Trading games in is not a practice I regularly take part in. I generally like to keep my stuff and would like to think that I only buy games worth owning forever. However, sometimes I roll the dice on certain titles and it doesn’t always work out for any number of reasons.
I recently went to my local video game store to trade in a bunch of games. Here are the games I got rid of and the reasoning behind letting them go.
Recently, Nintendo announced launch details in regards to the Nintendo 3DS. It’s out in Japan in February and in March everywhere else. This is still a lot of time between now and launch, but you may need to start saving your pennies now. It won’t be cheap.
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Hip-hop has historically gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to quality music games. While rock, pop and dance have been adequately served, hip-hop fans got DJ Hero (which was half not hip-hop), the obligatory Beastie Boys song in the rock games and Get On Da Mic (which was awful).
Def Jam Rapstar aims to finally bring gamers a good rap video game. I don’t know enough about the gameplay or feature set to talk intelligently about it, but so far it appears as though they’ve got the most important part right: the soundtrack.
Not too long ago, it was discovered that Metroid: Other M had a game-breaking glitch. If you got the Ice Beam and killed the spiked enemy behind you instead of proceeding through the door in front of you, the door wouldn’t open, which would make it impossible for you to proceed any further.
Nintendo has a fix for this. Just don’t expect it to be that convenient.
Back when I bought Super Street Fighter IV for the PS3, I was kind of hoping that I wouldn’t spend any more money on this game. Having two copies of the same game for different consoles struck me as excessive. However, playing against my friends has gotten pretty frequent, pretty serious, and my Dualshock 3 experiment ended with a painful left hand and sore thumbs.
Having owned the Mad Catz TE, Hori EX 2, Fighting Stick Wii by Hori and the Hori Tekken 6 Fightstick at some point or another, I had a good grasp of what was out there and what best suited my needs and my budget. In the end, I went with the Hori Tekken 6 Fightstick for PS3, which comes with Tekken 6 and the art book.
It looks like EA Sports listened to the voice of the people after all. After an incredibly poor response to the NBA Elite 11 demo and the anger that ensued with the XBOX 360 and PS3 versions of NBA Jam, Peter Moore, President of EA Sports, announced that NBA Elite 11 will be delayed indefinitely and that XBOX 360 and PS3 versions of NBA Jam will be sold separately in time for the holidays. For full details, go here.
To celebrate Super Mario’s 25th anniversary in Japan, Nintendo is releasing Super Mario Collection, which includes a port of Super Mario All-Stars, a book about the history of Mario and a CD with classic and new Mario music. It’s set to come out on October 21 in Japan for the equivalent of $30 US.
Resident Evil 4 still stands as one of my favourite video games of all-time. When it came out on the GameCube, it featured hands-down the best graphics on any console game and basically gave birth to the third person shooter. I’ve played through this game at least three times and it will always hold a special spot in my heart.
The iPad edition of Resident Evil 4 is a weird product. It tries really hard to be just like the original version, but in some cases, to a fault. What you’re left with is a game that feels like a hollow shell of its former self.
For all of those PC gamers anxiously awaiting the follow-up to the great PC Street Fighter IV port, you’re out of luck. A few days ago, Capcom Producer Yoshinori Ono during an interview with 4gamer revealed that there are no plans to bring Super Street Fighter IV to the PC due to piracy. Even though the original sold great, it also was a pirate favourite.
I know there are a lot of people who feel that video game piracy is a victimless crime because they feel like they’re only one person taking a product away from a faceless, multi-billion dollar corporation. However, there are consequences to pirating, and this is one of them. Not only does it hurt legitimate gamers that actually wanted to pay for it, but now pirates can’t even pirate it.
Don’t blame Capcom for this. They’re not here to just give away all of their work for us to enjoy. They run a business, and their purpose as a business is to make money. Releasing that type of game on the platform that is a pirate-haven such as the PC has proven time and time again to be bad business. I’m sure that the potential sales they lost due to piracy far outweighs the money they made on legitimate sales. To be honest, from a business perspective, I don’t know why any major companies would want to put out their big budget games in the traditional fashion on PC.
Where paying gamers can complain is the fact that Capcom doesn’t want to distribute this digitally through a protected system like Steam, which they feel is unfair to gamers who don’t have the service and limiting to gamers. Maybe someday they’ll change their mind on this decision.
Say what you will about much cheaper it is to pirate games rather than pay for them, but this is the end result of rampant piracy. The catalogue from which to pirate from will disappear and everyone loses. I sympathize for the PC only crowd that would have to buy new hardware to play Super Street Fighter IV in some form. As for the pirates that ruined everything…
A lot of people tend to gloss over the fact that Nintendo does more than just Mario, Zelda and Metroid. If you look far enough into their catalogue, you’ll find a number of different games and franchises that span almost every genre. Some of these games maintain cult followings and steady sales, such as Fire Emblem and Kirby, while others fall by the wayside with only a few people caring that it likely won’t come back (unfortunately, I’m looking at you, Elite Beat Agents).
Though Advance Wars made its North American debut in the early 2000s, the series originated in the late 80s in Japan. Why did it take so long to make it to North America? I don’t know. But I can tell you that when it did, it blew my mind.
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