$60 a Month: Episode II
This edition of $60 a Month shows how a semi-impulse purchase can have a big impact and finds me questioning the value of Gameznflix in light of some recent shennanigans. Also, the big AAA title this month was meant to be a long-lasting addition to the library, but I’m already considering trading it away. Read on to find out why.
- Zuma
Platform: Xbox Live Arcade
Method: Microsoft Points Transaction
Cost: 400 Points, $5.00
I bought this game when it went on half-off sale over Labor Day weekend. I played this game for months a couple of years ago, beat it several times and finally had to tear myself away. It’s not quite as good on XBLA because the controller is inherently less precise than the mouse, but they compensate for it by leaving the aimer on all the time. This changes the game because it makes one of the powerups literally pointless, but it at least creates a tolerable experience. It’s not great but for five bucks I can’t complain. - Battlestations: Midway
Platform: Xbox 360
Method: Gameznflix Rental
Cost: $3.19
In theory this is a good game: Tactical navy combat set in the WWII Pacific theater, a very under-represented aspect of WWII in video games. Unfortunately the game is just a big dull dud. The training missions are unforgivably boring and don’t allow you to skip over the rambling exposition before putting you in control. Plus there are a lot of training missions with fairly long load times in between so by the time I got to the actual game I was already a little annoyed. Then it turns out the game just isn’t all that fun. There is a lame story in the single player campaign that doesn’t really fit the vibe of the game and it turns out it’s almost more fun to play around in the 2D map than it is to actually control the ships and planes. Plus the graphics are PS2 level at best and the voice acting is lazy and…. do I really need to go on? I sent it back after two days. - Enchanted Arms
Platform: Xbox 360
Method: Goozex
Cost: Trade
I rented this one from Gameznflix back in July and kept meaning to pick away at it but it just got lost in the shuffle. Since it was just plugging up a slot on Gameznflix and I liked it enough to finish it, I decided to snare it from Goozex so I could complete it at my leisure. I figure that’s kind of what Gameznflix or any rental really is good for. It cost 700 Goozex points which is kind of a lot but it’s a long game so I think it’s mostly worth it. It’s probably better than paying the $25 or $30 it would cost me at GameStop. - Saint’s Row
Platform: Xbox 360
Method: Goozex
Cost: Trade
I rented this one from GameFly earlier this year and thought it was a decent GTA clone. I sent it back because I was concerned with the length of the game from a rental standpoint and I thought at the time that GTA IV was imminent. Now that Rockstar’s game has been pushed back I don’t mind sandboxing it clone-style for a while but I still don’t think this type of game, once you’ve decided you can get into it, works out to be a wise rental. Perhaps it’s the minor improvements over the basic, familiar (a nice way of saying “rip off”) gameplay from GTA, maybe I just like popping virtual caps in fools, but I really enjoy this game. I’m glad I picked it up. - Ninja Gaiden Black
Platform: Xbox
Method: Goozex
Cost: Trade
I rented this back on the original Xbox and thought it was just too obtuse to bother with. After all the talk of Ninja Gaiden Sigma and the brilliance that this game offers, I figured a second chance wouldn’t be the worst thing. So I nabbed it as part of my BioShock trade-in and almost instantly recalled that, yep, it’s really hard. Black has an easier mode that the original I rented lacked, so I may resort to that eventually. For the time being I’ll hang onto this one and keep working at the default difficulty. I’m not sorry I got it, I’m just sorry I’m not better at it. It really is a beautiful game to watch. - Nintey-Nine Nights
Platform: Xbox 360
Method: Gameznflix
Cost: $3.19
This was, like so many others from Gameznflix, low on the list because the games I actually want aren’t available for shipping to me when I have games I send back. It’s not a terrible game, but it’s not a great one either. Sent it back after completing one character’s campaign, which was about three hours more than I should have sunk into it. - Halo 3
Platform: Xbox 360
Method: Retail Purchase
Cost: $64.95
The big purchase of the month was Halo 3, the no-brainer 360 title that I helped make the single largest day one media event in history ($170 million in a single day). I beat the solo campaign mode in a day and a half&mash;granted, I took a day off of work just to play it—and found the game to be good but not great. The multiplayer stuff, which gave Halo 2 its long legs, is fun but I’m not sure it’s so fun that I’ll play it any more than I played Halo 2′s. I held onto the previous one too long before trading it in for almost nothing because I thought I might play online sometime for months. I never did. I’d hate for this game to end up the same way, so there is a part of me that feels I might be well served to use this as trade bait in the near future. Especially since the online game is less compelling (for me, anyway) than Call of Duty 4 and it’s detailed, progressive, role-playing style. I’m definitely on the fence about this one, although strangely I consider it a good purchase. Value-wise, I think it’s a solid title, I just don’t know if I’m as big of a Halo fan in either want to be or believe myself to be. - Phantasy Star Universe
Platform: Xbox 360
Method: Gameznflix Rental
Cost: $3.19
This role-playing game is curious in that I know it has an online mode but so far I’ve only tried the single-player story mode and it plays, even while feeling much like a jRPG, like an online game. There is no pausing, the combat and menus are all real-time and the graphics are stylized and unremarkable. When I do get to play it’s reasonably enjoyable but the game spends too much time showing me fun-looking combat in the cutscenes rather than letting me have fun controlling it. This game will end up staying with me through to next month but I won’t hang onto it long: If I find the multiplayer mode to be enjoyable I may plop it onto my Goozex requests but with Enchanted Arms still sitting and waiting to be finished, I don’t think I have enough time to devote to a game I’m so far only lukewarm about. - Superman Returns
Platform: Xbox 360
Method: Gameznflix Rental
Cost: $3.19
This open-world Superman game is actually a lot more fun than I expected it to be, especially for a licensed title. It has little to do with the movie with the same title, but it’s kind of fun to fly around the city. I like how Superman is still invincible but Metropolis has a life meter, and the powers are well executed. Combat is kind of bland, but it works well enough for what it is. I don’t know that I would buy this game and I doubt it will stick around for too long; I have no desire to try and earn 1,000 achievement points from it or anything like that. But as an occasional diversion, it’s a passable rental.
Special Cases
I lost a bit of Gameznflix transfer time to Civil War for the Xbox 360 because the copy I got was completely unplayable. It was around this time that GnF started shipping and processing my requests much more slowly than they had been so it took almost a week to get the broken game in the first place. I’m not counting it as one of the games rented or played this month because I never got to even try it out, but the time lost will have to count against my overall turnaround rate.
Sacrifices
I traded away Final Fantasy III for the DS which I was super excited about when it was released and just could not get into so I decided to collect the 600 Goozex points rather than have it sit around unplayed. I also shipped out Metroid Fusion which I more or less liked but it got ridiculously difficult to the point where it was no longer any fun. Plus I have Zero Mission now which I like so much more that it wasn’t worth keeping Fusion any longer.
Also out the door was BioShock, which was kind of a loss for sentimental reasons (it has already cracked my top 30 games of all time) but since I earned all 1,000 Gamerscore points from it and completed it twice within a month, it was better to grab the 1,000 Goozex points while they were still there for the taking.
On the Gameznflix front I didn’t finish and return God of War II until the 17th so I ended up hanging onto that one for about three weeks. It’s not a terribly long time for a rental but the game itself only took about 14 hours to complete so I probably could have trimmed a week off the lag time if I’d set my mind to it or played less Geometry Wars. It guess it goes to show that God of War wasn’t as good as I’d hoped if I was ignoring it in favor of playing GeoWars for the ten jillionth time. Like I said last month, I’m just glad I didn’t pay $50 for it.
I also received a lot of crappier games low on my queue this month from Gameznflix, including one game that I decided wasn’t worth reporting as damaged and unplayable. That not only increased my per-game rental fee but started me thinking that even though Gameznflix has a great pricing plan, the service isn’t delivering the way I’d hoped. I plan to give it one more month but if I don’t start getting games in at least my top ten by the end of the month then I’ll have to cancel for no other reason than that this flux of mediocre-to-bad titles that looked interesting back in July when pickings were slim is just distracting me away from the decent games I can get instead.
Results
Uh-oh. I had my first overbudget month in September. Part of the problem was the lack of legitimate sales for Halo 3 and my insistence on calculating the sales tax into the price of retail games. I made another recycling run that netted me a mere $6.65, plus the $13.14 carry over from last month so that put my operating budget at $79.79. When you subtract the $12.75 for Gameznflix, $5.00 for Zuma and $64.95 for Halo 3, I’m $2.91 in the hole. Granted, if I hadn’t counted the sales tax on Halo I’d be $2.04 in the black, but that’s the way it goes. I can’t change the accounting just to match what I’m doing.
As a result of my oversights, I start next month with $57.09 and I’ll have to pay Gameznflix no matter what so my spending budget is a mere $44.34. Ouch. Unless I can come up with something clever it looks like my plan to buy The Orange Box in October isn’t going to work out.
I played nine new games this month, which is down significantly from last month’s count of 14. Goozex traffic was lighter this month with only four new arrivals, but they were all higher-value titles than last month’s DS-centric bonanza. Had Civil War worked out the Gameznflix traffic would have been identical, but as mentioned above the quality of the games was less impressive and the turnaround times have gotten progressively worse.
Overall the month could have gone better, but it wasn’t too terrible. It would be nice to have a month where there wasn’t a AAA title that I was excited about so I could engage in some bargain shopping, but that doesn’t seem to be likely until early next year. I’m disappointed that I went over a little, and I knew as I purchased Zuma that it would cut it close but I hoped there would be better deals to be found for Halo 3. I guess it goes to show you shouldn’t count on a sale to bail out your budget. See you next month.