Justin

This is for the Xbox,

New games are £40-£45 (US$60-68). Non AAA may be reduced to £35 ($53) almost immediately. From this retailer, but you can save 25-33% by buying from a super market or online.

That's the problem with the specialist games stores in the UK, they are the most expensive place to but gaming stuff from, it kind of defeats the point of having them.

They also give very low trade in rates and try to make at LEAST 100% profit from the resale.

Blockbuster Video gives the highest trade in rates I have found. They also sell new games normally £5-£10 ($7.50-$15) cheaper than the specialist stores.

I have only used 'Game' once in past few years and that was only because I had £50 ($76) on my loyalty card and I wanted to spend it.

I'm not sure that this will harm second hand sales.

I've owned both Dragon Age and Mass Effects 2 recently and had access to the extra content. While the content was well made and both Zaeed and Shale fitted into the main stories well, it was not exactly a huge amount of content. So if you bought either of those games pre-owned, you still get a massive and detailed game. You would not miss anything.

I can't see how someone that buys either of those games several months later pre-owned is going to be bothered about not having access to the extra content. It's just not that much or that great. I don't see second hand owners being bothered about DLC period. It's the people the pre-order that buy DLC not second hand owners.

I'd still be prepared to buy DA:O second hand, the game took me 85 hours and Shale accounted for about 1-2 hours of that.

What's the ZX 500 ?

I'm English and these trainers have the same colour flash and finish of the Sinclair Spectrum ZX range, never heard of a 500 model though.

http://a1.twimg.com/profile_images/495975578/zxspectrum_48k_1__bigger.jpg


I have to say I do like these. Takes me back to the days of either typing in several hundred lines of code out of a magazine to play some game or waiting around for 5-8 mins while it noisily loaded off a cassette tape. I had a ZX80, 81, Spectrum 48k, and the '+' model with hard keyboard.

$120 for these in the UK, I think I may have to get some.

I agree.

The question about games on demand was lite.

They should have asked does charging twice, three times as much as the game can be bought at retail with no physical media, manual or case represent good value for Xbox customers. If costs have been saved cutting out manufacturing, distribution and retailer profits, why have none of these been passed on.


The MS rep claimed things were good. When was the last time something was 'good' and we did not get numbers, graphs and power-point slides trumpeting those 'good' numbers.

I saw Oblivion GOTY in Gamestation yesterday for £7, the version with no extra content on GoD is £20, you'd have to be simple to buy it off MS.

Very soft questions.

As for digital distribution, I'm not supporting it on the Xbox. At least shops reduce prices over time and have sales. Nothing gets cheaper on XBL, universally decried as bad value for money horse armour DLC still costs the same bad value for money 4 years later.

Digital distribution is going to be bad for us the consumer. They are selling it as convenient, easy, quick and hassle free to us, but the reality is there is no store competition, no price reducing old stock, no clearing shelf sales. Just eternal high prices.

Good call.

Only last night I watched 3 vids of this game and thought it looked good. I share a house with a Latvian couple who speak Russian so I will get them to translate for me.

I do like proper authentic voice work. When I play Silent Hunter I always have it set to German voice with English subs. It does help with immersion. Plus I can now shout "Engines full ahead" and "ship spotted, bearing 287 degrees, range 8000 metres" like a real German so it's educational too.

I did get a few games. Now I sit at the searching for games screen endlessly before being told to check my connection.

Why do they put up a message telling me to mess about with my network set up, when the problem is obviously server end. It's 1943 all over again.

When I did play it was good. I liked it a lot, I'm sure to be getting this.

I'm not surprised because of the inflated regulated and non competitive prices for content from XBL. Everything costs about twice as much as it should, imo. Lower the prices to more realistic levels + lower the prices on older content and they would probably sell a lot more.

All I ever buy from XBL is content for Rockband and the occasional map pack. I had 42,000MSP for about 3 months, they should try harder to relieve me of my money quicker by actually getting me to want to buy content from them, but with price points of 12,000-16,000MSP for most arcade games and 'short' expansions plus prices that stay high forever I can't see how they will do that.

Dear EA,

I'm not interested in buying games in parts. I don't want to have to wait 3-6 months between 'chapters' for my games, I like to play them all the way through as and when I want. I would find it hard to stay interested enough in a game for 12-18 months to want to continue to buy content and if I knew the game was not complete when it went on sale I probably would not buy it in the first place anyway.

I am also not that keen on having to pay whatever you charge for how ever many instalments you publish, I like to know how much the game is going to cost when I make my initial purchase. I believe that you will probably want to sell me a lot of low quality 'filler' before I can find out the end of the story and as such a game that costs me £50 now will probably end up costing at least twice as much when I have to buy the game in parts.

Instead of telling us what we want, why don't you ask us the consumers ?. As an older gamer who has played games now for 30 years I really do not like the way the industry is headed. Electronic distribution has turned out to be bad for the consumer on consoles, you've cut out a lot of costs but have not passed any of these savings onto us, games bought from retail benefit from price competition in the marketplace and discounting on older titles, neither which will happen on Sony or Microsoft's closed networks. Given Microsoft's extortionate prices for minor DLC, arcade games, themes, avatar items and games on demand now, please don't tell me that this is going to be value for money for the consumer.

What happens to a game that sells well initially but the latter content packs sell less and less and less well with each one, will you guarantee that you will not give up on the game leaving consumers with no end to the story ?, I doubt it.

It really pains me to say this but I can see a time when I could no longer be called a 'gamer' and that time could be soon. Digital distribution and periodical instalments are just a way of maximising profits for you, I don't see what's in it for me and if it is just a means to get more money out of me for delivering less, then I will just not buy your games any more.

Regards,

Justin

I was very disappointed with OP/F/DR. If they had marketed it as a spiritual successor to Ghost Recon it would have been a good game. but OP/F to me means complete tactical freedom, controlling a large squad, lots of vehicles and an epic campaign that you play lots of infantry,armoured and air missions.

Unfortunately OP/F/DR has none of that.

You only get to see a tiny fraction of the map, the campaign was short, the AI was not very good, there were hardly any vehicles, the weapon classes were very restricted, the engine could not handle bushes/cover if you were more than 50 metres away.

The reason we were told that we would have AI in MP was because it would be so good, the most advanced AI EVAR !! CM said, but I don't think it's very good. This led to them not allowing standard PvP DM and so game died online really fast.

I picked this up hoping it would be like the original but it's really nothing like it, as I said if this were a Ghost Recon game I would recommend it, but as a OP/F game I can't.

I lost count of the features they said would be in the game that were not. They said the first DLC would be free for consoles to make up for the lack of a mission editor, it wasn't. They said the campaign would be epic and cover this huge island, it didn't. They said there were loads of vehicles to use, there isn't. They said the AI was super-duper, it wasn't.

This game must have sold well because my friends list was full of people playing it the week it shipped. Now there is only one person left in my friends list playing it.

I knew this game had turkey written all over it when the announced the demo would not be available before the game shipped, yet journo's were given a 2 mission demo build, so it did exist. That was because we would have realised all CM's talk about this game was just inflated marketing BS, the game they described was not what they shipped.

I'm not sure how this DLC will sell, over on the official forums there only seems to be a handful of die-hard fanboys left. I traded the game in the day I finished the campaign on hardcore. After seeing how CM basically lied about their game and the way their community liaison guy Helios labelled anyone that was not a raving fan-boy a 'troll' I'm pretty certain I will not be buying any CM games again and I certainly will not be buying a sequel to this turkey. Once bitten twice shy as they say.

Wow, it will be an 'ever expanding universe'

Hang on, I've heard that somewhere before.

Oh yeah Bioware said that about the first ME that was very poorly supported after launch. I'll believe it when I see it.

Seriously though, they need to ship these 'expansions' pretty soon after launch, other than games I play online a lot, the average shelf life a game has in my collection before it gets traded in on something new is 6 weeks-3 months. If it takes any longer than that the chances are I will no longer own the game.