video game shopping

My ‘Do Want’ List of Q4 2010 Video Game Releases

Jett2 Comments

For gamers, the most wonderful time of the year starts right about now. Most of 2010’s biggest games are set to drop between September and December, including the likes of Halo: Reach and Call of Duty: Black Ops. As a kid, this used to be the time of year when I would fawn over each hot new release as they hit stores and make sure come Christmas time, it would make it on my wish list. Ever since I grew up and started working though, Santa has had a horrible time trying to get me stuff, because I have a bad habit of buying every game I want the day it comes out.

While I don’t see myself grabbing Halo: Reach or Call of Duty: Black Ops, which will likely be the biggest games out during this time-frame, that doesn’t mean I won’t have anything to play. Off the top of my head, I listed a few games I’m looking forward to getting my hands on when they hit stores later this year.

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Using ‘Cost Per Hour’ to Determine the Value of a Game

Jett4 Comments

cost-per-hour

Over the past few years of following podcasts, message boards and reviews, there seems to be this weird metric that creeps into discussions in one way or another. For the purposes of this post, I will refer to it as ‘cost per hour’. It’s a metric that people directly or indirectly use to judge a game’s value based on how much it costs and how long the experience is. I will express it with the following formula:

Value = Cost of Game/Number of Hours Played

In a perfect world, where money directly translates into valuable experiences, these types of metrics could work as a means of judging a game’s value. However, this logic is flawed, because neither cost or value variables are consistent. You can’t make a blanket statement saying that Limbo is too expensive at $15 dollars because it’s only a 3-hour experience, because it might go on sale, someone may take longer/shorter to beat it, and subjective opinion may say that their time with it was totally worth that price.

The price you pay for that experience and the length of that experience are viable factors in determining a game’s value, but not the whole picture. However, what if we did take away all of the other factors? Is it possible to come up with a consensus cost per hour rate to determine whether or not a game is worth it? I take a few examples from my collection and crunch the numbers to find out.

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To Buy or Not To Buy – BlazBlue: Continuum Shift

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I really wanted to like BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, and based on what I knew of the game going in, I thought I would eat it up. Instead, it sat on my shelf because I couldn’t grasp the gameplay. The pacing was a bit slower than I expected. I had a hard time understanding the game’s mechanics. It also didn’t help that every character played completely differently from each other, which meant there wasn’t much in the way of transferable skills. Some of this wasn’t the fault of the game; part of it was a fault in the user. I realized that my Street Fighter knowledge wasn’t as applicable with this game, and that the amount of investment it would take for me to be good at BlazBlue I would rather dedicate to Street Fighter IV instead.

This week, BlazBlue hit store shelves. I have a lot of reasons for just leaving it there. However, a couple of things are tugging at my heart strings (and wallet) to give the series one more shot.
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