Sunday, April 25, 2010

On the subject of men in their underwear...

I picked up a used Game Boy Advance recently, which, as it turns out, was perhaps not the smartest financial decision I've ever made, because, as it also turns out, some time in the winter, under the belief that I'd never actually get around to picking up a used Game Boy Advance, I went ahead and gave away all my old GBA games, so for most of the week, the only thing I've had to play on it was that Breakout, Centipede and Warlords cart, and a copy of Final Fantasy V Advance that I'm saving for later.

(... hey, ever notice how you just about always see FF games named with fancy roman numerals in their titles? What the deal? Is the franchise too good for regular numbers? Did Dynasty Warriors use them all up?)

So, long story short, I've had to go on another shopping spree in order to pick up some more games just so that the money I spent on the damn thing might be slightly less of a complete waste. The truly funny part is that all this comes on the heels of having a serious discussion about the dangers of getting into game collecting. Yeah, let's just say that saving money was a very expensive activity that week.

Friday, April 2, 2010

Let's Muscle

Digital distribution is the future of Kusoge; if not the present.

For a while there, it was the minigame collection, which consistently delivered on the promise of giving you a whole bunch of mid to low quality games in a single package, but there was still the whole thing about manufacturing and shipping physical copies.

Now, I'm not an economist, but I saw one on TV, so let's take a moment here to talk shop. Video games cost money to make, physical commodities cost money to produce and distribute, and of course, liquor and prostitutes cost money to procure. Now, the cost of developing a video game depends on the amount of man hours (time X size of staff) spent on it. The bigger a game is, the more time is needed to finish everything; the better a game is, the more time is needed to make sure everything works properly.

Now, this being a kusoge discussion, let's go ahead and throw quality out the window. The game need only not crash or have crippling bugs in it to be considered complete, so the cost of your game scales up entirely based on how big it is, so the further you scale back on this, the cheaper it is to fart your game out onto the world... hence the minigame collection.