My wife got me a copy of Mass effect Andromeda as a gift once. She bought the physical copy (or so she thought) since that makes a better gift. When I opened the case, there was literally nothing in there but a code for EA Origin on a sticker.
Ea games are awful for this. I bought sims 4 when it first came out and had the same issue. It’s so cool that I can’t own games even if I try to buy the physical copy. I’m just glad that other companies haven’t been doing digital only hard copies.
I mean, do you even have a bluray drive on your PC? That’s why they do it, I remember having the option to buy San Andreas on one dvd or 8 cds or something, precisely because people don’t often replace their drives.
Sadly, yes. Got a switch for Xmas this year. Went and bought a mario game, and was completely taken aback when the inside of the case looked just like this. I sat there totally feeling this exact post.
Aluminum cases need to become standard for physical copies. Not plastic with an aluminum veneer, all aluminum.
They can be cool and do aluminum tubes holding a flash drive with the game on it if they want so they can laser engrave the sides and screw on top with the title and art.
I remember getting Prince of Persia 2008 in a steel case for a birthday or maybe Xmas and loved the design of it. I haven’t seen my steel case editions recently.
It’s a tough one. You’re not wrong by any means, but equally the environmentally unfriendly bit is why people buy physical media. The memory card holding the game is mostly superfluous because of day 1 DLC or patches, but it’s the box; art; manual; and physical tangibility that matter to a collector of the media.
Ideally there would be a middle ground - sack-off the normal physical edition and purchase the memory cards themselves - and push up the price and pay for a premium edition of the copy made from better materials.
I suspect we’d only get the worst of both worlds though, the cynic in me thinks.
Ah yes, there is that. Is that still a thing these days? I remember EA’s Project Ten Dollar a few years back gating a lot of extra features or multiplayer behind a single use code being fairly widely adopted.
I’ll admit to being a bit behind the curve now, I still predominantly use my Xbox Series S, One, and 360 just to play Doom in different rooms so maybe I’m not on the cutting edge of news!
edit: it wasn’t five dollars at all, more like ten!
I had to look up that ten-dollar thing. Thankfully I don’t think that’s a thing yet in the Nintendo world, aside from preorder bonuses.
There have been physical releases that are just a download code in a box, or a game card that contains only one of the two included games, with the second being provided as a paper download code. In those cases the redemption is tied to an individual’s Nintendo account. I wouldn’t buy any of those, though I’ll admit to buying another release (BioShock Trilogy) that was a physical game card with no games stored on it, just launchers for downloading the three games from Nintendo. But at least in that case nothing is account-locked and lending/resale is possible: pop the card in, download the games and play them for as long as the card is in your system.
I haven’t thrown away a game case since Playstation 1. My Super Nintendo ones were cardboard and got destroyed, so I did throw them away because that is what we did in the 90s.
Yeah, I find it particularly weird, because Nintendo already had smaller boxes with the Nintendo DS. Did they decide that the Switch was a big boy console, so it needed to have comically large boxes?
Man you would have had a field day with PC gaming in the 90’s!
In fairness though, even though some did skimp out and just launch a CD in, most had a manual and something of lore interest or a physical anti-piracy thing, and a fair few were stuffed full of trinkets or other world building material… just because.
Even my Atari ST edition of Zak McKracken had the floppy, manual, passport anti-piracy card, and a faux-magazine which was both hilarious and acted as a hint book too.
PC games in he 90s were like cereal boxes filled with a few CDs and a the barest of a manual. In the 80s it was the same except it was floppy disks and the manual was needed to get through the copy protection. Sometimes you’d even get a decoder ring of some sorts to decode something for the copy protection.
Yeah but it wasn’t as fun as in the 80s and 90s when they’d be sending you on a treasure hunt through the manual to find specific words and letters like you were in the DaVinci Code.
PC game cases from 90s were amazing. I wish console games would do something cool like that. They were made of cardboard, typically had boxart with a bunch of high quality engraving, had manuals inside. They felt like collectibles and you didn’t have to pay extra for any of it. It was just part of the base game price.
The total footprints of the two cases are virtually identical. The Switch game cases are taller but not as deep, and the DS cases are shorter and deeper. I believe the DS case is basically the same dimension as a cut-down DVD case. It’s the same depth, +/- a mm, with 65mm chopped off the top.
The NDS game case is 134x125mm, 167.5 square cm in total. The Switch game case is 105x170mm, 178.5 square cm in total. The Switch case is also thinner, 11mm vs 15mm. The amounts of plastic used in each is pretty similar.
Wrestlemania 2000 was cool and all, but WCW/NWO Revenge will always be my GOAT. I remember as a kid being hella impressed by the customization options.
I also owned WCW/NWO Thunder for PS1. Game was dog shit.
They were a really impressive little piece of kit. With no extra peripherals, I was able to play NES on one core, and use FFMPEG on the other three to encode and stream to Twitch with mono sound. For $35. Probably my favorite gadget of it’s time.
If you can manage to find a place that has one, they’re usually selling for $200+ now. I’m pretty sure I can get ebay chinese replicas for like $50 though, but there are some games they won’t play.
The N64 had a $200 launch price, which is pretty much $400 now. So nobody is making money from holding onto their N64. Hrm, maybe I should pick one up.
Prices have come down in the last year. I see several on eBay listed tested/working for around $60. One even comes with a controller. Shopgoodwill.com has similar prices when they’re available. Prices for auction items with less than 10hrs look very reasonable.
Wait, what? I just bought my younger brother an n64 with an expansion pack, rumble pack, and Majora’s Mask and OoT for Christmas, and all together that only cost 180$. All legit copies and hardware. Made double and triple sure.
Are people just not hitting the “sort lowest to highest” option on auction sites? Or is this a new development in the last few months?
Ah, that makes sense. Consoles do tend to spike in price at the height of their nostalgia wave. Probably got boosted up for a while by the rumors of an N64 mini not panning out, and instead being presented with the sub par switch online expansion. Probably created a lot of demand for the real thing.
I regret selling mine when I was 17 cause I wanted to buy a paintball gun and gear. At the time, it was a great call cause I didn't play any N64 games at the time, and I got to have a blast playing paintball with my friends.
But man I wish I'd sold something else back then so I could still have my original N64 and games. Still got the ol' NES and Sega Genesis at least.
If you don’t like the jank of emulation or the risks of going to pirate sites: An Xbox Series S, Game Pass, and a few controllers is an okay replacement. There’s a bunch of Rare games on Game Pass, classic Goldeneye, and they even have stuff like Timesplitters in the store.
lemmy.world
Gorące