Silently Gone

The good ole days of demo discs

Crazy things that only happen in this digital age - digital copy of demos selling at a high price.

Yes the PT debacle. 

Now I'm not going to talk about my disdain for the project but I figure the news of PS4 containing a digital copy of the demo warrants a mention. After this game was announced to be cancelled, sellers started putting their ps4 with the demo up for sale on eBay for absurd prices. 

The thing about digital files is that it multiplies each time it's copied or in this case, downloaded. That's part of the appeal for publishers to go digital, they don't have to deal with the hassle of estimating how much to print. The more they print the more cost they incur. Instead just put the digital file online and the demand will determine the distribution flow with no additional cost.

So the PT demo was available was quite a while as I remembered a certain penny-pincher talking about it more than six months ago. Its distribution easily exceeded several millions if we just estimated a percentage of the 20 million plus ps4 users downloaded it.Now it's no longer available and unless someone reserve-engineer the ps4 hardware to copy the demo, you are not likely to get it anymore. But at the end of the day, it's still just a digital file made up of nothing tangible and distributed over a million times before. Who in the right mind would pay so much for a demo of a cancelled game?

A few years ago, EA sports also cancelled their NBA Elite (a re-branding of sorts of their long running NBA Live series) game shortly before release. A demo of that game was available on PSN before the game was cancelled. The removed demo never amount to anything of value but I read that retail copies of the finished game surfaced briefly before being pulled from the stores. Now those retail copies are serious collector items which I can understand but not this digital age nonsense.

Jumping The Gun

I have a set of 5 figures but I keep coming back to these two

What's the first button you instinctively reach for when you want the character to jump?

It's usually the lowest button on the controller regardless of what system or generation, that's how buttons are normally mapped to by default. You don't go against the system especially if it's a technical action game like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta.

The first Devil May Cry game mapped the jump action to the Triangle button. That's right, it's on the highest button on the gamepad for reasons I failed to understand. The buttons also cannot be re-configured so you are basically stuck with unlearning what you learnt through years of playing these games.

Thankfully as I tend to have multiple copies of these games, I discovered that the Japanese version of Devil May Cry doesn't have this type of insane button mapping. Jump is actually mapped to the X button like how it usually is. For once, owning multiple copies of the same game actually paid off and I can put this import copy to use despite have to start all over. Or if you are not the nostalgic type, you can always pick up the HD collection as it's seems they have fixed this problem on the HD reissue.

This anniversary re-issue is actually pretty sweet, it comes with a bonus soundtrack disc and a nice new cover art. When I first bought it, I even got a bonus DVD of the wesker report and trailers for other Capcom games. Those were good times, too bad it never lasts as with all good thing.

The Crossroads

As a consumer, cross generation games have really put me in a dilemma.

On one hand, I don't want buy a new hardware to play games that I can also play on my old system.

On the other, I don't want buy an inferior version (last gen) of a game that I know will undoubtedly look better on newer consoles.

Yes the old master race. Yet I find myself buying PS3 games lately that contradicts myself. Partly some are for collection purposes which I will gladly buy the PS4 version as well. But mostly it's also because the price drop is sufficient to the point where I think it's justifiable for a last gen version. 

You see I could never understand why the pricing of cross-generation games are roughly about the same. There is no logic to that, yes it's the same product but not exactly the same quality (in terms of aesthetic not the actual quality). If the pricing was adjusted to reflected that maybe it would make things easier. Then again, nobody will upgrade their hardware if games cost less and are still available on old consoles. 

I also realised the game itself is more important winning the master race. RE4 on the Playstation 2 was a pretty inferior port but it didn't diminished the greatness of that game. Everyone had good memories of it despite the fact that the inferior port was probably the most played version. 

In the end a great game will undoubtedly a great game, everything else is just superficial. 

Unless we are talking about RE4 Iphone edition or Dead Rising Wii.