Useless game tie-ins, part I

So there is this soda out now (you may have heard of it) called Mountain Dew. Apparently, it's very popular among the young folks. So is World of Warcraft. Hey, marketing people got a brilliant idea:



And why not. They did it with Halo 3:



Because gamers like to stay up all night, incredibly caffinated, playing Halo 3 and WoW. It's true. This collaboration makes sense.

But how about this one:



Apparently, since most gamers are hairy man-beasts, they have a different skin type than people who actually go outside and see the sun occasionally. It's hard to see this connection.

But it gets better:

http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/View.php?view=GameMuseum.Detail&id=40

Gunstar Heroes on the Genesis came packaged with a Fruit Roll-Up. Wonder if there are still sealed copies sitting around somewhere, waiting for a hungry gamer to break the seal and eat the hard sugary treat from decades past before partaking in one of the finest shooters of the generation?

There might even be weirder tie-ins, but it's going to be hard to top a Fruit Roll-Up. Just have to wait and see!

Collect 'em all!

"Collector's Editions" of games have become more and more prevalent within the last couple of years. Is it just a way to squeeze another ten, twenty, or sixty bucks out of consumers, or are gamers actually getting a deal? If you keep the game shrinkwrapped, then yes, it will eventually be worth more money than the mas-produced standard edition. But if you open it, you will find... what? A bobblehead? A "Making of" DVD? A Master Chief helmet that will fit your cat? Fable II's Limited Edition included a "Making of Fable II" DVD and a few extra in-game items. For ten extra bucks. Couldn't these things just be downloaded? Sell them on XBL Marketplace for $5, and eliminate the need to promote and package two different versions of the same product. Oh, and the LE Fable 2's were originally supposed to include a miniature Hobbe figurine and some fate cards that should have been pretty cool... but if you preordered it on GameStop you got this message a few weeks before the shipping date:

Dear Valued Customer,

We are writing in regards to your Fable II Collector's Edition preorder. Microsoft has recently informed us that due to supply chain issues, the contents of the Collector's Edition have been revised. As a result, the price has been lowered from $79.99 to $69.99.

The original advertised contents: premium box, five printed fate cards and Hobbe figure will NOT be included as part of the Collector's Edition. It will now include:

*Fable II game disc
*Bonus DVD with new "Making-Of" Feature
*Bonus in-game content (requires Xbox LIVE)
- "The Hall of the Dead" Dungeon
- "The Wreckager" Legendary Cutlass Weapon
- Spartan armor and energy sword

To show their commitment to you the faithful fan, a special Fable album has been created for free download for a limited time. This includes a wonderful selection of music from the original Fable game and three brand new tracks from the upcoming Fable II soundtrack.


Weaksauce. Another ten bucks for some wimpy DLC that would sell for five on Oblivion.

Don't get me wrong, I love when companies go all-out with fan service. Working Designs' Lunar and Arc the Lad collections were behemoths with beautiful instruction manuals, cardboard standups, jewelry, soundtracks, the works. And their games were usually only about $10 more than the standard MSRP's of other games at the time too. Then they went out of business. Sad story. Today, you'd be hard-pressed to find a sealed copy of Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete for the PS1 for less than $150 (except this one signed edition on Amazon for $145... how cool would that be?).

Since Working Designs has gone belly up, limited/collector's editions of games have been less and less impressive and have offered nowhere near the quantity and quality they offered. Yes, there are a few rare exceptions (here, here, here, and here), but they are big-budget games from companies with deep pockets, not little companies that love their fans.

And then there are the movie-style limited editions, like when a new DVD comes out for $25 at Wal-Mart because it has special features. Special features don't make a DVD "limited" or "collectible." They make it a DVD. Certain things are expected out of the format; it's not a VHS tape. Despite the fact that I never watch the making of documentaries on movies, if they're not on my disc, I feel cheated. Weird that we can expect so much more out of something that comes in the same-sized box.

Do games NEED multiplayer?

If you want to be able to play one game and one game only for the next year of two of your life, then yes, multiplayer is a necessity. Sure, there are single-person experiences that seem limitless (Spore, The Sims, Tetris) but eventually you need something more. Why do you think the Sims have had expansion after expansion after expansion? In today's A.D.D. world of YouTube and an MTV that has lost it's "M," people need constant, updated stimulation. Online multiplayer is one easy way to accomplish this.

Call of Duty 4, Halo 3, and Call of Duty: World at War - the top three online games on 360. They will remain this way for the forseeable future. CoD 4's single player was great - the scripted action was intense, the characters were believable, and the sense of immersion in the battles was unparalleled. Yet, there is no reason to play it more than once. The experience will always be the same, no matter the difficulty level you select. But online, you can meet new people, and shoot new people. The experience will never be scripted; the experience will never be the same. Online multiplayer has helped WoW become a pop culture phenomenon, and one that's doesn't show any sign of letting up. A game can be fun, but without online multiplayer, there is no reason to keep getting better and better indefinitely. If you invested 200 hours into Final Fantasy XII to get yourself the sweetest, toughest party in RPG history, who will know? Who will care? I sunk 120 hours into Oblivion, and now it just sits on the shelf, collecting dust. At least I got all 1,250 achievement points!

A distant cousin to online multiplayer is the increasing availability of online leaderboards. Rock Band, Mirror's Edge, Mega Man 9, N+, basically every other XBLA game... by getting people to compete with each other to shave half a second off a speed run, single player games are given incredible long term vitality. Mega Man 9 came out months ago, and people are still competing for the top spot on the leaderboards. How many full-budget games can make that claim? Not as many as would like to, that's for sure.

Go. Outside.

Halo 3 just broke the record for most wasted time. There have been over 1 billion online matches, equal to 64,000 years of life wasted online. Say a person today lives 100 years (not too hard to imagine, considering the rate science is progressing). That would be the entire lifetimes of 640 people. That's about six times the size of my graduating class. That's a lot of time that could have been spent better. Still, most of my graduating class is wasting their lives anyway (including me), so who am I to judge? Oh wait, I remember... I'm on the Internet. Judging is what we do here!