Ardent Meridian

I have been writing code, in one form or another, for over 30 years.  I’ve built games at a hobby level, business and entertainment software at a commercial/shrink-wrapped level, and had my hand in projects that have, individually, touched almost half a billion people.

In short, I know my craft.

During that time, across the many and varied projects I have been involved in, I have worked with a wide variety of extremely smart and talented developers, some incredibly talented graphic artists and animators, and several musicians whose creations can literally move the soul.

These people have talent, dedication, skill and creativity – not to mention more ideas for things they want to try or tackle than they will ever have time for in their life-times.

During my time in the software world, there is another class of person I have come across repeatedly.  Some of them consider themselves “designers”, others just say they are “ideas people”.  But one thing they have all had in common is a near total absence of any actual skill or ability at all.

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Technologists and, I expect, most geeks in general, cannot have escaped the recent rumblings in the European Union’s anti-trust proceedings around Microsoft and the “bundling” of Internet Explorer with Windows.

There has been plenty of discussion about forcing Microsoft to remove Internet Explorer from Windows entirely for Windows 7.

How this is good for consumers, the protection of which is the point of anti-trust law, is only indirectly derivative from the effects of the corporate protectionism that the EU actually seems to be biased towards.

Browsers today are free.

Prior to Internet Explorer being part of Windows, using a browser either required some relatively arcane knowledge and tinkering to acquire and get working (definitely beyond the abilities of the typical user) or it came in $40 boxes with the “Netscape Navigator” logo on them.

As a consumer, how is $40 better than free?  Lack of choice?  Certainly not!  There are more choices in truly capable web-browsing software today than ever before.

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What an absolute cluster-fuck.

Re-subscribing to ZunePass has been a epic mistake.  Well, okay, a $15 mistake.  Not really epic considering I drive an Aston Martin, which drinks gas to the tune of $0.50/mile at full chat, but still, $15 simply pissed away.

I really enjoyed my 1.0 Zune device on the original Zune software.  It was only my desire not to carry more than one device on a daily basis, combined with no 64-bit support, that stopped me using it.  Well … that and the fact that every other piece of music I wanted was either simply absent from the Zune marketplace entirely, or was for purchase only (and excluded from access via the subscription plan).

Sorry, but hardware wise the Zune is a poor alternative to any incarnation of the iPod, and especially when stacked against the iPhone.

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After missing having access to a subscription music service, I decided to re-subscribe to the Zune service with a ZunePass and start using my original 30GB Zune device.  I actually quite liked the service (though I have never been a fan of the hardware), but I was driven away by the lack of support for 64-bit Vista.

The x64 build of Zune 3.0 installed seemingly without incident.  Initial configuration and re-activation of my ZunePass subscription was smooth and simple, even if it flipping you over to Internet Explorer for any account management operation is rather silly and disjointed.

The Zune 3.0 software is generally slick and fast in local operation.  At least as long as it is not talking to the Zune servers.  Getting it to display a simple list of the top 100 rock tracks took over a minute.  Other, similar, operations were also unfathomably slow.  iTunes on Windows gets a, deservedly, bad rap for being slow, but it moves like a whippet with a bum full of dynamite compared to browsing the Zune marketplace.

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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.