Be Excellent To Each Other

The problem is that I've locked all the cars in Chris' copy of BP for two weeks.

"Chris's", actually. The "s'" only applies to plurals, or words where you wouldn't pronounce it "s's"

Anyway, I shall be playing with myself then. You cunts.

One of the nice things about games is that you can buy a disk with a complete world on it. And then you get to explore that world at your leisure. It's yours you own it.

It isn't nice when that world then reminds you it is incomplete.

I'm fine with Oblivion having the shiverring isles expansion because that is a separate expansion so doesn't undermine my purchase. It's just another world to explore. Whereas horse armour just makes the world I own look incomplete and unbalanced and so does undermine it's balance.

It's at it's worse in Crackdown, which is wonderful, but I don't want the expansion pack so whenever I run around the world I see all these orbs and adverts for things I can't do which makes my game feel crippled in a way that it didn't before the update.

It's a minor thing sure, but as we are only talking about leisure it's important to me.

It doesn't help that Crackdown's expansion is massively, massively overpriced for what it is, especially as much of it is available in the 'cut down' free version.

I paid £15 for Crackdown, so to be fair I won't begrudge spending the extra £6 when I get around to buying the expansion. It's a fucking brilliant game.

As someone who paid full whack it when it first came out, an extra £6 for three new vehicles and a handful of play modes (especially when compared to the sheer amount you got for the original price) stung a lot more.

I'm not being critical of the game. It's great, and it's the reason I see no need to pick up a copy of GTA till it's < £20.

But everytime I see a green orb out of the corner of my eye, then bound over to it without thinking to find out it's and advert for the Rocket Tag game mode it spoils the game for me.

As does everytime I see the locked guns in my weapon select screen.

Stop the hard fucking sell.

I also bought all the DLC for Forza without a second thought. I wonder how much I've spent on that game? I bought it for £25.

The Only DLC I've bought is the level pack for CoD4 and the level pack for N+

& the level pack for N+ was the best 200 points I've spent in a long while.

The main reason companies make DLC is make money out of the second hand market. The disk can be sold, but everyone needs to give them money to get the rest.

Although give them huge credit for the budget re-release plan.

Well not really. The demo is a demo, S1 is a full game, S2 came out a long, long time afterwards.

You forgot to mention standing in the icon for too long and it automatically taking you to the marketplace.

You are fucking kidding me.

It says a lot for that game that they can screw it up so many ways (The DLC hard sell, the present day adverts in future city, the long loading you have to go through so it can download new adverts and so on) and it still be a good game.

Not quite. It means that the stuff they didn't have the time to finish off can be finished off and released. If they couldn't charge for it, then they couldn't justify the hours spent finishing off the content. Before DLC, you'd see it as part of a sequel (or in some cases, pretty much the entire sequel, for full price) or scrapped. The amount of unfinished content for pretty much any game is phenomenal.

Which does make stuff like Burny Pees free content really quite good - although the reason for that being provided is fairly obvious from the money making point of view.

Unless it's already finished and on the disk.

But lets be realistic, most of the time they look at the game and see what they cut off into DLC. Gears of War 2 is currently having DLC developed for it, whilst the game is being made. Not because it won't fit on the disk, just because they know they can sell it for a profit after launch.

I don't mind that so much, I guess as I'm from a tech background I appreciate what's needed in terms of technology to keep things running and I wouldn't expect that for free. I don't mind paying for online games as I can clearly see where the money is going - I'm literally paying for a service, that being keeping the servers running. The game isn't playable any other way, we knew that going in and so I'm not bothered.



Which is fair enough. Except when the cost of that downloadable content massively exceeds the value of the stuff in the box. If a driving game comes with 30 cars and 20 tracks and costs £30, then DLC with 15 cars and 10 tracks should cost £15 at most. In reality the tracks will be £2 each and the cars £1 for a total of £more than the original game for less than half the content

You're being rather generous there. I'd like to think that of that £30, £25 is for the engine and gameplay, so I'd expect another 15 cars and 10 tracks for about £2.50.

But the same could also be said for sequels that basically use the technology as the previous game. There should be a cost making game:price game is sold for ratio, but this is never gonna happen cos we're all greedy selfish bastards

The only way I can see sequels/DLC content price being justified is if the original game was sold at a loss in the first place.

I always wondered if anyone who bought Falcon or Falcon AT tried to claim a free copy of Falcon 3.0 (or likewise, an owner of Falcon 3.0 trying to nab a free copy of Falcon 4.0) on the grounds that even the title suggests that it's merely a new patched version and not an entirely new product.

Do you know how microsoft limit DLC to be worth 250 Gamerpoints it would be good if they limited it to cost no more than, say, 1000 MSPs too.

That way you know the total cost of ownership when you see the game in store.

I would very much like that system.

The more I read about Crackdown on the three or four places on the internet that have a fucking clue about games, the more convinced I am that when I get my copy back an dmy funsquare working, I will never, ever let Crackdown connect to the internet. Multiplayer be damned - taking turns "be"ing Blacktion Man while the other chap drinks and laughs at your crapness is the way forward.

He's not Blacktion Man, he's Crackie.

Also, for all the bitching about the DLC and the cuntiness of the 'to play this mission you need the expensive DLC, remain within the sphere to be taken to the marketplace', that's a ridiculously overreaction. Downloading the new billboards is so quick you don't notice, and the free DLC adds enough useful features (being able to spawn almost any sort of car you like, once you've brought one in, GTA3-style, is brilliant) to make it worth it.

Likewise, co-op assaults on the big bad bosses are brilliant fun - possible THE MOST FUN you will have with the game (apart from shooting out all the tires on one of the Russian Jeeps and racing around the dockyard, or shooting out all the tires on the police car and trying to drive around the highway, or trying to carry any sort of cargo in the dump truck) so just download the DLC and grit your teeth a bit.

No. Adverts in games can fuck off. Obtuse, distracting ones like that orb thing sound revolting.



That's just racist, man.

Genuine question - assuming you never let your copy of Crackdown near a Live connection, what IS displayed on those billboards? Some weird part of me thinks the game came with Dodge Caliber adverts by default, but I could be wrong...

I've never played online with mine, and it doesn't display anything that has made me notice what it's displaying, if that makes any sense.

This. I've never noticed anything of the sort. However, I didn't ever get a chance to load it up to look for them after I heard there were adverts in it.

New Soul Calibur DLC is out.


Schoolgirl uniform pack.
200M$P (first non-pervy pack was 100)
108kb (ie - it's on the disc).

Penny Arcade has a thread on buying levels for Namco's JRPGs and loads of people were saying how it was 'fine', and 'if you don't like it don't buy it' and 'Ooh I hate grind I would buy this.'

And I just couldn't bring myself to argue anymore. To explain in tedious detail about how this throws balance out of the window. Just quite how bad this is.

Idiots are going to ruin my games.

I'm trading Soul Calibur IV in tomorrow. I just can't be arsed with Namco right now.

Schoolboy outfits today. 100M$P.

Schoolgirl pack was 200M$P.

Hmmmm....

Namco in bummer subsidy shokka!