I was just bored this afternoon waiting for a drive to go into the city to buy a game and i some how found myself with photoshop open. Anyone who uses photoshop knows this always leads to wasting a few hours and coming up with some horrific things some days so i just said WTF i might as well share my fruits of boredom with the community.
 
The idea of Giant Bomb gift cards or fake dollar bills just kind of came to me so i made the below images. I know they wouldn't have much of a use for anything like this since they don't really have a store with enough things to warrant them, but as i said boredom + photoshop = shit like this. If they ever get to a position where they could sell more Giant Bomb memorabilia perhaps this may inspire some kind of gift card ideas should they be in demand. And yesthey are based off the canadian money colour schem that is why they are the colours they are.
 










Yes i know there is a photoshop thread but i felt like writing a blog and these where sitting on my desktop so :P

 

When a person writes a review for a game, does a preview, or a friend say’s to you they finished game X this week, one of the first questions people usually ask are was it fun? and how long was it?

People want to know before investing in a game how much time they are going to have with it before they reach the end point of the game, or is it endless like an MMO or puzzle game. For a lot of people they can only afford, or have the time to play so many games a year so they want to know which game will give them the most game play for their dollars. Just like with movies people want to know beforehand how much time they will need to invest to get to the end. Nothing feels worse than to spend your monthly game budget on something that you beat in a few hours and have nothing to play until the next month.

The time we will invest in a game to get to the end is such an important decision in a games purchase I’m still surprise that game boxes don’t have an estimated play time label on them. I’m sure one reason why is simply because of the nature of the medium being so dependent on variables during game play it’s hard to say a game will take a certain amount of time to complete. When you factor in the genre, the persons skill, side quests and a plethora of other factors it makes it impossible to give an accurate estimation on how long it would take a person to play a game to completion. Because of all these and many other variables it would take the industry as a whole to adopt a guide line of what is to be included when deciding a games play time. Would you just say it will take X hours to go from start to finish without exploring any? But have a +X hours for side quests? What about the person who skips every line of text or FMV that comes up? Do you add an excluding story elements warning? What about when a person gets to a part of a game where they keep dying, how can you accurately estimate something like that? You can’t.

The only way I could see this coming into effect would be if Sony or Microsoft decided to make it another standard developers had to meet in order to publish games on their system. Just like the ESRB label, the player count label, or the HD resolution label they would have to include an estimated time to completion label. The key word there is estimated. They would have to base it on the few variables that they know of and make it clear what is and is not included. Perhaps something like the example to the left..

 

Artistic talent aside-- I just woke up so all you get today is a box-- there isn’t a whole lot that can be shown to tell the buyer what was included or excluded when coming up with the play time given the lack of space on boxes. As seen on the above box there is just so much stuff all over the place it looks like one of those NASCAR driver suits that has AD’s over every square inch of their bodies. It can be a very intimidating and scary thing to look at for people who are just new to gaming or sometimes even for long time players as it is just so busy. Perhaps one more box, even one that contains as valuable information as how much time you will get out of the game, is just one box too many. Maybe the reason we don’t have them now isn’t because they don’t want to, or didn’t think of adding it, but because there simply isn’t enough space on the boxes for it. Maybe we just can’t get these things added until we get a new box design for our games, or when we get an online distribution scheme. If you are looking at a web page for the game instead of a small box you’re holding in your hands there is an infinite amount of space for information to aid in your purchasing decision.

Perhaps it is just as simple as the medium doesn’t lend itself to a time stamp. Or perhaps there is just a deeper meaning I’m overlooking here then how long a game will last. Does it really matter how long a game will last you as long as you’re having fun while playing it? Does a game’s worth increase or decrease based on if the number of hours label on a box is bigger than one over another s? What about a fun time label for the box? Will I have fun the whole time I play the game or just for 5-10 minutes every hour that I play?

Personally I still believe some way to let the person who is going to buy a game know roughly how long a game will last them without needing to have been reading reviews online, hunting message boards or having a big enough network of people who play every game that comes out is important. Of course the most important part of buying a game should be will I have fun with it and not how long it will last. But with games costing as much as they do and with the obvious problems going on right now buying a $60 game that will last for 10 hours of fun then be over may not be as important to a person as buying another $60 game that will last 80 hours and be fun most of the time.

In the end I guess it comes down to what’s more important to you personally. Which of the two is more fun. Do you even like to play the type of games that go for 10 hours or 80 hours? Maybe you can replay that 10 hour game over 8 times and have just as much fun as the 80 hour game. At the moment it seems to just come down to doing your research before you go buy something and hoping that the gamble we all take when buying a game ends with you having fun with whatever game you bought. In the end we buy and play games to have fun don't we?

  This blog post is in response to THIS news.
 
 The servers sounds like a nice idea in principle but i understand where the outrage is coming from. The PC platform has been progressively getting consolized and degraded by the video game community and this is just another step down the road of them trying to make the PC into a console. It is not a console and the PC community is getting tired of always getting the short end and have finally gotten to the point that we are starting to fight back and not just bitch amongst ourselves. We are tired of game after game getting poorly made ports, we are tired of our games always being released long after the console versions, we are tired of always having missing content from our versions, we are tired of having things we have always had being restricted and expected of us to pay extra for or flat out not have access to, we are tired of being treated as a second or third class platform and we are tired of always getting ignored and looked down on and we are not going to take it anymore.
  
 Yes this does offer a good thing, but they are doing it in a way that destroys one of the few things PC has had since its beginnings. If you could offer a way to do both, this and an option to select games based on a server list, i don't think this would be that big of a deal and they would have been praised for their efforts. The PC community sees this as a slap in the face and just another attempt at the industry to try and make our platform like a console and we don't want that. We play PC games for the better controls, the better graphics, and for the freedom to play our games as we wish. If we wanted to get spammed with ad's every where we looked, if we wanted to be forced to pay an extra $60 just to play games online on top of our ISP bills, if we wanted to have our experience dumbed down to appeal to the uneducated masses then we would buy a 360 or PS3. But we don't want that, we want the freedom to play our games how we want, and we don't want to to have our favorite hobby be reduced to Ad's and nickle and dimming. 
 
  I had been planning to go buy Modern Warfare 2 because it looks like a lot of fun, but i refuse to play shooters on a console because playing them with a controller is just wrong and absolutely zero fun for me in every way. However after seeing absolutely zero coverage about the PC version of this game, the PC version getting left out of the collectors edition and now this, I'm not going to be buying the game. In literally every video, screenshot or interview i have seen/read about this game they have not once even mentioned that there is going to be a PC version to this game. So why then do you expect me to want to buy your game when you cant even grant me the courtesy of acknowledging that your working on a version of the game for my preferred platform? If Activision and Infinity Ward don't want to acknowledge that my platform of choice even exists and that they are going to support it equally and not give privileges to the other ones then why should i support them by buying their game? I shouldn't and I'm not going to. If they want my money then start treating me equally and not just expect me to bend over and take what ever scraps they are willing to throw my way and expect me to thank you for doing so.

As of this posting i am # 112, 066 on the petition and have canceled my pre-order.