Nintendo finally account a price drop for the DS - a pretty substantial price truth be told. Starting August 12th, Nintendo will drop the price of their latest handheld from $249 to $169. Making early adopters (like myself) cringe and rage (I pre-ordered from Amazon)...rage for a few minutes anyway. For anyone who connects to the Nintendo eShop before August 11th gets 20 free games - 10 free NES Virtual Console games and 10 free GBA games from the Nintendo eStore.
It's not 100% clear yet whether these are specific games we are being given for free, or whether we have credit for up to 20 free games (I'm hoping it's the latter, truth be told). Anyway, hopefully this will calm down some of the "Nintendo is failing and dying!" BS that's been flying around, and maybe we can get back to focusing on what a great platform Nintendo has created, and what great things we can do with it.
So, crossing my fingers next for an SDK (slim chance I know, but a man can dream...)
Via USA Today - Nintendo drops price of 3DS to $170
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
Norway and Video Games
It's a sad state of the world when a man things that slaughtering children is a necessary act to formulate change in the world. More than that, his ideological perversion of marxism is chilling to say the least. I can't help but think of the movie "Serenity," when they are talking about the Operative of the Parliment:
Anyway, I wanted to write about him briefly in regards to the fact that again, an act of violence, and certain groups are again blaming the video games. The uber-evil all-corrupting force of video games, and called for a ban of all violent video games (but ironically, not other violent media, curious ...). At this point, I don't think that anyone in the know in the game industry didn't expect it, but that doesn't mean that it's in anyway fun to deal with. It didn't help that this clearly mentally disturbed individual cited a video game as a great training simulator (*sigh*), but more than that, people seem to be willing to latch on to this one thing that he says, and ignore the fact that he's a couple hammer blows to head short of a Looney Toon cartoon. In the same breathe, use that exact justification to ignore everything else he says.
People make my head hurt.
Anyway, GamePolitics ran a couple of articles I don't feel the need to repeat wholesale, but go check them out. In reality, this whole thing makes horrendously sad. And upset that such a clearly crazy man apparently had the foresight to give people an easy scapegoat in this heinous act. Because, you know, no one goes crazy on their own - that's what video games are for. (/endsarcasm)
Edit: Spelling erros
ACL Calls for Ban on Games in Wake of Norway Massacre
Norwegian Killer's Manifesto Mentions Modern Warfare 2 as 'Training Simulator'
Because he's a believer. He's intelligent, methodical and devout in his belief that killing River is the right thing to doI think that's honestly what scares me most about this guy - he's a believer.
Anyway, I wanted to write about him briefly in regards to the fact that again, an act of violence, and certain groups are again blaming the video games. The uber-evil all-corrupting force of video games, and called for a ban of all violent video games (but ironically, not other violent media, curious ...). At this point, I don't think that anyone in the know in the game industry didn't expect it, but that doesn't mean that it's in anyway fun to deal with. It didn't help that this clearly mentally disturbed individual cited a video game as a great training simulator (*sigh*), but more than that, people seem to be willing to latch on to this one thing that he says, and ignore the fact that he's a couple hammer blows to head short of a Looney Toon cartoon. In the same breathe, use that exact justification to ignore everything else he says.
People make my head hurt.
Anyway, GamePolitics ran a couple of articles I don't feel the need to repeat wholesale, but go check them out. In reality, this whole thing makes horrendously sad. And upset that such a clearly crazy man apparently had the foresight to give people an easy scapegoat in this heinous act. Because, you know, no one goes crazy on their own - that's what video games are for. (/endsarcasm)
Edit: Spelling erros
ACL Calls for Ban on Games in Wake of Norway Massacre
Norwegian Killer's Manifesto Mentions Modern Warfare 2 as 'Training Simulator'
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Review: Bug Village
It's ironic that my first game review is only happening because the game is question isn't even really a game. I think what bothered me the most is that this advert is just more or less a thinly veiled attempt to weasel you out of your money or make you sign up for services to earn the in-game currency. This isn't a game, this is software that's designed to print money.
The Good: Beautiful graphics, fun music, engage mechanics (for the first twenty minutes or so)
The Bad: The game requires that you continually spend money to continue to progress at anything beyond a snail's pace; a geriatric snail's pace.
The game starts out like many other strategy games, with kind of a god-of-the-bugs vibe going on. It reminded me lightly of Populous. You start off with a basic tutorial walk you though building houses, piles, and gathering food. To get more bugs, you must have housing for the bugs. To get more housing, you must have piles to generate one of the two resources in the game, Acorns. Acorns are used to build more piles, to get more buildings, to get more ants to work more piles to get more acorns to ... I totally forgot why I was doing this again.
As you complete the mini-objectives, you level up, which raises the cap for the total number of builds that you can have. The real kick of the game though is that there are gold coins which serve partially the same purpose as the Acorns, but also have the added benefit of speeding everything in the game up. For example, when building a new house, normally it would take an hour to build. Real time...OR you can pay 1 gold coin and complete it immediately.
The same goes for your piles--which you build as a structure, and then have to put ants to work in to generate more Acorns. Again, you can speed up both the completion of the building as well as the production of the Acorns by using gold coins (in varying amounts). The kicker is--there is no in-game way to earn these coins. You get a certain number when you start, and the only way to earn more is to complete "offers." This part reminds me so much of the gimmicky "Complete 5 offers and get a free laptop!" scams, that I was immediately turned off.
However, throughout the tutorial, the game gives you coins to spend to speed up the process, and then refunds them at the end of the tutorial, which is where you have your 20 or so coins upon starting the game. What this does is shows you how fast the game *could* go with coins, making just letting the time run out when building things seem painfully long. Thus, making it so that you complete offers or spend real money to buy coins.
You can earn coins by directly buying them through the game and Google Check out (at not that great of a conversion, truth be told) or complete offers in the game to earn coins, such as signing up for Netflix, GameFly, downloading certain games off of the Android Market (note: there was no requirement to actually play the game, just to install it.) It looks to me like they are basically trying to pad the number of downloads for certain android market games and get referral kick backs for the Netflix and GameFly services. (I'm purely speculating on this--nothing I've said should constitute anything more than pure conjecture on my part.)
In my opinion, the game is downright unplayable without continuously paying. As you advance in levels and get more advanced buildings, it takes longer to complete the buildings or complete the tasks for getting your resources from the piles. Like, 24hrs to 48hrs kinda long. You can still rush the building or tasks with coins, but the longer the task, the more coins (approx. 1 gold coin per hour, near as I can tell). So yah, those 20-some aught coins that you start with go fast. Then, the pace of the game hits the proverbial wall.
I think it wouldn't be bad if you had a way to earn those coins in game, even at a much slower rate (like 1 coin every 12hrs or some such). As it stands, you can't without offloading a ton of money, the game slams into a brick wall and loses its charm pretty quickly. What could have been a fun, interesting game falls woefully short in GluMobile's mad-grab for money.
The Good: Beautiful graphics, fun music, engage mechanics (for the first twenty minutes or so)
The Bad: The game requires that you continually spend money to continue to progress at anything beyond a snail's pace; a geriatric snail's pace.
The game starts out like many other strategy games, with kind of a god-of-the-bugs vibe going on. It reminded me lightly of Populous. You start off with a basic tutorial walk you though building houses, piles, and gathering food. To get more bugs, you must have housing for the bugs. To get more housing, you must have piles to generate one of the two resources in the game, Acorns. Acorns are used to build more piles, to get more buildings, to get more ants to work more piles to get more acorns to ... I totally forgot why I was doing this again.
As you complete the mini-objectives, you level up, which raises the cap for the total number of builds that you can have. The real kick of the game though is that there are gold coins which serve partially the same purpose as the Acorns, but also have the added benefit of speeding everything in the game up. For example, when building a new house, normally it would take an hour to build. Real time...OR you can pay 1 gold coin and complete it immediately.
The same goes for your piles--which you build as a structure, and then have to put ants to work in to generate more Acorns. Again, you can speed up both the completion of the building as well as the production of the Acorns by using gold coins (in varying amounts). The kicker is--there is no in-game way to earn these coins. You get a certain number when you start, and the only way to earn more is to complete "offers." This part reminds me so much of the gimmicky "Complete 5 offers and get a free laptop!" scams, that I was immediately turned off.
However, throughout the tutorial, the game gives you coins to spend to speed up the process, and then refunds them at the end of the tutorial, which is where you have your 20 or so coins upon starting the game. What this does is shows you how fast the game *could* go with coins, making just letting the time run out when building things seem painfully long. Thus, making it so that you complete offers or spend real money to buy coins.
You can earn coins by directly buying them through the game and Google Check out (at not that great of a conversion, truth be told) or complete offers in the game to earn coins, such as signing up for Netflix, GameFly, downloading certain games off of the Android Market (note: there was no requirement to actually play the game, just to install it.) It looks to me like they are basically trying to pad the number of downloads for certain android market games and get referral kick backs for the Netflix and GameFly services. (I'm purely speculating on this--nothing I've said should constitute anything more than pure conjecture on my part.)
In my opinion, the game is downright unplayable without continuously paying. As you advance in levels and get more advanced buildings, it takes longer to complete the buildings or complete the tasks for getting your resources from the piles. Like, 24hrs to 48hrs kinda long. You can still rush the building or tasks with coins, but the longer the task, the more coins (approx. 1 gold coin per hour, near as I can tell). So yah, those 20-some aught coins that you start with go fast. Then, the pace of the game hits the proverbial wall.
I think it wouldn't be bad if you had a way to earn those coins in game, even at a much slower rate (like 1 coin every 12hrs or some such). As it stands, you can't without offloading a ton of money, the game slams into a brick wall and loses its charm pretty quickly. What could have been a fun, interesting game falls woefully short in GluMobile's mad-grab for money.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)