Poor Americans and Pixel Racism

Jesus christ I have a rant today, I've been baking this one all evening. It just exploded when I read this Gamespot article about the new Megaman game, Megaman 9.

First of all, you have to understand that Megaman 9 is released next week on XBox Live Arcade, PS3's online system and WiiWare. You also have to understand that it looks like this: Megaman 9 Trailer. Yeys, just like the Megaman games of old back on the NES. This is good, in fact it's very good. If you don't agree, then UR GAY. We're keeping things civil this evening.


So back to the Gamespot article. Read it if you want, it's all nice and lovely, but it's the comments that we're going to rage about today. We both know it's bad form to actually take any comments seriously these days, but amid the raw spasticity I've noticed a certain point that keeps regurgitating everywhere. You may have seen it too.


It's basically Americans whining about things being too expensive, that's the gist of it.

I mean look at the comment that says: "$10 for a NES game??? PASS!"

WOAH THERE, SUNSHINE.

I don't care that people might mistake it for a NES game; after all, it's based on the old NES MM games, and there's even an option in the menu to enable the NES' classic glitchy weirdness that occured on some games. Now that's authenticity. That could be a genuine mistake, so that's fine, no problem.

But you're whining because it'll cost you $10? (£5-6)

You can always spot Americans online, because they'll be outraged that a game they've waited forever to play costs something $50, which comes to about £25. Let me tell you something, guys. In the UK, new XBox 360 games begin at about £50. More often now, I'm seeing £55 on certain titles. That's $100-110 to the Americans.

If you asked any of them to pay $100 for a game, they'd probably mutate and violently latch onto your face; they whine and bitch when a game costs half that price.

Now I do understand that there's the whole tax issue in America, so you never actually pay what they say it costs, but hey, we have tax in this country as well, it's just done differently. It's just frustrating to see people make a huge fuss over something that we have much, much worse.

But hey, sucks to be in the UK. Oh well, nevermind, that's life.

BUT WAIT.

There's something a little more intricate that annoys me even more, and this especially is popping up on loads of websites. It's similar to what I mentioned above. It's this weird mindset that certain games should be cheaper than other games, simply because of what they are. I do actually agree with this to some extent, but trust the internet to get it wrong yet again. I shall explain.


A huge, all-singing all-dancing game like Grand Theft Auto IV probably should cost the full price for a game, so £50 for us (Or like 20p in America), because it's just so BIG, I suppose.

A much more simple game, like a puzzle game similar to Tetris I think should be priced a bit differently. I'm not sure you can justify asking the same price for such a game. OR MAYBE YOU CAN, I don't know. I can never accurately portray a one-sided argument in these blog posts.

Consider Nintendo DS games. They're priced at £30-40 new, which is on-par with most PC and console games. Somehow, when Fallout 3 rolls out next month, I would find it a bit wierd to pay the same price for it as I would for "Bratz Ponyz", when one is just ... more than the other.


And I must pause here because holy crap, the tagline for that Bratz game is "Ponyz with a passion for fashion". What?! What kind of world are we living in?! That's something else I need to write about: the crap they're showing on kids' TV these days, because if I don't write this somewhere I swear to god my head will just suddenly burst. Have you seen that puppet tellytubby thing on the BBC? It has this freakish, dead face and a weird zimmer frame-scooter hybrid, and it just plods around in a made-up forest, picking up rocks over and over, while this really calm voiceover just goes "It's a rock." "It's a rock." It's freaking terrifying.


But about game prices, I feel games should be priced on their size, or how much gameage you actually get from it. It's just so weird that a game you can finish in an hour or two costs the same as one that may take you months of your life. It seems wrong, in fact, to me.

Unfortunately I don't think it's possible to just drop game prices, because as we've learned, developers get next to nothing anyway. The publishers would obviously want to push the prices as hard as they can, and so nothing can really change. I just hope that in this new internet generation, where downloading games becomes the norm, prices will reflect the quality of the game you're buying, rather than the whole thing being a kind of "lucky dip" to see if you've wasted your money on something crap.

Which leads me to the second point that annoys me: people who discriminate purely based on graphics! Just because a new game is 8 bit and looks like it's from the NES era doesn't mean it should be dirt cheap; it still has solid gameplay, and will probably entertain people as much, if not more than the sort of stuff you can get nowadays at full price. It's just the amount of comments I see which are like "You can see the pixels! Why would I pay $40 for this game?!?!".

I don't know if it's just me, but I don't pay for the graphics when I buy a game. I pay for the GOOD TIMES, because all games are ultimately pointless. It's just that some, a select few, can inspire, encourage, make you think differently about things, and give you quite a good dose of FUN. If it does any of that, then it's worth the money in my opinion. I don't care if it's the most beautiful photorealistic 3D world, or just squares moving around on a black background. It makes no difference.

And these days, I think I'd prefer the latter more.