Followup

Some numbers to crunch regarding that previous post about how EA is trying to get a bigger piece of the gaming pie. Actually its a literal interpretation of such a statement, a pie chart showing just whose pocket that $60 you spend on a new game goes to.

According to the chart each game costs $4 to produce, this isn't the cost of making a game but merely the cost of burning it onto a disc, packaging, shipping and so on. That leaves $56 about half of which ($27) goes to the publisher.

Now since these are the people who make the game it makes sense that they get the biggest piece of the pie. Retailers get a considerable amount ($15) which leads one to believe that if game producers sold their games directly to the public they would be able to either: a. sell a game for fifteen dollars cheaper or pocket fifteen dollars more in profit.

Retailers to play an important part in the cycle since they facilitate the transfer of the goods to the customer and the transfer of cash to the producers. It's a very imperfect cycle, one whose convenience is paid for by the consumer, and one which changes dramatically when we're talking about used games.

If a gamer sells an unwanted title to a retailer (like Gamestop) he gets considerably less then what he paid for back, the retailer then sells the game at a considerable markup from what they bought it for, to another willing customer. The retailer reeks in lots of profit (on top of what they already made from selling the game new), the manufacturer gets nothing and the consumer is able to buy the game cheaper than new.

This is the market that EA wants to crack by trying to get some of those who buy used to buy new. No I'm not trying to defend retailers (especially predatory ones like Gamestop), I'm more worried about those who buy directly from other consumers via either Amazon. eBay, Craigslist, the swap meet or whatever. When you purchase a game you reserve the right to do with that copy as you wish (except you know make and sell copies of it), when EA tries to get into the used game market they take away potential consumer to consumer transactions. Transactions which benefit the consumer because they don't have to deal with corporations who are only concerned with profits.

And that's my main problem with EA right now. Not to try to take money away from small developers, not to try to get more money to retailer$ but to increase the number of transactions and situations that require neither of these two when exchanging games.

The full article is at Double Kill.

Bad Name, Bad Product?

Today Apple unveiled the horribly named iPad to the waiting arms of the Internet. Now once we move away from the "sounds like a maxi pad" jokes (yes finally, iTampon is a trending topic on twitter) we can begin to see what this new Jesus device will mean to the gaming world as a whole. Both to the game companies, the game developers and, perhaps most importantly, the gamers.

I'm not one to talk about specs because I didn't waste six years of my life getting a political science degree so become an expert on fancy computer words so lets talk about the looks and the possibilities. As was expected its basically a big iPhone, it looks like a big iPhone, it comes with pretty much the same built in features (except no camera on and phone so really its a big iPod Touch) and can run all the apps that are currently available. It can also be catalogued as half a laptop but that's not exactly true.

Because it can run any app it already has a huge library of games before its even launched. More games can, of course, be downloaded at a price that is way cheaper then other handhelds. The drawback? well like its smaller cousin it has to buttons. The iPhone can work its way around that with screen joysticks and other nonsense but the iPad is bigger and will be more clumsy when it comes to playing games in this manner. Games in which you tilt the screen or slide shit across shouldn't be such a big problem, just a matter of getting used to the device's bigger real estate.

The iPad can play games with the screen size the size of an iPhone or the screen can expand to cover the whole iPad screen. How in the hell one plays a joystick game with the small screen centered on the tablet is beyond me. There's also the issue of the games themselves, their small price and indie nature usually mean that graphically they're not the greatest. The iPhone has its limitations game wise and bringing those to a bigger screen will make them, well, bigger. Not to say that indie equals bad, on the contrary indie usually equals innovation, but does the absence of actual legit developers demerit the system? does it demerit the industry? it might. But then again graphical improvements and all that hoopla should be the domain of Microsoft and Sony.

As a handheld console it doesn't pose much of a threat to the DS and PSP. Why? because the iPod touch and iPhone already do that. The tablet will be a sort of middle ground between the handhelds and the home consoles, not quite fitting into either category. Think of it as a Virtual Boy without its doomed limitations. Yes it will eat its share of the market but its not an alternative to any of the handhelds, its a lot more and it appeals to a completely different crowd. This isn't something some dude will get for their nine year old to keep him quiet during car rides, this'll be something that dude will buy for himself for other reasons and use it for gaming only because it has the feature.

What about the device as a substitute for everything else. FUCK! think about reading a book, a magazine, a comic on it. Think about watching TV, a movie, surfing the web. When the iPhone came out it was the greatest thing ever (it still is) because you can do all the above stuff on a device that fits in your pocket. Now take the iPhone and make it bigger and suddenly watching movies and reading your rss feeds dont require you to squint at a small screen anymore. But it also no longer fits in your pocket so dragging it around with you is a real commitment.

So whats the verdict? I have no fucking clue. I havent seen it, I havent used it. I've read great reviews but also feel its not exactly groundbreaking, astounding or necessary. The miracle was the iPhone so this is mainly a beefed up version of the miracle. It also doesn't fix the iPhone's biggest problem: multitasking. This might be its downfall. It's not a motherbox, its not war machine designed to guide missiles into enemy territory (though I'm sure therell be an app for that) what it is is a piece of nerd porn, a status symbol which screams you're either part of the it crowd or you just drank the kool aid. It's a non entity which doesn't belong to any category but doesn't fill any need.

Tetris! in First Person!

Well prepare to get nauseous. Someone has finally taken Tetris and made it into a first person game. Now this doesn't mean you'll be maneuvering a figure composed of four squares through an urban warfare setting armed only with a gun and the knowledge that you can always respawn. No, it means that now its the screen doing the rotating and not the figure.

It's fun, sure, but it also makes you want to throw up. The upside? well its a new spin to Tetris and its free to play. It's not available on a console or iphone (yet) all you have to do is go to the following link. It'll transport you to a magical place in which TV screens were still square, the NES was the balls and Maxell had the recordable VHS market cornered.

First Person Tetris

The Internet Museum of Awesome

If there's something that is sorely missed now that we have transitioned to the user generated Web 2.0 is the old dedicated sites. Be it on geocities or lycos, be it a site devoted to pictures of a particular celebrity or to Zangief there was a sort of relief from finding out that not only did someone else share your niche obsession but they have also gone through the trouble of collecting pictures, interviews and data all in one place.

But most of these personal sites are now either gone (like the Zangief Shrine which I could not link to above) or have been replaced by celebrity rags, user blogs or social networking sites. It is therefore a true pleasure to discover a site as devoted as the castle of collectibles. This place has a huge amount of posters and other media not only from the old SNK/Neo Geo games but also the current generation.

The gallery might be a dancing baby short of coming straight from the late 90's but the layout is meaningless when compared to the amount of awesome that the website houses. Posters range from the very early, cartoony ones (at the apex of video game kitsch) to some truly magnificent examples (that last one, by the way, one of my favourite ever SNK pics, heres a better look). The great thing is that the guy who runs the site has most of the posters and the pictures posted are of the actual item.

Of course if posters are not your thing there are other sections, including a graph that shows you what games are available for what system and the Vault which houses a ton of old Neo Geo memorabilia, so much in fact that it comes with an old school warning for dial-up users. Yep, this site has so much kitschy goodness and do want that its hard to quantify in a single post, luckily its still there and is actually updated frequently so its a great time waster. I'm adding a links section and this is definitely going on it. It's times like these I wish I had the disposable income to foster my obsessions.

Check it out here
Neo BomberMan's Castle of Collectibles

Lady Pictures

A few days ago I mentioned the Darkstalkers tribute book and how its cover ruins and potentially cheapens the quality and importance of the entire thing. I believe my exact words were:

"I realize that Darkstalkers is a franchise known primarily for having half naked cat ladies and succubi and though I dare not ask artists to tone it down did they really need to increase it?... look at that fuckin cover? way to rob the book of any dignity by featuring such a prominent thong"

Good to see copying from blogger keeps the links by the way. The point is both gaming and comic book nerds get a bad rap because their interests are so male oriented that creators often overdo it when it comes to the sexual nature of their products. This has been a problem since the beginning for comic books because art was not technologically limited in the golden era of comics as it was for video games. While I am sure that Capcom, for example, wanted to create some really realistic thunderthighs for Chun Li they simply could not do it in the 1980's.

I write this because I recently ran into an example similar to that of the Darkstalkers book. The image above is part of the cover for New Avengers: The Reunion #1. Its a very nice drawing of Hawkeye and (his wife? girlfriend?) Mockingbird, so nice in fact that it made me curious as to what the book was about, but not nice enough to make me cheat on Green Arrow.

I did my research and found the title and the complete cover. My reaction was pretty close to this:


Complete fucking disappointment. As you can see the cover suffers from the exact same problem as the Darkstalkers book: ridiculously unnecessary sexuality in the form of a female character wearing uncomfortable undergarments. Lets not get into the whole "shes a superhero, why would she wear that" argument, lets focus on the goal of the artist: get an ass shot in order to sell the book. Did it work? I can see many people (women) being insulted enough to forgo the book and the entire series (a five issue mini), I can see many going for the more subtle variant, even the stereotypical nerd.

I can also see myself not buying it and its not because I'm insulted by the site nor because I'm some sort of prude, in fact I'd argue that a well done cover girl is a good thing, but rather because I'm appalled at the fact that creators feel a need to appeal to the basest instincts of all nerds. Not to mention that, like with Darkstalkers, the inclusion of the ass focal point makes the cover very unattractive. Unfortunately with the Darkstalkers book there is no variant, the horrid cover will have to grace the bookshelfs of those of us who end up buying it, forever forcing us to explain how we're not, in fact, nerdy perverts but rather just consumers with limited choices.

As for the Avengers book, I never bought it nor I have any intention of doing so. Not just because of the stupid cover but because this whole Dark Reign is starting to become kinda grating: we get it: Norman Osborn owns the world, lets focus on improving Runaways and Deadpool now.

The Onion: Punch Out

Because The Onion is the best satirical newspaper ever I thought I'd share this great article that details a new documentary about Mike Tyson in Punch Out. Its a few months old, I read it when it was first posted and it was one of the reasons why I started eightbitter.

There is plenty of room to work with when reminiscing about the video games we grew up with, the NES, SNES and Sega generation of the late 80's/early 90's has grown up and become aware of the brilliance of our childhood video games despite their limitations. And we openly mock and venerate them, more so than past Coleco or Atari generations simply because our video games actually looked like video games and not dots or jumbled pixels.

Anyway, read the article its fuckin hilarious, heres an excerpt:

"'MY BODY [WAS] JUST SO TOTALLY COOL,' a wistful Super Macho Man said during promotional interviews. Twenty years after his heyday, the clinically depressed former bodybuilder is confined to a wheelchair, the result of medical complications arising from the weight of his enormous upper torso bearing down upon his tiny legs."

The rest is here

New Mike Tyson Documentary Features Exclusive Interviews With Super Macho Man, King Hippo

By the way that kickass Punch Out scarf can (could) be found here.

Ninja Turtles

I received my TMNT: Tournament Fighters in the mail a couple of days ago, turned it on, played it for a bit and proceeded to be disappointed. The fighting seemed slow, the fighters small, the sound gimmicky. I then played it a bit more and I realized that it actually isnt a sucky game. The reason it appears slow is because I'm used to playing new generation games, the fighters are small and blurry because of my small screen and bad connection and the audio...well the audio is still pretty bad.

Lets talk about the game. There were three different versions: the Sega game which had Raph on the cover, the NES game with Leo and, the one I had, the SNES version with Don dancing with a shark. No love for Mike I guess. The games not only had different covers but they also had different character rosters and, obviously, different graphics.

Like I said, the game really isnt that bad. The available characters included the Turtles as well as five other non-turtle characters. Casey Jones was in there...in the Genesis version. April was also playable...in the Genesis version. The SNES game got some not so great characters, including a purple dinosaur looking guy named "War", Wingnut,, the Shredder, a token female character and a few more. I might have gotten over my initial disappointment of the game but I stil have issues with the available characters. I find myself not caring for any of them. I used to like Wingnut as I had that action figure but not anymore. I think the Rat King is the final boss. I dont remember if you can later select the Rat King but I hope so.

But there are many pluses, this is an old-school drawn fighting game. Of course its modeled after Street Fighter and KOF, but it also does a few other things those didnt have at the time (such as a separate bar for a super move). Each character has a unique stage, also reminiscent of SFII, each character has unique moves, most are able to throw projectiles using the standard Hadouken movement.

Sure this might be a bit forced but the Turtles is a franchise with so many discrepancies between all of its media appearances: what happens in the tv show is different than the movie, than the comic book and so on. That the video game would be just as disconnected is not surprising.

The game is good, yes its a bit slow and yes its a bit difficult but that was the norm when it came out. It really isnt fair to compare it to todays game but thats what we do because of what the norm is today. The biggest issue then really isnt that the character selection is poor but rather that this was not followed up on such in the same way that SF or KOF was. If it had been then TMNT: 2009 would be something else.