially since a number of Australian ISPs offer free traffic to XBox live (go Westnet!), but what will happen when gamers who are fed up with gaming stores start downloading games rather then going out to buy them and drive the traffic up?

There are already full games on the xbox live system, not just arcade fun ones but 4/5gb monsters. "Classic" games from the first xbox, I've got a few like Max Payne and Halo 1, but I doubt they'd even come close to the amount of traffic a new game like Assassins Creed 2 would generate release day.

Will we see ISPs drop Xbox live traffic from the free list? I know if I had to download an 8gb game and effectively pay for it twice I'd think twice, that's the reason I bit the bullet and went into town to buy my copy of warhammer online (bad investment, I played for a month before uninstalling it) rather then just download it like I wanted to as I hate my local game store and only go there when forced, like in that case.

I doubt the ISPs will drop it, free content like the xbox live stuff actually costs them less then a lot of stuff we download as its mirrored locally, I wont get into the details as its a pain in the ass to explain and frankly I can't be bothered, but by steering users to free traffic ISPs save money.

The price of the downloads is another thing to consider, currently we Australian's are royally ass raped (I don't like to use that term, but it really applies here) by game prices, check out the difference of Fallout 3 in AU $109AUD and US $56.99US (roughly $70AUD) so we pay a whopping $40 more then people in the US, yes you could argue we are a smaller market and there are fright costs, but when you start talking about online content those arguments drop away very very quickly, so if we pay even the difference you're going to see a lot of very happy Australians.

Another issue I see with this is the insane prices of xbox hard drives, you can buy a 1TB drive for less then an official Microsoft 120gb drive, that's just pathetic, there is no difference at all between them, and games now days take up a lot of space, I've got an 80gb hard drive in mine and I've already burnt 50gb of that on installs and downloads without even trying, so unless they drop the prices to a reasonable level, they are going to have a hard time selling this in some markets.

Though personally if the game price drops I'll likely just delete games as I'm done with them and redownload them later, if the system is like the xbox live current system which remembers what you've paid for and lets you grab as many times as you want. After all my xbox downloads content off the Microsoft servers at my full 8mb connection and 10gb at that speed takes only a few hours.

That's not even taking into account the game stores reactions... but frankly I don't give a shit about them, smelly dicks conning people into buying shit they don't need.

All in all, interesting news but not enough details to really go into it.

Things I love about Fable 2

1) The Freedom
God there is a lot of freedom in this game, go pretty much anywhere at any time, and it doesn't stop after you finish the main "story". There is so much to do and explore.

2) The Side Quests
It seems like they put more effort into the side quests and those stories then they did the "real" story, some of them are funny, some are pretty down right depressing, and some are really insightful, such as the cross-dressing guy who gets Stockholm Syndrome while living with a bunch of hobbs.

3) The Real Estate Market
You can own EVERYTHING, and I mean everything, its awesome.

4) The Relationship System
You can get married 30 million times, have gaggles of kids, and spend more time with hookers then a sailor on shoreleave, and its all up to you, though granted it does get old after a while.

5) The Ability to Kill (pretty much) Anyone
Sure you can't kill the people who really need it *cough* Reaver, but if anyone else pisses you own, out comes the sword, off comes the head!