Ardent Meridian… incoherent rambletastic techno-babble …

I had been successfully resisting the, latent, urge to buy a Nintendo DSi, since its original announcement.  After the latest E3 I found myself with a bad case of “must buy something”.  And so a DSi it was.

I bought mine at CostCo, mostly on account of me never wanting to give GameStop another penny, but also due to CostCo’s still unusually generous return policy.  As is typical from CostCo, it came in a value-added package – in this case with several “Power A” accessories.  More about those later.

You can read any number of reviews and comparisons of the DSi vs. the DS Lite on many popular gaming-centric sites, so I will not labor the differences here.  Suffice it to say that the DSi is 10% smaller, by volume, than the DS Lite, feels more solid, and while the controls feel stiff and “off” they do actually work better than those on the DS Lite.

Without saying anything else, if you have as DS Lite right now then save your money and stick with what you have.  There is simply no reason to upgrade today.  If, at some point, there are games available via the DSi store that you really want to play and that are not available for the DS Lite then, by all means, upgrade.  But there is nothing about the DSi that warrants the expenditure today.

Read the rest of this entry »

I wrote recently about the Ion "Drum Rocker" I had purchased, partially in response to a broken Rock Band drum pedal, and the excellent experience I had, and am having, with it.

However, as there are options to repair or replace the original pedal, and it was the "only" thing "wrong" with my original drums, I spent some time looking at those options with the intent of fixing the pedal, and giving the old drums to a friend.

That’s my broken pedal above, snapped clean off at the hinge.  A little research research pointed to two primary options for getting my broken Rock Band drum pedal fixed, and several more for a complete – and more expensive – replacement:

• The first was to go through the official warranty/repair process, which is probably the route most people would go.  However, assuming a simple swap of the broken pedal for a new one, this is just going to lead to the same problem occurring again somewhere down the road.
• The second was a third-party solution, either replacing or repairing the existing pedal.  The options I found for this looked like they would result in both a more solid and durable end-result, and a better looking one as well.

I opted to repair my existing pedal, partly because that option was slightly cheaper, and partly because the premium replacement pedals look like they might even be upgrades to the "Drum Rocker" pedal!

Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago a good friend of mine suggested I buy him some new drums for Rock Band for his birthday.  He’s a bit of a cheeky bleeda’, with some very strange ideas, but the drums he pointed out looked really cool.

As it happens, my own Rock Band drums just suffered a pedal-snap so those were in need of repair or replacement.

The drum kit in question is the Ion "Drum Rocker", and I was sufficiently intrigued by what I read on the product’s web site, and in various reviews, that I decided to buy a set for myself (for his birthday).

Anyone that has played with the standard Rock Band drums for any length of time is well aware of their pros and cons.  On the upside they are no-fuss, and are relatively affordable.  On the down side, the bass-drum pedal is prone to failure, typically snapping in half or at the hinge, there is very little room for adjustment (height only) and you need to whack them pretty solidly to ensure they register.

Oh yes, and they make an infernal racket when hit … so you’re very unlikely to actually hear the drum sounds from the game while you’re busy playing.  I might be exaggerating a little here, but not much.

You can, if you’re so inclined, purchase official Rock Band drum "silencers" (third-party options also exist).  These are, in my experience, easy to install, look good and are very effective in deadening the sound of the standard drums.  Sadly they are even more effective at deadening the responsiveness of the drums themselves, so they’re not something I can recommend.

The pedal issue is relatively easy to work around as well, either before or after it breaks, but I’ll write more about that when the upgrade/repair arrives and I give it a try on my current broken pedal.

Harmonix have announced new drums with Rock Band 2, which may improve things somewhat, but while the standard product is more than serviceable, and quite entertaining, the Ion "Drum Rocker" steps things up several notches.  You would expect it to offer more than the standard "instrument" of course, on the basis it is more than three times as expensive.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 …

Read the rest of this entry »

Pac-Man is an indisputably classic game, and one of my absolute favorite video games of all time.  From the perspective of classic retro-games, probably my all-time favorite.  It is certainly the one I’ve played the most.

Whether it was frantically pumping quarters (or 10P pieces from what was my part of the world back then) into the old coin-operated machines, or gladly buying it in some Namco "museum" collection or other for almost every console it has ever released on, I’ve probably spent more to play it than any other classic game as well.

For the first time since Pac-Man has appeared on consoles I am finding myself highly-resistant to buying it.  Not because I don’t want it … but because I don’t understand why a game that is $4.99 for the iPod Classic should cost $9.99 on the iPhone, when the game, control excepted, is the same.

Actually, I understand it just fine and technically it isn’t Pac-Man that has gone insane, it is Namco.  The two games are right there in the iTunes store, easily compared to each other – and beyond adding accelerometer control (highly questionable at best for a precision-control game like this, and definitely not something I feel is worth $5) it is the same game just ported!

It’s the same story for Ms. Pac-Man and Pole Position Remix.  A penny over double the price just because it is on the iPhone rather than the iPod?!  What’s the extra value here … other than to Namco’s shareholders that is?  It just seems schizophrenic and rather silly to me.  Especially when you consider how profitable Pac-Man has been for Namco over the years.

When the same game is available on the Xbox 360 for ~$5, and given the certification process and similar distribution fee for Xbox Live Arcade titles, and the addition of achievements and online leader-boards, $10 for the game on the iPhone just seems unnecessarily exploitative.

I find it very hard to believe, particularly in light of the consistent price feedback on the Application Store, that Namco wouldn’t make a lot more money by lowering the price and increasing their sales volume. 

There are copious examples of much smaller developers doing just this, much to the, quite vocal, delight of their new found customers.

But what is one to do?

Say "sod that", that’s what … if Namco does get a bleedin’ clue and those games do drop to $4.99 I’ll buy them on the iPhone in a heartbeat … but I am not paying double for the same thing as exists on other, more involved, platforms just because it is on the shiny new iPhone.