I thought this was retarded.
I was wrong, love it.
I love it too, but I can’t pry myself away from Geometry Wars to play it as much as I should.
I mean, I’ve got Gears of War sitting right on my desk unopened, I’m only like 2 hours into S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and yet I can’t stop playing Geometry Wars.
Woo! 218,460 just edged out Capt Donut for the top of my friends leaderboard.
Wow. Sounds like Shadowrun. Apparently the price of something is a direct measure of how critically good it is.
I heard that Ebert originally gave Lost in Translation a Thumbs Down because while it was a good movie, the $11 ticket price was just too much. Then when it hit the dollar theater it became a Thumbs Up. However, later when it first came out on DVD for $20 it was Thumbs Down again, until it hit the bargain bin where it was a Thumbs Up movie once more.
I bought it as well. Playing the demo for a few minutes, I was amazed at how fresh pac man felt with the changes they made.
My only gripe is how slow the game goes (on the championship mode) in the very beginning. Although I’ll counter that gripe by saying that this is one of the few games that I’ll probably get all the acheivements for.
For me and all non-millionaires, I’m pretty sure the price of something affects how likely we are to buy it. I, at least, would quite like to know whether it’s worth the money.
Of course, at $10, it’s no Steel Battalion, so I’m not overly convinced that price has any real place being in that review.
So in addition to letting you know if something is good, you need reviewers to explain to you whether or not it’s worth X dollars to you personally?
You can’t just take an objective description of the quality of the product, and then consider the cost and your economic circumstance to make the decision yourself? Is that how far we’ve fallen as a nation of consumers, that we’ve lost the ability to judge for ourselves how to spend our money and need other people to tell us what to do with our earnings?
Cost is such a subjective value that it should not be impacting scores. While a $60 game might be one college student’s food budget for a month, for another person it’s an hour of work and disposable on a whim. While cost may deserve a mention, especially in the context of giving actual examples of how a similar game costs less and is therefore a better value, mentioning cost without providing a relevant basis of comparison is meaningless.
Whether a game is good or not is something fairly concrete that a review can impart. Whether that experience is worth the asking price is my call. Having that factored into the score is useless.
You heard a bunch of baloney, then – he gushed all over it from the very beginning. I read his stuff all the time, and I’ve never seen or heard him wavering based on ticket price.
I was trying to use an absurd argument to make a point. Apparently I didn’t make it absurd enough.
However, you still figured out my point, which is that the price of something has little or nothing to do with it’s quality in the grand scheme of things, and a review should focus on relative quality.
Ah, gotcha. I’m prone to reading things way more literally when I’m super-tired :)
To an extent, yes, though I’m going to have to backtrack a bit because I used a bit of hyperbole.
If a game costs an exorbiant amount, then I’d expect on a reviewer to touch on it. Perhaps it shouldn’t affect the score, but then I don’t pay much attention to scores anyway; I have far more grievances with them than I’d like to admit, regardless of the relative use of them, especially now that I generally know - based on who the reviewer is and what they say - how much I’m likely to enjoy something. To me, the text is the most important part, which is how it probably should be, though I admit the Gamespot scores are faulty enough on these aspects that I sit up and take notice.
Regardless, 7th Guest retailed for £70 over here. Steel Battalion was, what, over £100? The price has an impact on my purchase, and is part of the relative merits. As has been stated a number of times, Shadowrun is an acceptable game, but most people I know won’t buy it at the price it’s at. The scores reflect this, somewhat - if it were $30 (apologies for the changing of currencies, here) then I imagine it would’ve scored a fair bit higher as it would be a fun little budget game. Note the review scores that things like Peggle are getting. Would I pay £30 for that? Fuck, no. But that’s not the price range or the competition it was ever aimed at. Would it still have received high scores at that price? No.
There’s a standard price-range for commercial games. If it’s much less or much more than that standard, then yeah, I guess I do expect reviews to take that into account somewhat. Games are frequently compared to their brethren, and if the price varies drastically between them, then that should probably be taken into account.
If I’ve still missed your point, then I apologise. Honestly, I’ve never really thought about this in depth before - it’s something I suppose I’ve always assumed has been taken into account, even since the late 80s and early 90s, and it’s always seemed to be represented even way back then. I can almost certainly dig up and quote a load of reviews, but this isn’t anything new, at least for me. I suppose different places and different reviewers vary on this.
Apologies if this makes little sense or seems to ramble, too. I’m far too tired for this sort of argument at this time of the morning.
To bitch about a $10 price for Pac-Man CE is to miss the big picture.
Pac-Man Arcade: Adapt an ancient game to run on new hardware, primarily through emulation, with a bit of tuning and tweaking to adapt to the new control scheme. $5 is fair.
Pac-Man CE: An entirely new arcade game based on the same gameplay fundamentals, but with new levels, new rules, new AI, and brought to you not by a small developer specializing in emulated ports but by a development team led by the guy who created the original game way back when. How can you demand this be sold for $5?
I think we’re on the same page here. I’d expect a reviewer to mention price if it was out of kilter compared to other similar games.
That might be useful information for some people, and that’s what the body of a written review is for. Making a game sound like it’s a 9.0 in the body of the review, and then giving it a 7.9 based on cost is not reasonable. If MS had subsidized the game and sold it for 100 points would it have gotten a 9.8? It’s a more attractive purchase perhaps, but it’s still going to be the exact same game at any price.
218,460 just edged out Capt Donut for the top of my friends leaderboard.
You bastard! I busted my Pac-Ass to get that score.
I would love to see video of the top leaderboard score. Last time I checked, it was well over 600k.
Is there a strategy you all use to get such high scores (if you are willing to share such secrets)? I have been generally working both sides of the board at the same time and use the early game to keep the ghosts blue as long as possible to keep eating them at the 3k score over and over, but I run out of time on that by the 3rd map usually.
I was wondering if it might be wiser to focus just on one side of the board so that you can keep the fruit score on it higher.
I saw a vid of a 300K+ and I kind of follow that. Chain as much as you can in the beginning then race for the key focusing on clearing over ghosts taking ghosts as opportunity presents itself. When the Key spawns you’ll get 3 pellets really close together on that side where you’ll be able to mass chain ghosts again.
Also, one of the reasons I posted the 1up review compared to gamespots was Mr. Davidson’s take on price.
In early feedback, the gaming community has made a number of negative comments about the game’s price. The argument goes that “classic” arcade games are 400-500 points a pop, and that the 800-point price ($10) for Pac-Man Championship Edition is a little steep. To that, I present the following two arguments:
- Championship Edition is a lot more than just a tarted-up Pac-Man and certainly warrants more of a premium on its price, especially in light of the fact that…
- “Casual” games are not as cheap as we all like to think they are. If you look at the true classics, games that offer endless fun thanks to simple challenges, like Zuma, Bejweled, or Bookworm, you’re looking at a $20 price point. Don’t believe me? Just go check out the PopCap site. The trials are free (just like there’s a free demo for Pac-Man CE), but the full “unlimited” versions are $19.95.
I don’t have a problem with a $10 price point for a new, original game. Sure, there are a lot of $5 games on Live Arcade, but those are just ports/emulators of classic games. The 1Up reviewer is right–casual games on the PC almost always sell for $20. Just browse through PopCap’s site, or Reflexive arcade, or the Garage Games site, or any other casual game site you can name and you’ll find that $20 is the magic price point. Bejewelled? $20. Peggle? $20. Marble Blast? $20. Phil Steinmeyer’s game (Bonnie’s Bookstore)? $20.
Given that, the Live Arcade games are really pretty good values. I think that $10 is a perfectly fair price for an all-new, original game (and more specifically, a fair price for this game). It’s cheaper than most casual games, and on par with the rest of the original content on Live Arcade. So while I don’t have a problem with reviewers pointing out that a game represents a particularly bad value, I’m not sure what line of reasoning led them to think that was the case here. It’s sort of analogous to complaining that $40 is a lot to pay for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Except that it’s not–it’s exactly what you’d expect to pay. A little less, even.
edted for typod
Yeah, you’re quite right. Funnily enough I do agree that the price should have no bearing on score for this game, at least, because for something like this I can’t see anything wrong with the price at all. But then as has been said, there seem to be more issues than just price with that review.