Geometry Wars, Uno for Vista!
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved has come a long way from its initial release as a minigame. Since, it’s been amped up into a fully developed Xbox 360 console game, and now it’s coming to Vista users everywhere. Apparently, both Geometry Wars and Uno appeared in Microsoft’s CES keynote video. So if you have a Vista, get ready for some cross-platform competition in these awesome games! Check out the video here.
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List of Virtual Console Games for Wii
Here is the complete list of Virtual Console games available on the Wii to date, courtesy of MeanMachinesMag. There are currently 40 games available, divided among 5 classic consoles. Check them out:
Nintendo NES
Baseball
Donkey Kong
Donkey Kong Jr
Gradius
Ice Hockey
Mario Bros
Pinball
Soccer
Solomon’s Key
Super Mario Bros
Tennis
The Legend of Zelda
Urban Champion
Wario’s Woods
NEC PC Engine / TURBO GRAFX
Alien Crush
Bomberman ‘93
Bonk’s Adventure
Dungeon Explorer
Military Madness
Moto Roader
R-Type
Soldier Blade
Super Star Soldier
Victory Run
SEGA MEGADRIVE
Altered Beast
Columns
Dr Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine
Ecco The Dolphin
Golden Axe
Gunstar Heroes
Ristar
Sonic the Hedgehog
Space Harrier II
Toe Jam & Earl
Nintendo SNES
Donkey Kong Country
F-Zero
Sim City
Street Fighter II: The World Warrior
Super Castlevania IV
Nintendo 64
Super Mario 64
Also, it’s important to note that all of the NES games cost 500 points, the NEC games are 600 points each, the Sega Megadrive and SNES games are 800 a piece, and the Nintendo 64 games are 1000 a pop. Also, it seems like the selection is pretty unbalance, with there being far more NEC games available than SNES or N64 games. When are we going to see some classics like Ocarina of Time, Chrono Trigger, or even Super Mario World?
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Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés
Project Apollo has had this list up for a while, but I’m mentioning it because it hasn’t had as much exposure as it should! The magnanimous list I’m referring to is none other than The Grand List Of Console Role Playing Game Clichés, which sports many laughter-inducing clichés for those familiar with console RPGs. Here are 12 of my favorites:
3. Thinking With The Wrong Head (Hiro Rule)
No matter what she’s accused of doing or how mysterious her origins are, the hero will always be ready to fight to the death for any girl he met three seconds ago.7. Some Call Me… Tim?
Good guys will only have first names, and bad guys will only have last names. Any bad guy who only has a first name will become a good guy at some point in the game. Good guys’ last names may be mentioned in the manual but they will never be referred to in the story.10. Luddite Rule (or, George Lucas Rule)
Speaking of which, technology is inherently evil and is the exclusive province of the Bad Guys. They’re the ones with the robots, factories, cyberpunk megalopolises and floating battle stations, while the Good Guys live in small villages in peaceful harmony with nature. (Although somehow your guns and/or heavily armed airships are exempted from this.)24. Capitalism Is A Harsh Mistress
Once you sell something to a shopkeeper, he instantly sells it to somebody else and you will never see the item again no matter what.27. Nostradamus Rule
All legends are 100% accurate. All rumors are entirely factual. All prophecies will come true, and not just someday but almost immediately.76. Magical Inequality Theorem
In the course of your travels you may find useful-sounding spells such as Petrify, Silence, and Instant Death. However, you will end up never using these spells in combat because a) all ordinary enemies can be killed with a few normal attacks, making fancy attacks unneccessary, b) all bosses and other stronger-than-average monsters are immune to those effects so there’s no point in using them for long fights where they’d actually come in handy, and c) the spells usually don’t work anyway.77. Magical Inequality Corollary
When the enemy uses Petrify, Silence, Instant Death, et cetera spells on you, they will be effective 100% of the time.87. Supply and Demand Axiom
Killing a powerful enemy will usually yield an item or weapon that would’ve been extremely useful if you had gotten it before killing that enemy.115. Law of Scientific Gratification
If the hero needs a new invention to progress, he will find out that somewhere in the world someone has spent his or her entire life perfecting this invention, and usually just needs one more key item located in a monster-infested dungeon before it is completed.143. Falling Rule
An RPG character can fall any distance onto anything without suffering anything worse than brief unconsciousness. In fact, falling a huge distance is an excellent cure for otherwise fatal wounds — anyone who you see shot, stabbed, or mangled and then tossed off a cliff is guaranteed to return later in the game with barely a scratch.172. Golden Chocobo Principle
There will be at least one supremely ultimate improvement for your weapon or some way to make your trusted steed capable of going anywhere and doing anything, requiring hours and hours of hard work to acquire. Once you do achieve this, you will use it once, and it will be completely useless for the rest of the game.173. Golden Chocobo Corollary
The magic formula for acquiring this supreme upgrade will be only vaguely alluded to in the game itself. Ideally, you’re supposed to shell out $19.95 for the strategy guide instead.
Be sure to check out the complete list of 192 hilarious console RPG clichés at Project Apollo.
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A Second Take on Second Life’s Economic Situation
Tristan Louis, an application development VP for HSBC, recently made public his economic analysis of the pertinent numbers available on Second Life’s website. For those of you who don’t know, Second Life is the highly controversial MMO 3D digital world in which paying subscribers interact in ways analagous to real life. The only things truly connecting it to reality are a) subscription fees for high-tier membership plans, and b) its in-game economy, which can be exchanged for real money. Like all real currencies, the exchange rate from “Linden Dollars,” as the currency is called, to USD fluxuates.
But back to Louis’ economic survey of Second Life. By dissecting the pecuniary affairs and the raw number of users who’ve subscribed since last August, Louis arrived at a conclusion that affords us a new perspective on Second Life:
On average, the number of logins over a 60 day period seems to be about 35 to 40 percent of the total population reported. The people who log in, however, seem to spend a fair amount of money ($50-60 a week) within the Second Life economy.
GigaGamez accentuates the highlights of Louis’ findings concisely:
If accurate, this would mean that some 200,000-230,000 active Second Life users are on average currently spending more on their in-world experience than any existing online world by far. (For comparison, a World of Warcraft subscription is but $15 a month, and that’s money paid to the Blizzard/Vivendi, not user-to-user.)
To summarize Tristan Louis’ conclusions, Second Life is relatively sparse according to its amount of active users, but absolutely economically lively based on the average amount of cash trading an active user’s hands. Furthermore, even though Second Life doesn’t have an enormeous amount of active users, Louis predicts that that’s all going to change:
[I]t looks that, under the most conservative growth rate, we will see 3.5 million users registered and over 600,000 using the service by the end of April 2007. Under a liberal interpretation of the data, those numbers would shift to 9.6 million and just under 7 million. However, in the most likely case, it is probable that there will be 7.2 million users registered with 1.6 million logging in over the previous sixty days. Not too shabby.
“Not too shabby,” Tristan Louis concludes, but he also advises his readers “to go with the most conservative estimate because [his] data set is still relatively small. Even then, this type of growth mirrors some of the growth patterns we’ve seen in the early days of the commercial web and seem to support the contention that LindenLab is going to be a very strong player in the future.”
In response to Tristan Louis’ analysis of Second Life’s economic situation, Tateru Nino analyzed his analysis, ultimately judging that although many of the user-to-user transactions aren’t meaningful, there is still significant economic activity:
The way money moves in Second Life with tip jars and alternate accounts and refunds means that probably about half of the value given is double-counted. That would leave us with roughly 75% that we could count on, but let’s go the highly conservative route and say a mere 40% of that figure represents actual meaningful transactions, where there’s a net change in the distribution of funds that is in line with the stated figure. Averaging out Tristan’s weekly samples for December 2006, and then applying our own conservative 40% figure to it, we get a daily movement of L$ equal to $269,848 USD.
You can read Tristan Louis’ analysis of Second Life here, and Tateru Nino’s response here.
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SimCity DS Screenshots!
Sometime next month in Japan, SimCity for the DS will be released! However, there is no listed release date for the American version, which is a little dissappointing. Even if all they told us was that they would begin development on such-and-such a date, or were ever planning it in the future, I would be content. Let’s hope this one isn’t just a Japan-exclusive for the Nintendo DS. Check out the exquisite screens below:
