Geraldo Figueras

The Three-Headed Monkey, from the Monkey Island series.

Best shooter ever. I wish I could turn my TV to play with the real aspect ratio.

LiK, you don't have to worry about that. Here in Brazil, no one actually buy a game. Unless I'm unaware that Mininova is a store nowadays.

Ok, I'll try to expalin a little bit about how's gaming going in Brazil.

First, the market here has a lot of potentioal. Problem is, politics, as usual, are all fucked up around here. The videogame taxes are the highest in the country. If you want to import any kind of game from anywhere, you have to pay 60% of taxes of the game cost + shipping costs. If you wish to distribute games officially here, it's even higher: 104%!

Of course, you can imagine how the prices end up being.

Another interesting fact, is that pratically no one buy consoles and games on autorized stores, thus absolutelly few will buy a Wii for $650. The best deals comes in brazillian eBay (called Mercado Livre), and systems imported through Paraguay (Paraguay has no taxes for import, so a lot of people cross the border to bring eletronics to sell in Brazil).

As I said before, the gaming market here tends to be huge, but piracy doesn't help eitgher. Actually, we are behind China, being #2 in the ranking nowadays. Mexico used to be second, but things got better latelly with Microsoft producing Xboxes inside the country.

Back to piracy, check out the amount of unlicensed copies being played in 2004, according to study of IDG Consulting:

PC - 89%
XBX - 97%
NGC - N/D
PS1 - 100%
PS2 - 97%
GBA - 88%

Things will hopefully get better now that Microsoft is bringing Xbox 360 officially to Brazil. Unlike Nintendo, the consoles will be build here, so the prices won't be as high as those that Nintendo announced. Nintendo act here as the major importer, and sales tend to be very low.

These are the average prices of consoles and games being sold on Mercado Livre and through Paraguay distributors:

Gamecube - U$220
PS2 slim - U$280
Xbox - U$350
Xbox 360 - U$740
launch title to any platform, sealed: U$100
DS Phat - U$210
DS Lite - U$300
PSP - U$330


Someone here asked what do we think about those prices? Well, personally, I think they are unpayable. What most people do is save money to buy the console, and never buy an original release, just keep downloading them thru Mininova and the likes. I have another way, wich is buying directly thru eBay and trying to skip taxes, since there are some "underground" ways to do that. But Im pratically alone in that.

Hope that helps, everyone!

Actually, that's not the first system to come in a "gold edition", the Game Gear before that did it, back in ol' 80s.