OnLive Costs
by Shals on July 20th, 2010I finally got around to checking out this OnLive, streaming games over the internet, and after looking at the prices I’m a little baffled. If you happen to have been accepted into the founding members program their service is free for a year then $4.95 a month afterwards. Sounds good huh? Being able to play games over the internet and it’s actually fast and graphics look just as good as if they were installed on your system.
The catch though is you have to rent or buy games. For example, Borderlands costs $30 for their full play pass which expires on June 17th 2013, 5 day rental is $9 and a 3 day rental is $6. Guess what? You can actually buy the game from Direct2Drive for $29.95 and keep it for as long as you want it. Is someone really going to pay $5+ a month only to have to buy a game which will expire 3 years later? 3 years is a long time but I just don’t get it.
Most gamers these days, not even just hardcore ones, have good enough systems to be able to play most if not all games on the market right now. So what is the point of this?
I guess it’s good for casual gamers whom only play on the weekend and usually don’t play the game again afterwards. You could do four 3 day rentals for $24 plus the monthly fee which would be cheaper than buying 4 games in a month.
Posted in Other Games | 4 Comments »Warhammer Online Newsletter – May 2010
by Shals on June 1st, 2010Well, I was going to give a brief summary of the newsletter then link to the actual one on their website but looking at their newsletter archive page the latest entry is from February 2010. So I guess I’ll try to copy and paste the newsletter email here! (Looks like it worked okay, aside from the images with background colors.)
Hello everyone,
Welcome to the first Producer’s Letter in a post-1.3.5 universe! I hope everyone is enjoying the version and the new city changes as much as we are. While you get your city on, I want to take a minute to thank all the players who came out and supported the Public Testing in the past month. We held 14 different public test events–from the exclusive guild closed tests to the stability test, to the European and North American open tests. At each test we had Mythic and GOA employees, participating, taking notes, and gathering feedback. And from that player feedback, we have put weeks of polish, tweaks, features, and fixes into the cities.
Posted in Warhammer | 2 Comments »OnLive: The Future of Video Games
by Shals on May 31st, 2010This came across on one of my RSS feeds, OnLive: The Future of Video Games. Right now they are having pre-registration which could get you a free year of service. I haven’t really read up on it yet, just skimmed over the review from AppStorm but I’m going to pre-register just to check it out (if I get a free year of service that is).
Posted in General, Other Games | 4 Comments »Anyone else tired of Sprint 4G commercials?
by Shals on May 28th, 2010Especially considering they only provide it in 11 states and 48 cities (based on this). They’ve been running commercials about them being the first 4G network over and over again for well over a year (and the first time I checked after seeing the commercials they only covered 7 cities, not really worth bragging about is it?). Of the 100k+ population cities in the country, there are 273 (according to wikipedia from 2000 census), means Sprint only covers 17.5%. So why are they advertising their 4G network so much when it probably covers less than 3% of the country.
Wonder what will happen when Verizon rolls out their 4G network and puts them to shame. Last I heard they are on schedule to cover cover almost 100 million customers upon release (to lazy to look up that source) by end of this year. I’m not sure about AT&T, their struggling to upgrade their 3G network to make it more reliable… just ask any iPhone user not in a major city, or google it. Plenty of info out there about that.
Some recent news I’ve read mentioned AT&T dropping price of the iPhone 3GS to $97 with 2 year contract extension and AT&T also increasing ETF (early termination fee) by almost double the previous value for iPhone customers. Apple releases new iPhone products in June but other past articles I’ve read rumored the contract with AT&T expires this November. So maybe we’re looking at the last exclusive iPhone for AT&T, and June 2011 we could see a Verizon iPhone… hmm, one can only hope.
Posted in General | 20 Comments »Dragon Age: Origins | Darkspawn Chronicles
by Shals on May 21st, 2010Just got an email announcing this, been awhile since I played the game. Was good from what I remember, but didn’t have the time to play it much and it got shelved. Maybe I’ll check it out again in the near future. Anyway, apparently they have an expansion for it and it sounds kind of interesting. Here’s the short description from their website:
You now fight as the Darkspawn! The city of Denerim, jewel of Ferelden, girds itself for war. As a hurlock vanguard, you alone hold the power to make thralls of your fellow darkspawn and drive them into the heat of battle. Heed the archdemon’s call Denerim must burn!
And here are some screenshots from their website:
