Value I Can Totally Refuse

weblog Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

 

An update to Xbox 360s everywhere has been pushed out today, which brings the thrilling ability to buy more hats for my teeny little Xbox person. Woah, you might say, that’s pretty exciting right there. And I say to you; hold your horses. This thing’s not over yet. We can now buy entire Xbox 360 games online! Not this pissy old Xbox stuff we used to get.

And of course, because these are games which have been out for years, and they don’t have to sell them to retailers, hold stock in stores, make cases for them, make books for them, or transport them anywhere, obviously they’re… more expensive. I haven’t seen value this good since Village Cinemas started charging me a dollar extra for doing my own ticket-booking online. Mass Effect, an excellent game which you can get for $89.98 on JB Hi-Fi Online right now, is $99.95 through Games on Demand. Phwoar.

I’m done being sarcastic now. Maybe I’m just out of practice, but I’m finding it quite difficult to maintain. Perhaps you can get nasal injections for that.

Anyhow, it turns out that the prices are much more reasonable if you’re not in Australia. Which of course makes sense; the tubes to Australia are much longer and clearly Microsoft’s Australian division will need extra money to suck the content all the way to us.

But I reckon they don’t need it, because as far as I can see, they’re sucking pretty good already. Ba doom tish. Oh yeah.

There are actually some good, if subtle changes, like better sorting in menus and a rating system for content which could get very handy. I feel I should point this out in the interests of balance. Also, some games are only $49.95 and much much better value. On reflection, it’s almost not worth writing about, but there hasn’t been anything posted here for over a month so I’m hardly going to go around slashing perfectly adequate paragraphs now.

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This entry was posted by the illustrious Tom Charman on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009. It concerns such pressing issues as , . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “Value I Can Totally Refuse”


  1. Andy
    August 12th, 2009 at 5:36 pm

    Ars Technica lists the US price for Mass Effect as $20 and they still think it is too expensive.


  2. Andy
    August 13th, 2009 at 9:20 pm

    They fixed the retarded system where you had to click on every achievement to read what it was for. Now they’re on one page.


  3. Tom Charman
    August 14th, 2009 at 12:13 am

    You could do that in some parts of the NXE already couldn’t you? Still, a worthwhile improvement.


  4. Andy
    August 15th, 2009 at 5:09 pm

    You could, just not while in a game.

    Bioshock is only $50. I’m not sure what Mass Effect so expensive.

    I like the summary screen in the NXE for all achievements, except for the fact that it counts DLC achievement points even if you haven’t bought the DLC for the game. It’s discounted some of my 100% games. (Not that I care about achievement points or things.)

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