Some games I’ve played.
Posted on Wednesday, November 28, 2007 at 9:45 am
My wife is getting sick of the (admittedly disgusting looking) turducken picture below, so I probably ought to post something to get the picture pushed down “below the fold,” as it were. So here are some thoughts on recent games I’ve played, since I really can’t think of anything else to write about at the moment.
First, Beautiful Katamari. As I posted before, it’s a very short game. I beat it, as in, “got to the closing credits,” in only a few hours. It’s taken me significantly longer to get 100 points on each level, and I’m still 4 levels away (at last count) from finishing the 100 point run completely. But a new development here is that the downloadable content was indeed posted to the Xbox Live Marketplace last week. At the time I wrote the previous post, I was unaware that the DLC was technically released, but only in Japan and Korea. Now it’s been posted to the Americas as well. And I can confirm that it is indeed a ripoff.
There are a total of 8 downloadable elements for BK, each costing 200 points ($3.33 in real money). Four of these are new levels – in and of themselves containing new cousins, presents, and rollable items. The other four consist of “cousin packs” and “item packs.” From what I’ve been able to ascertain, not having downloaded any of this myself, the cousin packs and item packs contain the exact same new cousins and items that are in the new levels, but you are allowed to pay for the privilege of automatically adding them to your collection without having to go to the trouble of rolling them up yourself. Tiger Woods 07 did a similar thing, that allowed you to pay to unlock every item in the store without having to accomplish whatever task would unlock them for you.
Now, the levels and the item packs are all well and good, except for one tiny little detail that I’m sure Namco was hoping no one would notice. All eight downloadable entries are the EXACT SAME FILE SIZE. And it’s a small filesize at that – a mere 384kb. Levels alone (sans new items), I could understand being relatively small, given that the entire game essentially takes place in the same “world,” you are just allowed to access different parts of it at different times (and different scales of size). So really, the whole world is already there, the levels would just be a collection of scripts telling the game what your size and item type objective is, and your starting locations and size scale. But the item packs, and the fact that the levels themselves contain new items, should in any normal scenario be MUCH bigger than 384kb. Small size aside, there are only two possible reasons for all eight things being the same size. The first is that it’s one of the biggest coincidences ever. The second, and by far more likely, is that you’re not buying the levels and items themselves. You’re buying an unlock key. In my previous post about BK, I’d said I thought it seemed like they removed stuff from the game disc to charge you extra for it later. This, it turns out, was probably wrong. They didn’t remove anything at all. They just disabled it until you forked over more cash.
And this is what I think is one of the shadiest things done to date with DLC for any game. The disc itself cost only $39.99 (in the US), making it $20 cheaper than almost any other Tier 1 game title available for the 360. However, if one were so inclined as to buy all 8 Marketplace items (which, again, consist only of things that are probably ALREADY ON THE FUCKING DVD), the total cost of the game now becomes $66.63, making it more expensive than pretty much any other game save the Guitar Hero and Rock Band bundles.
Ok, enough bitching about the BK ripoff. On to bitching about something else.
I beat Halo 3 over the Thanksgiving weekend, and I gotta tell ya, I’m kind of let down. Granted, I didn’t play the first two games because I never had the first Xbox. But if I had, I could imagine being even more pissed at the ending than I already was, having only played the one. I won’t spoil it. I won’t give away what happens. And I will say that, if I’d beaten the game on Legendary mode, the ending would have been different (look for that video on Youtube, if you’re like me and would probably be dead before you left the starting gate on Legendary mode). But on anything other than Legendary, the ending just kind of blows. Sorry Bungie.
In other news, I am very excited that Valve has apparently made comments to the effect that, sometime before Christmas, you will be able to purchase your very own Weighted Companion Cube from the Valve store. No real details are available, that I’ve been able to find anyway. But this makes me really happy. Because I totally want one. If you don’t know what a Weighted Companion Cube is, you need to play Portal – either buy “The Orange Box” to get Portal plus a couple other games, or you can buy/download the standalone version of just Portal on Steam. It’ll only take you a few hours to beat, but it’s one of the best, most entertaining games I’ve played in a long, long time. And if you play it, there will be cake at the end.
Ok, that’s all, I’m done now. You go away.
3 Comments
Happy Thanksgiving!
Posted on Thursday, November 22, 2007 at 9:29 am
Note to all, that I will not be enjoying anything resembling this fabulous Turducken this year. I will be enjoying a turkey. Nothing more, nothing less. Because the very concept of Turducken really makes me want to vomit.
Also, sorry for no posts in November. It’s been a very busy month.
