Amentep

Hurlshot, man of steel ... dude, collossus isn't the man of steel! SUPAMAN MUTHA FU*KA! Superman stole the Man of Steel moniker from Steel Sterling: (Superman's original moniker was "The Man of Tomorrow" until they appropriated "The Man of Steel" after MLJ switched their line to chronicling the adventures of Archie and his pals) That'd be the Man of Tin (Tin Woodsman, to be exact). I'm surprised -considering it was a titanium rod - that no-one went for the accurate Titanium Man: Glad to hear the surgery was a success Hurl!

I wasn't meaning all to be all inclusive either. Must remember not to type in slangisms ("...and he was all up in my face, and I was like his stuff ain't all that and everybody was all like 'he went there' ") I still wouldn't say Frazetta is best know for non-magical fantasy stuff, but meh... What I've seen from DA2's art style isn't negative to my mind. Mind you I tend to have a high tolerance for weak graphical style if the gameplay is good, so maybe I'm not the best judge of things.

Well I've heard the legend that salt thrown after a suposed witch is supposed to keep them from returning, but not sure about throwing it on them...

Dunno, rock salt could hurt though, I guess.

Except that its Frazetta who defined much of fantasy in general. Most of what came after were copycats. So much for your knowledge of fantasy illustrators Which is exactly why your post didn't make sense. Dragon Age 2 art is pretty obviously inspired by Frazetta's work too. I don't know where you see that. Most of Frazetta's work is Conan like low key fantasy. Definitely not the high fantasy anime influenced stuff of DA2. In the long run it might take some notes from Frazetta but it has no specific visual identity of its own, unlike his work which is instantly recognizable. The man might have invented a set of ideas that became generic but his work isn't. Err...not sure where you got that Frazetta's work is all low key fantasy. I used to have a Frazetta painting on my wall of a wizard summoning a demon. Besides the Conan stuff he did a lot of horror/fantasy covers with all sorts of monsters and things (and he did science fantasy paintings as well).

They should go for clicking morse-code style. short click short click short click long click long click long click short click short click short click could be a last ditch all out attack, for example.

Has anyone actually managed to beat Lionheart? The same thing happened to me. I loved the Barcelona section but just got sick of the game once you leave. Yeah I did. It wasn't worth it, IMO.

"If we fight like animals, we'll die like animals!" - The Doctor, Survival

It was successful enough to spawn a sequel Champions: Return to Arms. I actually liked CoN pretty well, personally; it was like a better version of what Snowblind had done with Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance. The sequel delivers more of the same, but IMO if you liked the original there's no reason not to like CRtA (unless you were wanting something radically different).

Lionheart is great in Barcelona. After Barcelona itis a pure hack and slash game where the hackin' and slashin' ain't so fun (unfortunately I don't think they balanced the system very well so for my money the stuff outside of Barcelona is just an incredible pain in the rear. Mobs of enemies and for the most part no easy way to deal with them).

A trailer for an announcement?

ME2 is Mass Effect 2? It just had downloadable content, yes? I've never had a problem with paying for additional downloadable content or expansions and the like (as mentioned before). I see now I kinda missed the point a bit; I guess the idea of buying a new game for $10 less never made sense to me. I know other people do that, but first few weeks a game is out, if I really want it I buy it new.

ME2 is Mass Effect 2? It just had downloadable content, yes? I've never had a problem with paying for additional downloadable content or expansions and the like (as mentioned before).

But you do when game publishers do the same thing? I don't get it... I think we established a few pages back that I was under the mistaken impression that the online content being locked out was not server based.

Well that certainly puts a different face on things, I suppose. Of course as I mentioned way back in the begining I was being a bit of an alarmist; taking things to a scary extreme (and yeah I'd be rather put out to be locked out of offline content which was my alarmist reaction). Does seem like there's a legitimate point to the additional fee that wasn't obvious to me. No. When I reinstall WoW I no longer need my CD Key because I already have an account. YOu need a CD Key in order to create a new account. But couldn't you give the entire account over to someone? Or is your personal information locked into the account in a way that makes it, essentially, something you could never "blank out" and give away?

Interesting about WoW. I suppose you can't clear your personal information out and sell the keycode access as well then?

The cost of buying games has continuously decreased since games came out, especially in my neck of the woods when NES cartridges were $60-$70 upon release. Games DID get cheaper when the conversion was made to CD (see: N64 vs PSX) moving to their $50 price point. They then returned to $60 price point again in the 2000s. Maybe it's different where you are. Hmmm, there were only a few cartridges that were super-expensive here that I recall Phantasy Star IV for example being $100. Most cartridges of the SNES/Genesis era was $50 here though. PSX games started around $50 as did Saturn games. There was, I recall, a rather large debate over this fact on rec.arts.games.video.* heirarchy on USENET complete with a breakdown of the costs to make a cartridge at the time and a CD and based on those numbers it was much cheaper to make the CD without any resultant difference in the price of games to the consumer (but perhaps it was the game seller's markup as opposed to the publisher?) Irrelevant. In this case they're spending time and money doing this then. Furthermore, how long do you allow an account to be inactive before removing it? There's additional overhead regardless of what you do. Now you're just warping your original premise in order to try to keep some footing under yourself. Actually I was asking a question.

It did. Adjust your costs for inflation. Furthermore, factor in the cost of game development compared to what the end user pays. I'm not sure how games being $50 dollars as a cartridge and then in months being $50 as CDs (which was the case with the PSX generation of games) is actually adjusted for inflation as I don't think there was THAT much inflation in a years time. This is the slippery-slope logical fallacy. If this is actually as big of an issue as you are indicating that it will be, wouldn't this cause people to buy less games and see a significant reduction in revenues for the game devs, leading to them rethinking the actual policy? Perhaps, but if the horse is already out, its a bit late to close the barn door. But as I said, I was being a bit alarmist. I may be completely off-base on the effect of this on the consumer, and as mentioned I think a predicted move to digital distribution for all games will render it a moot issue eventually. The entire online component is not covered with the resale of a used game. Take an extreme example. I buy a game, and create my online user profile that the game uses to log my match history, statistics and so forth. I resell this game and this game continues to be resold a million times. The online servers still log each and every individual profile that was created and keeps track of a million times more data than they were originally compensated for. The only cost is not just bandwidth and the matchmaking service. Your scenario would only make sense if upon being resold, the game's online profile was now in possession of the new owner as well. This is not the case. Why wouldn't the company clear the server of inactive accounts (I know Battle.net cleared mine 4 or 5 times)? Sure, but I don't really see that as the same thing, particularly given that Live and a MMORPG require subscriptions to cover the maintanence of the servers (I have no clue how STEAM works). And I have no problem with that kind of fee. My problem is player A buying something with access to content that is - to him - free for the life of the product, but player B who buys the game from player A now has to pay for that same content. This wouldn't apply to additional content bought by player A, profiles and subscriptions bought by player A, etc. In a WoW scenario, player A could uninstall the game and sell the discs to player B, but player B would still have to subscribe to play the game. Makes sense to me.

Because they're not selling a transferrable license. Most people will not utilize the servers 100%. If the game keeps getting transferred, that means much higher utilization of the servers in reality, something the publisher is not compensated for. Thus they have a right to charge extra for the transfers. I see what you're saying; I'm not actually sure it really means higher utilization of the servers though unless the companies are only looking at a very short shelf life for the game (ie not like Diablo 2 was with Battlenet) but its a valid enough point. There's no reason a publisher should be obligated to sell a transferrable license to their game. They could very well sell a single user license (as is commonly done with other software) and they'd be on solid legal and ethical ground. Hmmm...an interesting point, but I'd think it'd be impossible to enforce a Single-User License for console game as long as the games are on physical media (eventually they'll go to a totally digital distribution and much of this will be a moot point, I suspect). It'd also pretty much ensure that once a game was bought, if the player didn't like it they were stuck with it (using the game as a coaster) which has been my concern about this policy all along. I'll buy a lot less games in general if I have to live with them or toss them as my only options. As an example I buy a lot more console games than I do PC games because I've got no real recourse to unload PC games I don't like. Certainly the publishers can do what they want - just as Gamestop can as long as they have customers. But it doesn't mean I have to be happy about it (heck as I pointed out none of my consoles are connected online so at the moment this doesn't even effect me).

True, but as pointed out this seems to be a way to make double money off of one purchase. If it was a truly reflective market, the price point on games would have went down when they switched to CDs since the cost to produce cartridges was higher than CDs. Anyhow, incentives I don't mind. DLC, expansions etc. Sure no problem. Great stuff. If Player A buys a game and a DLC but only sells the game, sure player B who buys that used copy has to buy his own dang DLC.

Explain to me why nobody bothers to read when I write things like "Actually my real complaint has been that I don't think that this will stop to online, extra or additional content but taken to its (logical?) extreme which would make it impossible to sell a game used as no second hand user would be able to play the game since the second hand user didn't pay the publisher for it." That said, if player A has bought a game for which he would always be able to access the servers as long as he wanted to or as long as the publisher supported the game and then sells it to player B, as player A can no longer access the servers, what justification is there that player B should not be able to access those servers? The net use on the servers hasn't changed. The only justification is its a new revenue stream for the publishers. Yay for them. My worry - as pointed out above - is that this will not stick to limited, optional, and/or online server-based content.

And that may well be...but...so what? It seems to me that the "solution" the publishers want is to punish the retail stores (who carry their games) by passing on certain extra fees to the consumer. I'm not talking about DLC; DLC, expansions and the like are a different kettle of fish. What I'm talking about is the ability to access the online component of the game; EA has said that used buyers of their game can't access the online content unless they pay an additional fee. My misunderstanding was that the online content was a player-to-player connection, but I've been corrected in that this is actually a player-to-EA server. Now comes the murky bit; technically if person A buys a game for $50 and is given a redeemable code to access the games servers, in theory either part of the price of the $50 should cover their access to the online server or the company is offering the service free to the consumer with the understanding that the consumer will take advantage of it. When person A sells their game to Gamestop they are now no longer accessing the server. Person B comes along and buys the game from Gamestop used. The company now wants Person B to pay to access the servers; except Person A's purchasing price on that disc "covered" that access (ie if Person A kept the game he'd be able to access the online content as long as that service was available from the company). The argument is that player B didn't buy it new so didn't pay the company to cover the cost of the servers; however what it seems that the game companies are doing is, in essence, finding a way to get extra money out of a single purchase. So who loses in this scenario? Gamestop? The used-game buyer? Both? Actually my real complaint has been that I don't think that this will stop to online, extra or additional content but taken to its (logical?) extreme which would make it impossible to sell a game used as no second hand user would be able to play the game since the second hand user didn't pay the publisher for it. Not really avoiding it. I'm just not sure why Gamestop making a huge profit entitles the publisher to go down a path that could eventually shaft the consumer. I'm not entirely convinced that even the argument that online content has extra infrastructure costs makes it make sense either (see above). When the difference is $10 I always buy it new. Unless it something I really want and there's no new copies available, I usually only buy used when its below $20.

You can't have more used games than you sell new; If retail stores buy 30,000 copies of a game across the country, the most used games that could exist is 30,000 (ie every game sold and is now in the position to be bought back) Even in your example, the "other 8" they buy back/sell used had to have been bought previously somewhere (and thus the publisher was paid for them already). True, if there is only 30k copies across the US there can't be more than that, but you can resell that item via gamestop 20 times, compared to the publishers solitary sale. So one game could be owned by many people earning Gamestop (or other retailers) a huge amount of money compared to what they paid for it. Right, but the publisher has still been paid for the copies bought. It doesn't matter if the copy is in the hands of 20 different people (one at a time), the publisher has already been paid (when the retail store it was bought at ordered it from the publisher) and someone has already paid that retailer for that copy. I don't believe if the 20 people who bought it used did not have the option to buy it used it would magically become +20 orders from the retailer to the publisher for the item new. Sure it *might* lead to an increase in orders. It might not as well. The content wasn't free and now locked out. New copies sold of the game have a code bundled with you that purchasers can redeem to get the content. The entire process is the same as if you were buying the content, except instead of entering your credit card info, you're effectively clicking the "redeem code" button. It most definitely is an incentive for people to buy the game new. It is "Thank you for buying a copy of the game and directly supporting us. To show our gratitude we have granted you a key to enable you to acquire some paid downloadable content." Unless you're suggesting that the better idea, (and I suppose it'd be "fair") is for the publishers to just outright charge everyone for the content. I don't know why you'd want those that get new copies of the game to lose this incentive though simply because you don't think it's fair for used game buyers. My thought is that prior iterations of these games did not have the code system; that the code system was created as a way to cut out the used game market now. Also if you weren't being charged extra for it (ie if the cost of Madden XX without the code was the same as Madded XXI with the code), it was free. But again, I said that I could be mistaken (I personally don't pay attention to online content as I have no way to access it so I'm not sure what is the case; any clarity that can be offered is appreciated).

You can't have more used games than you sell new; If retail stores buy 30,000 copies of a game across the country, the most used games that could exist is 30,000 (ie every game sold and is now in the position to be bought back) Even in your example, the "other 8" they buy back/sell used had to have been bought previously somewhere (and thus the publisher was paid for them already).

I'm having flashbacks to 1982. (Obviously this is a horrible murder, but in looking for motives they should be examining the subject).