Category: Games

I Guess I’m Getting Old…

January 17, 2009

Year-in-review time again, with respect to my game buying, and 2008 saw a notable change in habits.

During the past year I bought a total of 73 games for 7 different systems, spending just slightly over $2000 in total.

This is a fairly significant decrease in spending across the board. The total number of purchases is the lowest since 2000 and the total dollars spent is the lowest since 2002 (but you have to go back 1997 to see a meaningful difference). Here’s some charts breaking down the distribution:

^ Games Purchased, %

^ Dollars Spent, %

You’ll notice the % amount spent on the Mac, PS3 and Wii are higher than the game totals. This is due, in order, to additional costs associated with certain games. Mac expenses for instance include WoW subscription costs; PS3 expenses include monies spent on Eye of Judgement cards, and the Wii had a couple of much more expensive than average purchases (notably Wii Fit).

I’m not sure if I actually played less games in 2008 – I think more likely I spent my game-playing time on fewer and less-expensive games. World Of Warcraft of course is to blame (thank?) here, because I play it a lot and it’s actually fairly inexpensive as far as a gamers hobby is concerned. Most of my other time is spent with portable games, especially for the DS.

Another explanation for the drop is I’m perfectly happy these days to not get a game immediately upon release, and instead wait for it to drop in price (or never get it at all actually). This is why the number of games for traditional consoles is so low.

One notable statistic to come out of the year is that my DS collection became the largest amongst all my games. I now keep 967 games in my collection (plus or minus) for 24 different systems. 154 of them are for the DS, and given the continuing strength of the system it’s hard to imagine anything surpassing it any time soon. (The closest competitor is the GBA, with 138 games, but that’s a dead system and there are only a tiny handful of games for it I don’t have that I’m still interested in aquiring).

I usually end these posts with my best-of thoughts. Hrmmm… if I set my mind back to December 31 I would have named the Warcraft expansion Wrath Of The Lich King as the year’s best, but now I’d probably call it deeply flawed. Which leaves…

The World Ends With You, for Nintendo DS, as my pick for the best game of 2008! A brilliant action-RPG with a compelling story, truly unique battle system, great challenge and amazing replayability makes this a must-have for any true DS games 🙂

The Barcode Battler

January 4, 2009

For christmas, I purchased the following for myself from ebay:

You read that correctly – a barcode battler!

Now in the unlikely event you are not familiar with this magical device, it is an electronic game with a barcode scanner built in. The idea is that barcodes can be converted into powerful combatants that fight each other to see who is strongest. The thing was introduced in Japan in 1991, and brought to the US in 1993. It disappeared from stores almost immediately…

Here’s shots of two of the included cards, and a screenshot of the action:

You can see, in the shot, that my warrior ‘Chip Chopper’ (on the left) seems woefully outmatched by ‘Fruit Juicer’ on the right. I had valiantly fought through the entire 25 combatants of ‘Era 1’ to get this far, but would soon concede that I had no hope of further victory.

Therein lies the problem with the system. Although it is far more sophisticated than I ever expected (it even has a savefile!), it relies on randomness to a fault. Battles are simple affairs, but at almost all times you are hopelessly outmatched by the opponent, and victory is determined solely by the roll of the dice. My ‘winning strategy’ was to repeatedly use the item ‘Rocket Gun’ – which gave me a one-turn boost to my attack strength – and then hope I could 1-hit KO the opponent before he fought back. Victory rewarded a meagre increase in stats that made clearing Era 1 easier as I proceeded, but the opponents of Era 2 (and there are five Eras) were so much stronger than Era 1 it seems the game is designed around using barcodes other than those included to continue.

But the problem with this is that there is no diagnostic mode. Certain barcodes only work at very particular times, and there is no mechanism where you can just scan some random barcode (such as from a box of cereal) and have the game identify it as a warrior, or item, or spell etc. So I may have a barcode that is a health item for instance, but the game will only ever accept it during the tiny interval when health items can be used. This is dumb and frustrating, and very, very poor design (not the least because the manual states many barcodes “will have no effect at all”).

But, consider:
1) I have wanted one of these things for over 15 years,
2) It cost me $6 plus shipping on ebay, AND it was factory sealed, and
3) I spent perhaps 4 hours playing with it the other day, and even if I never use it again already count it as a prized possession!

So in other words, this was easily in the upper echelon of (self-purchased) Christmas loot 🙂

To answer your question about how I could identify my opponents? Well since the system itself has no text ability, it provides codes that must be cross-referenced to the manual. Yes it’s laughable, but hey, this was 1991!

< Dynamic names!

Cross one thing of my “List of amazing items I have to get around to tracking down and buying one of these days” lists…

Attack Of The Clones

November 27, 2008

First, a shot of Momo and her clone army:

< Pengomomo

Secondly, a shot of a perfect Christmas gift for AW that I will unfortunately be unable to mail overseas:

< Oh!

And lastly, a promise that thsi post has given me a good idea for another 🙂

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

Robot Claw