Be Excellent To Each Other

Actually, I've decided N+ can fuck off. It's the wrong sort of hard for me, being utterly frustrating and none rewarding.

I played the trial again last night and it didn't convince me to part with 400 points.

I third this. It was ranted and raved about and while it amused me it didn't enthrall me. I suppose I prefer the infuriating controls, hideous voice samples and sluggish movement of EXiT!

Five major Xbox Live Arcade titles make up Microsoft's Summer of Arcade lineup, and now we know exactly when each is coming out, from Turtles in Time to Shadow Complex.

We're getting one big release per week starting July 22nd and running through August 19th, when the Summer of Arcade promotion delivers its last quality title and we revert back to plain old, unexciting Xbox Live Arcade releases.

Festivities kick off on July 22nd, with the release of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-shelled, the remake of what many consider to be the best TMNT title. (1200 Microsoft Points)

On July 29th we get another remake, though I'm not sure if Marvel VS Capcom 2 counts as a remake. The HD health bars are certainly nice, but I suppose re-release is more appropriate in this case. (1200 Microsoft Points)

August comes in with a bang with the release of Twisted Pixel Games' Splosion Man, revisiting old-school platforming goodness with an exploding hero for a new age. (800 Microsoft Points)

Trials HD races onto Live Arcade on August 12h, a physics-based motorcycle racer that lets players create and share tracks via the magic of Xbox Live. (1200 Microsoft Points)

Last, but not least, Chair Entertainment returns to Xbox Live Arcade with Shadow Complex, a 2D shooter created using the Unreal Engine 3, set in the world of Orson Scott Card's novel. Empire. (1200 Microsoft Points)

That's a whole lot of points right there.. I agree on N+ though. It frustrated me as much as this touch screen keyboard is doing right now.

None of those releases interest me in the slightest.

TMNT does me, but not at 1200.

FTFM

Thank fuck there's nothing good coming for a while then. I might buy both MI:SE and BF43 now.

Greedy fucking bastards. 1200 is the new 800 then, eh?

Has been for nearly a year, mate.

Has the cost of the points changed much over the year?

Yeah, they got a lot more expensive since Tesco stopped doing 2100 for £11 something.

When I get contact details for the relevant PR folks for those games, I will pass them on to Grim... to try and get review codes for uptojump.

Seriously, whenever people bitch about XBLA pricing, I never take part in it because I don't really pay for XBLA games.

I sometimes feel like doing an experiment. Set up a shell web site that looks like a proper one, and email game PRs asking for free games, but never review them or anything, just do it as a way of getting free games. I bet it would work too.

You are a scamp.

If you dig back through this thread, I proved the price of a Live Arcade AA title has gone from 1/8th of the price of a chart game on release to 1/2 last xmas, maybe 1/3 now (retail gets discounted quicker, points cost more, games cost more points). Effectively XBLA is 3 times the price compared to buying a boxed game as on release.

In other words, fuck em. Turtles was vaguely interesting, but not at 1200. Trials HD I have on PC (where by the way it costs the equivalent of 700 points) so fuck them at 1200.

Still might get Splosion man.

Unless it's something awesome like Sam&Max, I generally only get things when they reduce the price nowadays.

I like the look of turtles, trials and shadow complex. I can imagine turtles not being hugely popular so I'd imagine that would get a price cut in the future, maybe trials aswell.

Cor, has no one metioned monkey islandisonly 800 points?

Only 800? FUCK YEAH! Well done Lucasing of the Arts.

No doubt it'll be another error and meant to be 8000.

The ones on Steam (that are non-special edition) are £2.99. They're being refreshingly smart with their pricing, which probably explains why I've bought too much of their stuff.

Yeah I noticed that. I've still got my White Label CD-ROM of them though.

Yeah I bought the first Indy and Loom yesterday, kind of like a history lesson of lucas games for me. Probably buy all of them eventually.

So a remastered popular classic is 800 points, a remastered cult streets of rage turtles game is worth 400 more points. Hwo does that work?

Fucking brilloiant.

yeah, although it saddens me we have cheer about it..

hoped Marvel v capcom was 800 , as dr. octogon said some good things about it, 1200 points i don't want it

That means I have 2,000pts for both BF1943 and MI. If I can ever get on to use my 30 trial minutes, of course...

The thing is people must be buying these games at the 1200 point level for Microsoft / the publishers to persist with the pricing. I would hoover up a lot of the releases in the early days of arcade but now it's rare if I get one every couple of months - I rarely even bother with the trial version if the full game is silly money.

The whole MS Points thing seems to be clever as it would appear people aren't seeing it as real money. Just stop buying them and they will have to lower the price the robbing fucks.

Well if you think about it, they only need two out of the three who were going to originally buy it at 800 to break even. I don't think this forum is a barometer of what's a fair price on the XBLA, as we're all curmudgeonly cunts.

Games like Sam and Max and BF1943 I can see value in paying 1,200+ points; stuff like Capcom vs Marvel and Watchmen, definitely not.

Or discontinue XBLA because they're not selling.

1200 points is a tenner.

Games cost a tenner in the days of the Spectrum when I guess we all had a lot less disposable cash than we had now, and games were often written by a single masturbating school child in his bedroom, all 48K of code of them (well, less than that of course was actually available for use) - also, games were often really shit.

I have no problem whatsoever with paying 1200 points for a decent XBLA game, and there's no excuse for buying a shit one 'cause all games come with decent trial versions.

The fact that retail gets discounted so heavily and so quickly doesn't make XBLA games a rip-off.

Obviously 800 points would be preferable to 1200 points, but to my mind arcade games are often a lot 'fuller' than they were in the early days of the 360 (not least since the limits were (IIRC) upped from 50MB to 100MB and now effectively unlimited?) - so you're often getting more of a game for your cash.

Atrocity Exhibition is the voice of reason. It's not even a tenner; you can buy 2100 points cards for £15 very easily, making it £8.50.

Only big-hitter games were a tenner. XBLA games are surely comparable to budget titles, so £1.99 or £2.99.

£8.57

Technically and irritatingly correct. The best kind.

I think it's more to do with being used to 400 points for the more basic stuff (with apologies to Mr Minter) and 800 for the big releases, when those big releases suddenly cost 50% more, then it does come across as a big price hike, especially if there's not a big increase in quality.

The problem is that you could sell on your old games when you were finished with them. If they came on a disc in a plastic sleeve, I'd have no qualms on the price.

Take for instance Marvel Vs Capcom 2... £8.57 for that IS a lot of money considering I'm sure I got it for less than a fiver on the Dreamcast a load of years ago.

I agree, I don't mind paying if the game is an original smash but paying £8.57 for something that is just a rehash of an old game? No thanks... for that much I'd want a box, instructions and the chance to trade it in somewhere down the line.

Well it mostly works on that level too, since your big-hitter releases on 360/PS3 are generally £35 or £40 on release, hence it scales almost the same. And not all retail games get hammered on price very quickly (there was no cheap GTAIV or Bioshock for quite a while, for example), plus retailers devalue their own new stock within days by punting stuff back out on pre-owned so it's their own fucking fault in a way.

Whichever way you slice it, getting a game onto XBLA is going to take an awful lot of time and effort, and usually for several people, if the end result is a good, solid game that sees a few quid being passed back to the guys who wrote it, then all to the good IMO - and a tenner is an entirely fair amount of cash to be asking.

Doesn't really seem a fair comparison as MvC2's price certainly wasn't a fiver at when it came out.

That's a whole different argument, but I'm not sure who benefits from the pre-owned market really, certainly the coders/developers/publishers would be better off if you literally walked into HMV and stole a copy of their game, rather than trading your copy in, as at least the retailer would be short a copy of the game then and would need to buy another.

Digital distribution doesn't bother me at all in that regard (if a game's worth buying, it's worth buying regardless of whether or not you want to sell it again or not), and I don't like pre-owned anyway as people with poo and semen on their hands may have been rubbing the game and disc all over their jizm-encrusted fingers. And I like pristine discs and manuals.

You're correct, it wasn't.. but just because it's coming out on a new machine, doesn't make it a new game. This should be reflected in the price at least. Also.. why are there only 3 price points for games? Whats wrong with the inbetween numbers... 1000MS points would seem better value than 1200MS points.

A full HD remake would probably justify the price increase, but it's just a port with HD health bars, as far as I can make out.

And you can sell them on when you're done, lend them to a mate, you got a physical product with a manual, you could play it on your next machine if one breaks without asking them politely (and later you won't be able to use these at all).

It's a poor comparison.



Yes it does, it's a comparable product you COULD have bought. They're competitors.

Regardless even if you assume there's no comparison with retail games to be made whatsoever, the price of an average title on XBLA has gone from £4.96 to £10.25 with the rise in the price you can get points for and the rise in the price of games.



More bloat anyway. Sam and Max for instance should just have been in a box at £20.



Us. It's part of the package.

And no they wouldn't be better off if you stole it, don't swallow that bollocks. Most people trading in use the money to BUY NEW GAMES.

You also have to taking into account that the eBay price of MvC2 has been pretty high too.

My main concern is that if they released a game like Marble Blast Ultra now - a good game with some really well made levels you can play in handy small chunks - it would be a guaranteed 1200 point release.

The inflation within XBLA is far in excess of that in the outside world. I really liked the arcade element - I don't want big 7 hour epics that are ostensibly worthy of my tenner. I want it to be an arcade experience like the fucking name says.

Those games still exist. In fact, I would say that the marketplace is better value now with the XBLCGs too.

Except that the CGs are mostly terrible, and the really good ones get lost in amongst the drivel. I mean, it wouldn't hurt MS to give the best ones a push on Inside Xbox or something, would it?

Trousers! Trousers! Trousers!

You're bang on.

I'm a bit saddened that no other games have reached 'gold' status and been halved in price since Worms and MBU nearly a year ago.

Not surprised, though.