Aegis Wing, and XBLA/VC in general

Magically_Stoopid

Alright, so Joystiq a little while back brought up this XBox Live Arcade title, basically stating how important it is that people download it. To remind Microsoft how important it is to give us free sh*t from time to time.

Seen here... http://www.joystiq.com/2007/05/17/friendly-free-stuff-reminder-aegis-wing-on-xbla/

As I looked at the game (Pretty good btw, nicely challenging). I thought about how the Arcade, and really the entire marketplace has been thus far. Strangely enough it seems like for the most part, they have the right idea. But when a solitaire game is 10 dollars, and you have to pay two dollars for a song on Guitar Hero 2. Then someone or something is messing up here.

With all this in mind you'd think Nintendo could do a better job with the VC, give it a bigger advantage and such. But five bucks for a nintendo game? For five bucks I'm better off going to my local gaming shop and buying the actual cartridge. Not to fault Nintendo for trying, but having to pay so much for something which most of the time, isn't a whole lot. That's just tard and feathered if you ask me.

Basically what I'm getting at here is that I'm okay with paying for these games. Believe me I know that people put a lot of effort into them, and so thus getting them for free is out of the question... but 10 dollars for a SOLITAIRE GAME?

And no, I didn't know this was already a topic (If it is or isn't I don't know either... but you can never be too careful on the world wide introweb.)

Noray

Yeah VC's prices are off. Basically everything needs to drop 2 dollars in price. Look around on Ebay and you can indeed get most NES games for like 5 bucks, and you're not actually getting anything physical here, so it could be cheaper.

Live Arcade is a lot more hit and miss in that regard because publishers determine prices themselves (I think), so you sometimes get ridiculous stuff like horse armors and overpriced GH2 songs. In those cases, all I can say is 'Don't fucking buy it', and the market will correct itself. That's how it works.

mntorankusu

Magically_Stoopid wrote: »

But five bucks for a nintendo game? For five bucks I'm better off going to my local gaming shop and buying the actual cartridge.

This isn't a good argument. For one thing, most of the good games sell for more than $5. When Gamestop and EB still sold old games, games like Kirby's Adventure and Zelda were closer to $10 there. Even on eBay you'll have a hard time finding the games, shipped, for less than $5.

And for another thing, you can't measure the value of a downloadable classic by how much you can buy the old cartridge for. Do you have a working NES? I don't, and I have two of the damn things.

I don't see what's wrong with $5 per game, really. It wouldn't hurt if they were a bit cheaper, especially the SNES and N64 games, but the good games are worth it, and the bad ones aren't worth buying anyway.

Edit: And I didn't even mention any of the advantages of playing a game on the VC, like being able to play with the nice wireless Wii remote, having the game as a convenient button on your main menu, or save states.

Velmeran

The one thing that irks me about DC stuff, is that if you think about previous games we all loved on the computer, DC was free because it was made by fans. Mods, extra levels, extra tracks (StepMania), and such are free because someone not getting paid is using the tools given with the game to make said extra content.

But with consoles they don't give you the tools to do this. So they know that all extra content is coming through them. On one side you can say "sweet, this means any new stuff is going to be high quality!", but the other side is "They have a freaking monopoly and there is no "market" to let prices be fairly established.

I would be more interested in DC for games if we were given the tools to make our own extra content. It's not that hard to package a level editor or what ever tools you need to make new content with a game, they are usually much much smaller then the actual game and with dual layer disc out there, there isn't much of an excuse. The harder part is getting the content onto said consoles. Now XNA development is designed for this though, for $99 a year basement dev's get to play around and put stuff back and forth between the 360 and their computers. Only the content is all standalone, and not new maps/tracks for existing games.

Personally, I would like to see map editors and other tools released for games, and let the market be a market, with anyone being able to put up their work for free, and make the dev's see they can't charge $2 a song when Johnny Rocker just uploaded 12 songs he likes and did a good job at converting over for free. Yes, if you develope extra content for games your didn't make, you don't get to charge for your work, its a work of love, not for money. It's how the mod communities have always worked so don't try and rock the boat.
X

Something else to consider, console game communities aren't known for modding, yes there are rom hacks and such, but nothing you could say as big as what was going on back when Quake 1 was out and me and my brother checked ftp.cdrom.com for the newest stuff all the time. So if these tools did get released for consoles, it's hard to say how much of an impact it would have initially. I think there are more kids then adults, so the ratio of developers for each title will be quite different. Also, we all know people made pron levels for Quake, so how would Microsoft react when little Jimmy downloads said level for Halo3 and his mom wanders into the room? Stuff like that is another reason I think we don't see consoles opening up more to the mod community.

I don't own a 360 (I'm in China for the next two years, and I don't really want to buy a PAL console system), but I have read a few of them threads and I'm just throwing my 2 cents in.