Deathawk

Hopefully this means Ubisoft is done with dumb and obstructive DRM, but I worry that this is just the exception. Something like "Well the console version didn't sell, so let's try anything to make money of this."

@Aetheldod said:

Ok? LIke the disk knows that it is not new and locks itself? .... On consoles they cant force people into playing online , if they do then heck just go for a PC then

I guess you're right. Potentially games could require unlock keys but that seemingly wouldn't be on a system level. My next thought would be that this might mean that the new system would require a code to activate achievements, which wouldn't be too "anti-used" for gamestop. Heck, I might not even care if that's what's going on.

So Kotaku ran a story today about the next Xbox. It's generally uneventful except when they mention the possibility of an "anti-used game" aspect to the system. This would be terrible if it is true, and would just be another case of people who buy used games being treated like second class citizens. To be clear if this was true it would also most likely mean: A) You couldn't rent a game B) You couldn't borrow games from a friend and C) That once a game was out of production it would be impossible for new gamers to ever play the game unless they chose to digitally re-release the game.

This just furthers my upcoming dread for next generation.

So I downloaded Stacking the other day, and I'm not really feeling it. Sure, sure the art style is great and some of the doll's abilities are pretty funny, but it just 't feels really slow and simple. Most of the puzzles are extremely simple which is a problem it that's the core of your game.My other problem is it doesn't feel interactive enough-there have been times where I was doing something correctly but in the wrong place and this is never expressed to the player in any way. Furthermore I find the story uninteresting, the text hard to read and, the whole experience kind of dull. I was really looking forward to the game and I'm really bummed that I'm not enjoying it.

So anyone who's been following this blog knows I've been thinking about checking out Fallout 3, well I finally did on Saturday. My first impressions follow:

-The game starts in a weird manner. People describe Vault 101 as a tutorial area, but the game does not really teach you much. Perhaps I'm just use to modern games hand holding you in the first area, but Fallout 3's opening dungeon is straight up old school in some respects. For instance during my first "real" mission a character tells me to grab a gun, normally this is where a game message would pop up and tell you how to equip that gun-not in Fallout. To be fair it's not really hard to figure out, but I still did die a couple times before I realized what was going on

-The music is catchy but doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The game features a 50's motif, which is cool but it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The game's opening cinematic makes it clear that the nuclear bomb was detonated around 2070, so why is the music all 50's pre rock and roll? Don't get me wrong I enjoy it, but the story and the motif are kind of at a disconnect.

-Dying and reloading is handled really well. It's been a while since I played Oblivion but I'm pretty sure that was one of those games that made you hard load your saves every time you died. I was impressed to see that Fallout 3 just streamlines this, after you die you respawn where you last saved almost as if nothing happened. The load times are quite well done too, and I was impressed that the music/radio plays during them too. I didn't install the game so I was rather impressed by this.

-Finally I really like some of the status effects. Specificly when your head gets crippled it's really noticable and the game swings in and out of focus wildly. I actually got through one of the dungeons with this status effect and that's just one of those "Wow, I can't believe I made it" moments.

Overall I like this game so far.

Point lookout is the Alaskan one right? Yeah that looks pretty fun.

I guess the whole point to this blog was not so much a question of used games, but the crazy amount of research I had to do prior to actually buying it. For a while I was thinking that it would be a code, so when I saw best buy had used copies of Broken Steele I was understandably confused. By comparison, ten years ago if I wanted Halo, I went and bought Halo. I'm not saying that that's necessarily better or worst, it just seemed like one of those "living in the future" moments

To steer the conversation in a different way, I was also considering Boarderlands. Would that be worth it for the single player alone or does it lose most of its essence without co-op?

So I've kind of been in the mood for a post apocalyptic open world RPG as of late and I've come to the conclusion that buying Fallout 3 nowadays is kind of hard. First of all no retailers seem to stock a new GOTY copy, they're all used. Normally I have no qualms about buying used games, especially when the game is years old like Fallout is, but I don't know, something about purchasing used expansion pack seems a little bit shady to me. So my next option would be to buy a used copy and purchase new DLC from the marketplace, which would put me out around $17 (since I only really want Broken Steel) but that's also the price for a used GOTY collection. I probably don't have the time to play through more than BS so then the whole thing comes down to if I just want the GOTY to say I got a better value. I don't know....buying games nowadays is kind of difficult.

My favorite is Tinkle Pit. Yes, it's a real game, about trains I believe...

So I bought Mysims about a week ago. It's a terrible game, and I had a feeling it was going to be less than stellar when I bought it, but I did so anyway. I just had to see it for myself for some reason. It's pretty much an Animal Crossing clone without the charm. Actually a better way to put this is the whole thing seemed like it was designed by someone who heard about Animal Crossing and then went and made a copy of it without ever playing said game. In Animal Crossing you get furniture from your (in game) friends, in Mysims you get blueprints to build your own furniture from townspeople. The fun part of Animal Crossing was amassing hundreds of unique furniture sets and other pieces of home decor, when you have to build it all yourself it's slightly less fun. The frame rate is also terrible, as are the load times. Somehow I want to continue on though, call it self masochism .

I really have no interest in playing these type of games. They're shallow, repetitive and at home you can literally die as many times as you'd like and still beat the game.