Ardent Meridian

A long time ago, way back in the distant annals of history (otherwise known as late-2002), I bought a rather entertaining Xbox game called "Steel Battalion".  This was a first-person Mech game with two rather interesting differentiators:

• It cost $200 – the same price as the console it ran on.
• It came with an enormous, and insanely cool, controller.

The controller in question was a glorious three-console plus foot pedal monstrosity, solidly built and quite the thing of beauty (if you like that sort of thing).  The image doesn’t nearly give the true scale of the thing.

In addition to being unique and having a certain amount of bizarre geek-status, the other interesting aspect to owning this game was its tendency to cause everyone you knew to question your sanity.

"$200 for one game!?", was the typical first response.  Okay, actually "WTF" was often the first response, but the first response not comprised solely of consonants was the "$200?!" one, but I digress.

I suppose, at a time when the Xbox console itself was only the same price as the game, it might have seemed a little odd.  But in terms of people questioning the sanity or value of the thing … well that’s a little bit different …

So what does one make of this?  Console games at the time were typically $50, so $200 does seem a bit out of the ordinary if you think of it as "just" a game.  Even taking into account the controller which, at the time, was only usable with the one game (and later a sequel), on face value it probably seemed poor value.

To my mind, however, that really comes down to how you factor the value of entertainment  And, way back then, when I stopped to consider that question, there was an obvious and simple formula:

    Cost / Hours Played = Cost Per Hour

You can quibble about the level of entertainment provided by any given activity.  Jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft with a large silk handkerchief strapped to your back obviously registers higher on the "entertainment" scale than, say, playing a couple of levels of Tetris.  But at some level an entertainment is either worth spending the time on or it isn’t.

So, if we assume that we do not bother with things that aren’t worth spending time with at all, at any price, we have a minimal baseline for comparing the relative value of different games and, indeed, different forms of entertainment in general.

What people find entertaining is, of course, highly subjective.  Something you might enjoy I may not be able to tolerate and might not even be willing to do for money.  So this is no absolute standard of measure – it only works in the context of the person making the evaluation.

Even so, with this simple formula in place it becomes fairly easy to compare different games in terms of their value, as opposed to just their price.

Take the afore-mentioned "Steel Battalion" for example.  I played that, in total, for at least 100 hours, probably nearly double that, but we’ll stick with 100 hours for this.  Following our simple formula, that puts it at $2/hour.

That seems pretty reasonable, particularly if you compare it to, say, a movie at the theatre where you’re looking at about $10 for a roughly 2 hour film or about $5 an hour.  True, you can increase the entertainment value of that $10 somewhat; in this case by loudly threatening to violently disembowel the little bastards kicking your seat from behind but, on the whole, its still about $5 an hour.

A DVD or Blu-Ray movie probably stacks up a bit better … a single viewing coming in at closer to $10 or $15 an hour, respectively, but most people buy such things to watch multiple times.

The $10 I paid for a DVD version of "The Princess Bride" (personal top-five film right there) has proven to be fantastic value.  Even at a conservative estimate of 30 viewings,that’s about 50 hours of entertainment, or about $0.20 per entertainment hour.  That’s pretty hard to beat.

Games wise, there are some interesting stand-out titles:

• Gran Turismo 3 (PlayStation 2) – I’ve easily put 150 hours into this, for which I paid $40, so that works out at about $0.27/hour.  Excellent value by any measure.
• Gears of War (Xbox 360) – This took me about 8 hours to play through solo on "Hardcore".  And then I played it through again, solo, on "Insane" difficulty, stopping to collect Cog-Tags on the way, which took about 10 hours.  That was followed by a further 7 hours or so playing it through on "Insane" in co-op mode.  I didn’t play much multi-player on this one, maybe 5 hours total, but that still puts it at 30 hours time played, on a $60 purchase, or about $2/hour.  Very good indeed.
• Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance (Xbox) – I want to say, all in all, this was 15 hours from start to finish.  I know I spent more time watching talking heads and otherwise incomprehensible full-motion-video cut-scenes than actually controlling anything.  So best case this was a $4/hour game (not bad).  In reality though, I think there was only about 6 hours actual play time in it, which knocks it down to $10/hour … and now we’re in the realm of watch-it-once-why-did-I-buy-it DVD purchases.
• Geometry Wars Evolved (Xbox 360) – Hard to believe this was a $5 game, when I’ve put an easy 50 hours into it (and am still not much better than when I started!).  This rings up at about $0.10 an hour, which is spectacular value.

Those are just a small handful of titles that had interesting value ratings.  I tend to consider anything below $5 an hour good value.  By $1 an hour you’re into the "excellent" arena, and anything below that is just very hard to ignore.  Some of the old Atari 8-bit games would rank in the low-pennies-per/hour.

Metal Gear Solid 2 is a special-case stand-out in that list for me.  So much so that it guaranteed I would never play another Metal Gear game again.  Ever.  The game play itself was quite entertaining – there just wasn’t enough of it to justify sitting through all the awful dialogue and mind-numbingly convoluted and dull cut-scenes.  Friends rave about Metal Gear Solid 4 to me, and yet everything I’ve read suggests it is just more of the same … and I buy games to play them not watch them.

Getting back on track …

Some things justify much higher per-hour prices; however, for electronic entertainment, namely games and movies, even music (at $1/track a typical song winds up at pennies/hour), this is a useful yardstick for me.

A few other interesting titles from this perspective, all of which I think are excellent games and would not hesitate to purchase and play through again, are:

There are hundreds, of other games I could include here.  I may, in fact, update that list over time, but as it stands there are some fond old and recent memories there.

I find it interesting that the older "classic" so-called "retro-games" exhibit, generally, much better value than the newer multi-million dollar block-buster/triple-A titles.  That’s probably a personal thing.

No matter how you slice it though, the $200 custom-controller games have, so far, in my experience, all stacked up to be more than "good" value for money, and certainly much better than many of their more typical contemporaries.

I’d be most interested in what other people’s experiences are when considering entertainment value on this premise, even if there are many other ways to look at this particular issue.

As for "Steel Battalion"?  Absolutely one of the most immersive, polished, and out-right fun games it has ever been my pleasure to experience.  An absolute bargain at $2/hour.  I maintain an original Xbox in my game room specifically so I can dabble with it as the mood strikes me.

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