4 Left 4 Dead Friends

Games take on a whole new experience when you play them online with your friends. I'm not just talking about getting in a random group with people that maybe you've even met before playing other games, I'm talking about your buds from high school that you don't see very often in person anymore. Those guys that always had your back in the real world, now getting your back virtually against hoards of zombies, having a great time, laughing it up, reliving the old years.

Tonight, one of those buds was my wife, sitting in the same room with me split screen with my friends. Probably one of the best nights online together we've ever had.

Video games have truly transcended they're socially inept colorings and gone way, way outside the lines.

Digital is More Expensive?

Since the Xbox 360 started offering the ability to download older games from the original Xbox library of games online and store them on your hard drive, the Wii, PS3 and PSP have also taken to the idea and started doing it as well. I think it's a great service to have digital games instead of cds and cartridges (though I am a bit enamored with my own collection of stuff).

But I don't understand what's going on here. Instead of the idea of a digital service saving money by not using physical media, companies have started to offer the service at a premium, charging way too much money for games that are 5-20 years old.

It's hard to say for the PS3, since I can't seem to find any prices on their Playstation Network website, but the Xbox and Wii offer titles to download from their older consoles at about 200-400% markup on prices based off of eBay offerings ($15 from Live vs $6 average from StillLivesAtHome128 on eBay). Of course, the used games behemoth Gamestop is still selling Halo, a game from 2001, for $20, but only idiots shop there.

*crickets chirping*

Nintendo isn't doing much better. Nintendo offered the first three Mario games for download on the Wii for $5 each. You can find it on eBay for under a $1 if you can get an auction that doesn't charge $8 for shipping. That's almost a 500% markup on a game that they fully admit on their store website is 25 years old. In fact, it's the oldest commercial Nintendo game ever that they gave away with the console. I'm not even sure you could buy it because they made it available to everyone that had the NES.

And what's worse is that your paying for a transaction back into your childhood. Most people played these games when they were kids. I'd even bet that the majority of the buyers of games like Super Mario Brothers are in the 20+ age bracket and realize after buying the game that, like most childhood memories, some things are best left in the past. Games that old evoke other memories from times of yesteryear but not the ones that help you compare your new HD-loving, 1080p, BluRay watching eyes to the 8-bit bleeps and bloops that you fondly remember sitting cross-legged on the living room floor drinking a Tab.

Sure you have to manage a new set of resources when your dealing with digital distribution. Instead of trucks delivering games, your paying for bandwidth. Instead of paying retailers profit margins, your paying for server hard drives and routers. And instead of packaging, your paying for programmers to retrofit code to new consoles. But per game, I'd have to imagine that it's still cheaper to sell games digitally that it is to keep shipping out disks. Especially if sales are stagnate in brick-and-mortar stores.

So here's an offical plea to Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony: Stop trying to make money on games that are older than our kids. Here's some logic to follow: If (ParentAge-ChildAge/2) < GameAge Then GamePrice = 0. I think that's a pretty fair rule to follow.

Wii Store: http://www.nintendo.com/wii/virtualconsole/games
Xbox Live Store: http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/catalog.aspx?d=5

PSN Store: http://www.us.playstation.com/PSN/Store

Further thoughts on OnLive

While the idea of PC gaming's barriers to entry (expensive graphics cards mainly) going away with the invention of the OnLive service, as well as a host of other pretty ingenious features like being able to pick up where you left off from any computer with out moving save files around, it does beg to question how all this will end up in the real world.

One of the features that OnLive promises is hi-defintion gaming on any console through the use of the servers that have embedded graphics processing chips. While they not only process the game data, they also handle rendering the graphics, something your computer used to have to do client side. But it only works if you have around 5MBps download speeds from your ISP. I do subscribe to Comcast for internet and I can tell you that I rarely get 5MBps speeds for my 6MBps subscription service. Tonight I tried a few download tests and got a couple 4.7MBps, a 5.2MBps and a 3.5MBps all using DLSReports.com. I have a feeling that if your computer's connection doesn't maintain the required bandwidth, your session could be topped out at the lowly S-Video-level graphics, a 480p resolution.

Secondly, a lot of ISPs like Comcast have started capping bandwidth since the days of online video services like Netflix have started eating up a lot of precious wire capacity. A game on a DVD can be as big as 7GBs. Assuming that you access everything on the disk once, that's around 7-9 GBs worth of data. In the real world of games, you play levels over, race tracks over and over and over, play online matches even more. The amount of data that an Xbox reads and re-reads off of a disk over a gamer's interest in the game must be pretty substantial. Comcast's monthly cap is at a beefy 250GBs, so that's about 45 fully packed games. But you throw in normal internet usage (we're on our laptops quite a bit during the evenings and weekends), Netflix streaming, our Vonage internet based phone service and whatever else we use the interwebs for and I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few people out there get cut off and are unable to use the service (or their phone) for a couple days. 5MBps will eat up 250,000MB pretty fast when your talking about hours of gaming a day (347MB per day).

Right now, even Wikipedia's criticism section on OnLive is not making the company look very good. Extraordinary promises. Smoke and mirrors public presentation. Little information on their website. I want this product so bad and everything they claim to be so true. I'm still keeping my hopes up despite all the turbulence they are stirring up in the tech/gaming community.

OnLive: The Perfect Console? Anything!

I'm not sure what to make of this. An online service that will let you play even the most high end graphics games with the crappiest computer. Or you can play games on your TV with a inexpensive box.

 

 I'm still watching the presentation that happened at GDC.

Video Game Music: Fan Renditions

Believe it or not, some video game music is just plain awesome. Most Japanese game music composers are pretty well known and loved. Koji Kondo of Mario/Zelda fame. Nobuo Uematsu of Final Fantasy fame. Even Martin O'Donnell composed the Flintstones theme and then composed all the music for the Halo series. There are lots of composers. And lots of fans.

Of course there is a lot of usage of commercial usage of already produced music in games, like the game I'm playing now from EA, Burnout Paradise. There are about 20 tracks of licensed music in the game.

But what were talking about is music specifically composed for a game with as much of a thought process, if not more so, than in most movies.

Game music has become a subculture world-wide. Bands have been formed. People record themselves and post on YouTube. Most play the piano. A few guitar too. But recently there is a trend to recreate all the parts of a song by yourself and mix them together like this dude. Color me impressed.

Internet Ads = Crap

I don't understand how click-through ads make money in the first place, because I never use them. But I also don't watch late night infomercials or buy stuff out of those as-seen-on-tv catalogs.

But I love how search engines on the internet turn everything you look for into an ad. My example:


Don't get me wrong, I'd love to own a suit of Mjolnir armor, but a Halo "brand" of it? There really needs to be a better formula for these ads other than, "Buy your *insert search request here* for cheap!"

And trust me when I say, no one, absolutely no one sells items for your '07 Warthog that is sitting your imaginary driveway.