I almost bought Cities XL on Sale- do your homework first

9/28/2010

How much is $5 worth to you? I decided today that it wasn’t worth the heartache of trying to get a broken game to work. I had spied this game months ago, and decided to get Torchlight instead for my $20. I logged on to Steam today and found that this neat looking city sim was on sale for 75% off!!! Sweet I thought, I’ll just pick this up for that price. The Steam variable price model really appeals to me and any time there is something good I pick it up.

I poked my head in the forums to read what people had to say about it before I clicked buy amd this is the post at the top of the screen:

Hmm, I wonder if there is any merit behind this post with 100 replies to it? Without a huge twitter gamer following to source from, I chose to dig a little deeper. Come to find out the company that originally made the game knows all about the technical issues that promted the creation of the “DO NOT BUY THIS GAME” thread on Steam’s forum. The gist of the thread focus’ on the fact the the game developer is perfectly aware of the thecnical issues that make this game unplayable, and have opted not to fix the issues, but create a whole new game.

The kicker about this whole thig is the new Cities XL 2011 will not be avaialbe on Steam because they picked a different distribution method. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Staem the number one didgital distributor of games? This rat hole is far beyond me, and in diving in it I just got more frustrated.

The end result of this foray, I saved $5. There are a lot of people that buy things that they never intend to play just because they are on sale, not because they are good games. In these hard time it is a shame that we have to quibble over $5, but that’s $5 closer to Civ 5 as far as I’m concerned.

Are we getting too much Bioshock Infinite too early?

I have been inundated recently with info and promotion of Bioshock:Infinite. The front page of Xbox Live, the full cover and spread in Game Informer this past month. Don't get me wrong, I was a big fan of the original Bioshock, and an old time player of System Shock and System Shock 2. I did play a little of Bioshock 2, it Didn't catch my fancy like the first one did. I watched the interview that the Xbox Live community guy did with Ken Levine about the game. It was full of game play and the stuff really does look awesome. The story telling that is possible with this world may have even more potential than the original Bioshock. The same question remains, is this too much hype of a game that is coming out in 2012? I hope not..

How will Tivo compete when it can't deliver product??

After reading this post on engadget, I felt compelled to express some opinion about Tivo and its place in the market. I have owned 2 Tivo units over the last 10 years. A Series 1 Unit that worked wonderfully for us for 4 years, and a DirecTV SD unit that was the bees knees since I didn't have to have IR blasters and it had dual tuners.
Like many DirecTV subscribers, I have been waiting years for this fabled unified box again. I have been tolerating the Hughes box for a few years since I went HD. It works, but it does not have the interface of Tivo, which I believe if their "secret sauce".
This latest announcement hints at the idea that Tivo will be getting out of the hardware business. Does this make sense? I think it does since the the streaming content software companies are moving rapidly out of the HTPC realm and into the set-top-box area. With the advent of the Boxee Box the idea of Al-La-Carte consumption of media, the cable and satellite providers are going to have to innovate and deliver content as consumers want it. Will Tivo be able to deliver? Their track record says no, but maybe they will be able to come through.

Netflix Universal Deal bearing fruit for streaming customers

 

Netflix customers, do you remember how upset you were when you couldn’t rent “Avatar” for the first 28 days of DVD/BD release? I do, and to fight “The Man” I went down to one of the last remaining Blockbuster stores in my area (there used to be 4) and pick up a BD copy to my family to watch. Now we all know based on the latest news, that we will be seeing fewer stores very soon as the bankruptcy protections they are seeking will allow them to break leases and consolidate their stores. This has already been happening here in the Midwest for a few years now.

Is the 28 day rule tolerable with the new content that is available on Netflix streaming? As long as you are willing to wait to see future new realeases. I recall the days of VHS, and the months, and even years that we had to wait to rent VHS tapes of our favorite big-screen hits. I believe that these agreements will eventually push the hard-core movie buff in the direction that the movies studios want them to go. It will introduce the re-emergence of the DVD/BD purchaser that just HAS to have that new release the day it comes out. Those of us that are a little more frugal, will most likely wait for it to be avaialble to stream, or go down to the new BLockbuster Express machine to pick it up.

The fill press release can be found in this article at Engadget.

Good Old Games Closing…… FOOLED YOU!!!!

To coin a line from Dark Helmut, we’ve been fooled. Was this just a ploy to get attention? Sounds that way. What does this type of stunt do to the hard-core fan? I personally have purchased a few games from GOG, but a majority of my library comes from Steam. This approach damages their base, and they did work to help mitigate the damage. The statement has been made the the site has always had “Beta” at the top, so we can only assume that this is the big release.

The re-launch of the the site brings the original Baldur’s Gate. The big issue with the launch is they generated too much publicity. They are adding servers to take up the load. If you are in to old games that are modified to run on modern systems, give the newly re-launched GOG.COM.

If you still have that old media hanging around like I do, take a look at dosbox. I have some moldy-oldies like Tie Fighter, Renegade, and Gabriel Knight. I will be publishing my testing with these games in use with dosbox and dbox to ease the pain.

 

Stay tuned!!

The continuing story on Vernor v Autodesk

 

In my previous post I had talked a little about what ramifications this might have for the resale of games. There has been considerable buzz around the “Doom and Gloom” of this decision as it pertains to used video game sales. There have been a few articles written about this topic, but the most comprehensive one is on gamepolitics.com.

Rules of first sale

It’s up to the courts to interpret laws, that’s how our system works, but what happens when there are conflicting decisions? That’s the predicament that the Ninth Circuit Court was dealing with in this case. The term “quacks like a duck” are used to describe how they rule on if something is a sale or a license. Basically the content owner decides on the terms on which you can use their product. This type of scenario was successfully used by Blizzard to shut down a bot manufacturer in World of Warcraft.

What came from this decision

Really, what we gain from the court decision are some guidelines to apply to these types of cases. There were no questions asked on the criteria of the product in question. Now there are questions that are asked about the how the license is written, and that is only one component of the process.

Will this affect how the used game market works? Probably not. There are more characteristics of owning a console video game that are like a sale. It’s more about having a copyright on the content than licensing it to the end user. The major exception this is MMOG’s. Users pay a subscription to this, and if they stop paying it, the lose access to the service. If you try to pirate the software or install it against the terms of service your account will be banned.

The moral of this story is DON’T PANIC!

The software ownership discussion….

This past week on This Week in Tech (TWIT) the topic of software ownership came up. The story is around the case Vernor v. Autodesk in which a man purchased used copies of AutoCad at an office sale with the product keys. He then tried to sell them on Ebay, and AutoDesk asked Ebay to take down the auctions repeatedly. The man then sued to get the sales declared legal.

The court interpretation of the EULA upheld AutoDesk’s claim that the sales were in violation of the agreement. This, of course opens a can of worms that should have been left closed. If software manufacturers and media companies had their way, any time you were done with their product, you would send back the media for them to destroy them.

This argument comes down to weather or not you own the software or media that you buy, or are you just “renting” it. Some think that if you don’t really own a game when you buy it the costs are too high for games. This line of thought also hurts the largest game retailer in the US, GameStop. Their entire business model was built on the used game market, and everyone’s desire to save a few bucks. I’m not going to go in to the merits of their business practices now, but there is some value to the games industry that they provide.

Consider that someone buys an Xbox360 late in the console cycle. You of course would want to build a library of games to play at a lower cost. You may pick up earlier titiles that have new sequels coming out currently. Those earlier games may sell newer game titles. That is of course hypothical, but it is one example of a potential benefit.

A major success story is Valve’s Steam service. It gives the software publishers control and rights management of their games, and a convienient method for media delivery. It’s a great way to keep older titles in front of consumers and continue to genereate revenue for game developers. Valve also does a great job of shaking up prices by running frequent sales on individual titles and bundles of  titles at deep discount. This week the Star Wars software collection is on sale for $49.99US. Well over $150.00 of software for $50.

There will eventually be a middle ground in this battle. For now, speak with you wallet, and show these businesses what you think!

Playstation Move First Impressions

This evening the folks from bitmob did a live stream of their first look at the Playstation Move. While some aspects of it look interesting, I am not personally sold.

Haven’t we done this before?

Watching the bitmob guys watching themselves on the TV doing goofy things on the TV monitor reminded me of the Eye Toy stuff of old. This in fact, is part of the Move solution. I wonder if this will sit like the Eye Toy and Xbox Vision Camera. We played “You’re in the Movies” with the kids like 4 times before we got tired of that.

Pets, Really?

Aaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrr

Watching them play around with the Eye Pet was comical. I don’t think it gets more gimmicky than than watching your legs on the screen while you play with your virtual pet. I know that this is designed to bring the family together, but come on. This will end up at the bottom of the game pile wile the kids go back to playing farmville.

There is some potential..

The look at the titles that are slated for release here, there are some high points. Not the least of which is the number of 3rd party studios that are putting games out that take advantage of the technology. As referenced in  previous post about Wii MotionPlus, that cannot be said. If you have fans of DDR in the house, the elimination of the unwieldy dance mats. That alone may be enough to push this over the edge for some. This holiday season will determine who will take the motion control dollar!

Will the Boxee Box really survive at $200?

Being the tech bargain shopper that I am, most new release products don’t make it in to my house. I have the means to purchase them, but I’m not a fan of the early adopter premium. There was one product that really piqued my interest at CES this year, the Boxee Box.

 

For those of you that don’t know what Boxee is, you can find out all about it here. It is by far one of the fullest featured pieces of home theater software  for streaming internet content on the market. It’s free, and will run on old hardware to boot.

So what is this Boxee Box that I speak of. Well it’s this great software coupled with set-top hardware supplied by D-Link. It does a lot of cool things that are similar to the Roku HD-XR Player and the newest model Apple TV. For a feature-for-feature comparison there is a great article on newteevee.com.

The reason it came back to the front of my mind was my daily email that I received from resellerratings.com. One of the listing is from Amazon.com about the pre-order Discount of the The Boxee Box for $200US shipped. At nearly double the cost of its nearest competitors it may struggle to compete with the very visible AppleTv.

Sound Off in the lastest poll! Who do you think will reign supreme?

 

Listening to iTunes B-Tribe - Suave Suave - Nanita (A Spanish Lullaby)

Have wii been fleeced again by Nintendo with Wii MotionPlus?

Rading though my online deals this morning I came across a great on from an online retailer for Wii MotionPlus add-ons for a great price ($9.99US shipped free from China). I thought it would be the time to take the plunge and pick a couple up for 2 of my 4 Wii Remotes. I thought “Man it’s been almost a year, there should be a bunch of games out by now”. After doing some digging, I found that not to be the case.

This wikipedia article has a nice table that details the compatible titles.

The fact of the matter is, there are like 5 (worthwhile) games that actually support it. One fo these games happens to be the one that has it bundled in. ( I don’t think that counts, just like Wii Play) I think Nintendo has talked us in to buying some more white plastic to combine into one of the most expensive controllers in the industry.

Do the math:

   +     + 

$19.99      $39.99         $19.99     =$79.97

 

That is one expensive controllers on the market. I know these numbers have been crunched before, but that is really expensive for the few games that take advantage of all of these technologies. There are ways of combining the costs though buying games that include certain compnents, but in the end you are paying more for a fully loaded Wii than an Xbox360. This doesn’t make the Kinect seem so pricy, although not an apples to apples comparison.

I will accept my deep discount on some more white plastic and buy Wii Sports Resort for the kids the Christmas and we will undoubtedly have a great time with it.

Why is it OK that iTunes sucks?

As I mentioned in a previous post, I recently put together a new desktop PC for my personal use. This promted me to move my iTunes library from my work laptop to this nice shiny new computer. I had it on my work laptop because I tend to travel a fair amount, and if I ran out of podcasts to listen to I could download them there and sync them over. I’ve amassed such a collection of music, pdcasts and audiobooks that I can be gone for a number of days without doing a sync, and I could download new stuff via wifi on my ipod touch.

I copied over the music and movies over and downloaded the latest iTunes software (version 10). I thought “great a new version, this should be much better than the last”. Not so much…

It seems like the iTunes helper service doesn’t work all of the time. I Took a look at the Apple troubleshooting steps online, and followed the directions. Restarted services and started iTunes back up. Plug in my ipod, and nothing. Windows sees the device, but it’s a no-show in iTunes. I reboot, and plug in the ipod iTunes starts and ipod syncs. When I try a second time, no go. Then process starts all over again.

I wish this was the first time that I have had a similar experience with iTunes. On my wife’s old laptop iTunes stopped working and never worked again. That could have been a combination of the Dell (yuk) laptop and iTunes, but the result was the same. She now has a shiny Macbook Pro, but there were numerous reasons for that, and iTunes is working just fine. So is the issue Windows? I don’t think it is because I have heard a number of Mac users complain about it as well. I am pretty sure that for Apple iTunes is a loss leader to sell more hardware, but wouldn’t it be great if it worked as advertised?

The Used Game Market Backlash and Xbox Live Price Increase

Work has had me on the road a lot this week (750 miles worth) so I have been playing catch-up on my gaming podcast listening. For some reason the discussion about what the used game market does to game publishers. In my catching up on the topic (about a week late) there was a Penny Arcade comic on the August 25th that insinuating that buying used games from GameStop was equavalent to piracy. There is a great discussion about it on The Legal Satyricon. There was also talk about it on CagCast with some surprising comments from Wombat stating that the Penny Arcade guys should practice their own motto of “Don’t F***ing Judge Me”. I think that this was fitting, and they had the discussion about how some in the gaming media are getting too close to the developers that make the games.

Let’s be honest, most of us normal schlubs can’t always afford to plunk down $60 every time a game comes out. The gaming press get advance free copies of games for review, and it gives them the ability to look at game very objectively. We rely on these reviews to help us make decisions on what games we should be spending our hard-earned greenbacks on. There will always be the groups of gamers that have to have a game as close to release date as possible. I have bought new games at GameStop with money I got from trading in old games. I might take a chance on some Wii shovelware in the used section, but buying from GameStop is not my primary method of getting games. Over the last 18 months most of my game purchases have been made through Gamefly. Mass Effect 2, Borderlands and New Super Mario Bros. Wii all have come from the Keep-it option.

The other hot topic that was covered everywhere was the Xbox Live price hike for next year. I have to say that this couldn’t have come at a worse time for Microsoft. It may be a play just to show that you get what you pay for in counterpoint to Sony’s offering. Since everybody ran out and got a PSN premium account right?? Not really… I think the hike will go largely unnoticed since a majority of smart people buy the subscription cards at a discount rate. I think I purchased mine from NewEgg for $30. If you look for like 5 minutes you can find them online for a reduced price.

Use Coupon Code TENDAY to start your 10-day free trial today to GameFly!

Tim Ferriss and Slack Life

Since this is the House of Slack, I think it would make sense to talk about some ways to bring Slack into you life. One of the best education al tools for this would be reading the book "The 4-Hour Workweek” by Tim Ferriss. I personally own a Kindle and Audible copy of this book and while some of the things in this book do not meet my lifestyle, I found some valuable information in it.
I have the benefit of not having to be tied to an office most of the time, so I was already part of the way there. I have used some of the techniques outlined in the book to be able to manage time on my own terms and keep work at arms length. While I may not have a 4 hour work week, I can honestly say I work about 4 hours a day, and get paid very well for it. This frees me up to spend more time with my family, and SLACK! There are plenty of options for the more driven individual as far as building your own business and such. I did go down the rat hole of the 30 day challenge, but I don’t necessarily believe in the SEO thing, and believe that it ruins the internet for people that are looking for real information. I digress, and will talk about that another time.
I chose to not make use of my time during the day that I am not doing work to slack off, and generally do nothing other than surf the web. One might contend that this activity can be done from the comfort of any office or cube, but I prefer to do it from the comfort of my own couch. Plus I can do other things, and I don’t have to spend as much money on gas or lunches.
So I say check out Tim Ferriss’ blog!
Download & listen to the latest personal finance & investing audiobooks on your iPod or mp3 player, only $7.49!

Is Star Wars as good as we remember?

Over the past weekend I have been watching the Star Wars marathon on SpikeTV off and on. Like most of my contemporaries (mid-thirties) I am not as fond of the latest installments like I am for the original trilogy. I watched a little of Attack of the Clones, and the beginning really turned me off. As I watched Star Wars this morning listening to the dialog, it’s not really that good. I still love the movies, and they do hold up even after all these years. Is it the acting? I don’t think Mark Hamill was really that great. Of all the people in the movie Harrison Ford is the most successful by far. We used to make the Billy D. Williams jokes when he was doing the Colt 45 commercials for sure. It should have been worded “You may remember me from my part as Lando Calrissian” but that would have been too blatant.  I contend that these movies were at the right place at the right time. The old lightening in the bottle saying applies here. Lucas, ILM, and cast all came together to make the most successful movie franchise ever. I have to say it is still good every time I watch it.

Testing out this Blogger stuff to see how well it works.

I have been looking for a good place to write my thoughts in blog format that was apart from any of the other projects that I have had on the web recently and also apart from my Facebook account. As we all know, there are eyes and ears everywhere, and I would like to have something wholly separate from my usual public persona. I tried the Windows Live Spaces thing, and the platform is way too limited. Not even stats are available without going with a 3rd party. could be good, but very hamstrung right now.
There are a number of awesome plugins for live writer that can be found here. I plan to use then as I go along documenting my thoughts.
I am writing this from the new computer that I put together this last week. It replaces an old rig that I put together about 6 years ago. It’s rather embarrassing working the tech industry and have such an old PC for home use. I usually use my work laptop most of the time, so I didn’t really miss it. I figured the time was right and the deals so good on Newegg I would bite off on it.


So far, other than me almost braking it with a BIOS upgrade, it really screams. I still have a few things that I want to get for it, and I am waiting for another influx of money to finish the build.

I’m sure there will be more storage down the line, but I am hoping to have a dedicated NAS device to do this with rather than using SugarSync for replicated web storage, but for $4.99 a month you can’t beat it. This is in addition to Mozy for backing up 120GB of info off the old PC that is more or less a NAS device. It would be great to have a unified platform that didn’t have to be a PC to house and share all this stuff. Iomega make this device, but it’s still a little pricy for my taste. There may be a large data migration and consolidation project and FreeNAS in my future. There won’t be RAID protection, but it would be a little more useful.
That’s it for now. I have a long drive to think about things tomorrow….

Newegg.com has all your computer and electronic needs!