Be Excellent To Each Other

I think this excellent feature by our pal Rich should be brought to light and discussed.

http://www.peoww.co.uk/features/f050-1.shtml

BE WARNED: It's one of those things that makes you angry as you read it.

It's fucking dispicable, to be frank. Rich has hit the nail on the head.

I know I am in the "will pay 1200 points for a downloadble game" crowd but this shit boils my blood.

I've dugg this. And commented it too. This needs to be wider read.

I believe you to be wrong about Ridge Racer 6 though, without looking I think they're all actual CARS already in the game and it's just a different livery, which could well fit in 108kb. Of course this means what they're actually charging you that money for is a fucking jpeg.

The rest of course, especially the whole of Ace Combat 6, is bollocks.

I bought RR6 used and that's my entire Namco library since about 1997 so I'm clear.

He's right. He's absolutely right.

But gamers deserve it. If someone is willing to cheat or buy their way to the top of a leaderboard or to bragging rights over their mates then they deserve the wallet rape.

If the question was "how many people do you know who would buy this stuff?" then the answer, depressingly, would be "fuckloads".

But balance of game mechanics and the design of such is the paramount purpose of games. And for the developer to give "people buying buffs" a weight in their design effects all of us sensible people.

And by effect I mean screws over. Completely.

True. Absolutely true. But they are taking advantage of people being shallow cunts. They aren't inventing them, just pandering to them.

You can always say that as a long-term strategy, it is doomed to failure. The fact is, it isn't. Not at all. Your serious, well-informed gamer won't buy Namco again, but that will be more than offset because their target audience won't notice.

The whole Katamari thing makes my piss boil!

thanks for noticing the piece, chaps.

I think most of my anger stems from the fact that these are mostly eagerly awaited sequels and they are using that expectation against us. It's like they are saying 'thanks for buying the last five Ace Combat games and supporting the series, so here have half the sequel at full price'.

I'm a big fan of the Katamari and Ace Combat games and quite fond of Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast so next-gen sequels are quite a big deal to me but selling us content that is already on the disc just so we can fully enjoy a sequel to games we love, well that's just prickish.

Amusingly, I'd started researching the article before the Tales of Vesperia thing got announced. That's why there are so many swear words in there.

This is all made worse by EA giving us all this lovely content on Burnout Paradise for free.

Yeah your right. Us VS Gamefaqs isn't a battle we can win.

Unless we buy 24^6 Starbars.

EDIT: Yeah, who would have thought EA would be the good guys here.
EDIT: EDIT: I bought Katamari for £12 and I'm not buying the add on stuff because seriously fuck them.

The Tales of Vesperia DLC is astonishing. If Namco released a football game, would they let you buy extra goals through the Marketplace?

"Two-nil down with thirty seconds to go? Our three-goal pack is only 400 MS points! Download today!"

Indeed but that would be more respectable than this.

The Tales bullshit means they've throughly understood how fundamentally dull and boring and hideous grinding and having to level up is in JRPGs and rather than take the genre forward and work out how to make a good game, they've realised they could charge people to bypass the shit parts of their game.

It's more like a DVD charging you to use scene select.

EA in 'actually the good guys' shocker. It's when you watch Star Wars and realise that actually the Empire are the goodies*.





* - Or are they? Or ARE they? OR (That's enough of that - Ed)

Yes...it's self evident that the Empire are the goodies. For a fuller explanation search for David Brin's website and I believe Gregg Easterbrook did an essay on it.

Not just Burnout Paradise, but ARMY OF TWO also.

Crackdown's terrible for that. It wasn't until partway through the second island that I and a chum (we used to take turns. Fnarr) realised that the point of that game is essentially to wipe out every foreign national in the city, and that Blacktion Man was the one tolerated black man in town, and even that's only as long as he ruthlessly annihilates anyone who isn't a white American.

And then you get to the ending and think back to all those jokes you were making earlier, and exchange horrified glances.

Really good article. I am adding your website to my bar thingy at the top of my browser.

You could possibly include instances of where other companies are not being arseholes with their DLC as a compare/contrast thing? Might drive the point home even more.

Just read this, V good article, although you may want to release a non-swearing version!

I was thinking about getting SCIV, don't think i'll bother now.

You really can't get 1000G on Katamari without downloading the addons. What annoys me most about Katamari is the fact that they charged 40 quid for it and it's all over in no time. Anybody who has completed it will tell you that the number of levels is pretty small, and charging extra to get anywhere near a decent amount of playtime is fucking disgraceful.

taken by itself, the Soul Cali thing isn't a big deal. I guess the article's purpose was to highlight all the little things they do.

the 100msp pack is just a download key, so again that's on-disc content right there. 100pts is only 80p but it should be free. that's really the issue for me. yeah, you don't have to buy it but you shouldn't have to.

the Namco pervy issue is a different thing. it's not that they are often outwardly terrible, but it's just the little things. In this case making a picture pack slightly more expensive because it's "sexy" rather than "good-looking". just little niggly things like that.

The Soul Cali stuff has only just gotten started though. I'm sure we'll see more soon.

and the music thing is awful.

They really weren't done, in both cases.

TDU left space for extra dealers and cars knowing they wanted to do later DLC but it WAS later. Same with Forza.

If it was done before release, it's part of the game, no matter what "moral" discussion you want to have. If they do it later that's not a problem.

The Katamari thing wouldn't be so bad if it was priced a lot cheaper. It would be a good way of getting people to risk buying it. But it isn't.

It's funny because EA and Criterion seem to have gone down the route of wanting people to actually play Burnout Paradise for as long as possible, rather than trying to shill us as much 'extra' crap as quickly as they can.

I know that I'll be playing it for a good while longer due to the released and planned future updates.

have jut ordered BUrny PEe.

The other important difference of course is it screws the honest consumer another stage as the pirates will have all of the DLC within seconds of release of the actual game.

We're all playing Prey now.

Actually, philosophically, it is a huge difference and touches on something that I'm been meaning to blog about for ages.

You have paid money for a disc. You should be able to decide what to do with that disc. What unlocking via paid-for DLC does is charge you a second time for the bytes on the disc.

Therefore, what have you exchanged money for in the first place? A licence to run the game? OK, then give me a replacement disc free of change when this one is scratched. And provide me with patched replacement discs on demand. And if your game breaks my machine, take responsibility for it. Because the company is saying I don't "own" the disc, I have licenced the content and it is merely an enabler.

OTOH, they can't provide a replacement disc because I've bought the game. OK, if we take that line of argument, why must I pay to unlock content that I already own on the disc? This is different to unlocking through gameplay - it is a form of "double-dipping".

What I am trying to say, very badly indeed, is what gives a company the right to reach inside my machine and make changes? It isn't just a console thing, it is a computer industry thing because PCs do it all the time. Why does the IT industry feel it has domain over something you purchase? This is why spam and malware exists - it isn't because a bunch of people realised the possibilities of invading security holes, it is because the culture of computing is such that companies and the people within them think they have an unalienable right to invade your PC. Because if Microsoft/Apple/IBM can do it, then so can a bunch of spammers and malware authors.

Because IT has got away with it is precisely the reason the music industry is currently tying itself in knots trying to put itself in the same position.

Gah, I really should put this into some coherent text.

Katmari 360 is the biggest disappointment for a full price game I can think of for a long long time; and I'm going back to my first C64 disk purchase - 'Line of Fire' by US Gold.

I think it's about making informed decisions.

If I know that Katamari costs £X for the disc and £Y for the unlock codes to be able to play the damn thing, I can make a decision on whether I want to buy it. (And much as I love Katamari, the answer to that is a big, fat no.)

When a game is new and the DLC isn't up yet you need to look at what's on the disc and see if that represents value for money to you. If so, buy it. If not, don't. The fact that there's extra stuff doesn't change the fact that your £35 bought you what you considered to be £35 worth of game.

Of course, Namco are cunts, there's no getting round that. (Did they ever patch the horribly broken online mode in Mr Driller?)

And the really troubling thing is that Namco seem to be getting worse, not better, when it comes to DLC. Which suggests that sales of the discs are good enough that they think that the DLC isn't putting off purchasers, then can grab what amounts to free extra cash from the (hopefully limited) people buying the bad DLC.

The thing is, though, if I've still got Soul Calibur IV when they let me pay to unlock Vader, I probably will. (I've got a feeling it's going to be traded before too long, though. It's good and all, but my skills aren't improving one bit, making it all feel a bit empty.)

Ace Combat 6 is pretty 'complete' out of the box, actually. All the extra stuff is bonus content for the deranged. And I do mean deranged, as you unlock a shedload of planes in the game as it is, for free. The 'extra planes' they charge for aren't new planes - they're existing models with fiddled stats and a new paintjob (so, a data file of approximately 5kb and a fucking jpeg, then). And here's the thing - it's JET COMBAT. Nobody will ever see your flashy paintjob except you! When you kill someone, you don't get to see them, and even the closest, most doggingest fight you'll maybe have a split second glimpse. So what's the point of all these Idolmaster paintjobs for the planes? And which girl is the one with the smallest bust? I'll buy her paintjob. Smaller boobs = less drag = better plane, right?

Thank goodness the only thing Eternal Sonata has is the ridiculous piano music thing. I mean, true, they are specially-recorded-for-the-game renditions of Chopin's music, but you could just blunder into that glassed-off area in your local HMV and buy a huge CD multi-pack of everything the great man ever did and be able to play it anywhere... as opposed to the ludicrous situation of firing up your 360 so you can sit and have it play piano music at you.

Grrrr.

I boycotted Katamari for this very reason, then Game seduced me by dropping the price to around a tenner. They can keep their "DLC" though.

I liked this article, you might want to reconsider the swears though as they detract from the point IMHO.

[Devil's Idiot/Advocate]

Should Braid be free? I downloaded the trial and paid my 0 pounds, then when I went to download the full version all it did was unlock the locked parts in the version I already had.

[/D I/A]

And for the same reason, let's kick and scream about stuff like Wario Ware and all Codemasters games EVER where you couldn't access multiplayer stuff until you'd ground your way through the horrible singleplayer mode!

There are guidelines set out by Microsoft. I read them, and IIRC, you had to provide 1000 points with the game and FREE DLC before you could put them in paid for DLC which could then take the total up to 1250. They are fairly recent though.

I fucking hate games where you have to unlock multiplayer stuff in single player. Grrr.

I think it is:
Retail game = 1000G
With DLCs = up to 1250G

XBLA game = 200G
With DLCs = up to 250G.

Yup. I remember getting the long-awaiting TOCA Race Driver for the PS2, and one of my housemates and I settled down to have some HARDCORE RACEAGE.

Except, virtually all the cars and tracks were still locked. So much for that.

I just read the thread title with the word 'Namco' as a verb. I'll fucking Namco the cunts.

If you had to pay 800 points for the demo, yes.

How about we knock off, say, 20 points for every article about Jonathan Blow whinging we've seen? In that case, he owes us enough points to buy every single Namco DLC, three times over.

I actually agree with your in principle. I don't mind the system of paid for unlocks (if nothing else, surely it helps save space on the 360 hard drive?) but it's a matter of scale. If I'm buying a game I want the entire thing. If that's a £30 disc then £10 worth of DLC add-ins then that's fine. If it's a £30 disc and £70 worth of DLC add-ins then clearly we have an issue.
For me it really isn't how the content is unlocked or how it's paid for, it's the fact that we're now looking at £100+ for the 'complete' game.
And yes, it's been that way with PC add-on packs for a long time, but generally the week an expansion is released they also release a game+expansion bundle for the price of the original game. Whereas Marketplace content rarely falls in price.

Speak for yourself. I buy a game once, and anything else can fuck off. I'm not alone. WE ARE LEGION.

But yeah, showing off aside, you're probably right.

Dont worry Mr Chris, Flis and I will play with you when our copy of DP BP arrives.