Games depreciate faster than cars. You drive a brand new car off the lot, and it loses half of its value. You open a game, and then it’s just not worth much anymore. That’s why you can get an open copy of Chrono Trigger on the SNES for $50-100, but a sealed one will net you over a grand, easy. I just got Far Cry 2 on 360 for $10 on a clearance at Target. I can go on Xbox Live and get N+ for $10. Both are quality games. But Far Cry 2 started at $60 then lost 83% of its retail value. N+ was released before Far Cry 2 and maintains its original $10 price tag, all whyile not offering the benefits of tangibility. You can’t bring it over and show your friends. You can’t read the instruction manual in the bathroom. You can’t pass it down to your children someday like I hope to do with my NES and Atari 2600 games, proving to them just how far we’ve come and just how lucky they are to live in a world with more than 8 colors. Why are downloadable games able to maintain their value so much longer while not even being real? They are real in the fact that you pay for an experience, and you control it like a normal game, but you can’t hold it. You don’t get to rush home, break the seal, and take a huge whiff of that “new game smell” (you know the one). I’ve wanted to download Cloning Clyde since I first played the demo on my new 360 a few Christmases ago, but it was ten bucks. It’s still ten bucks. Games that were available at retail at that time have prices that have completely plummeted. It’s not fair. It makes it really hard to want to download games when full, expansive retail games are available for the same price.

Also, I seem to be blogging about game prices a lot. With the economy in shambles, it’s easy to get hung up on how much things cost. I don’t want to sacrifice quality, however. A $20 year-old 360 game is almost always better than $20 Wii shovelware. But downloadable titles… they’re almost all the same price, regardless of quality or age. Money is harder to come by nowadays, and I could use that $10 on rent, or to eat, or to fix my car. Even in America, our expendable income isn’t as expendable as it used to be.

I want to play a funny game. When things are humorous in real life, it’s because I made light of whatever bad/normal/good situation I was in. I enjoy watching Comedy Central Presents, and comedy movies are fun once a year or so, so you have time to forget the gags and punchlines. There have been a few attempts at funny games in recent memory (Penny Arcade, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Armed & Dangerous), but it was always humor, then gameplay, then more humor, then more gameplay. I want comedy and good gameplay to be entwined in a way that one would not succeed without the aid of the other. Sure, it would be tough because not everyone has the same sense of humor, but no art has ever been created with the intent of pleasing every last person in the world. Grand Theft Auto caters to mature gamers exclusively, and it sells reasonably well (except on the DS, apparently). I want funny people to write funny things for funny games. The Daily Show: Stewart’s Revenge, now on Xbox Live! Something like that. There are lighthearted games (Mario, anything on Wii), and there are serious games (GTA, Call of Duty, anything on 360 or PS3). In the middle, there are games that try to be funny. Even if they are clever, I have rarely, in my entire life as a gamer, laughed aloud at something that happened in a game. Movies and TV… all the time. Why? The Harvey Birdman game was just like the show, only without the need to laugh, ever. I enjoyed it, despite it’s obvious flaws as a game, but I didn’t laugh. And that’s sad. Why is it so hard?

Konami has been working on a game called Six Days in Fallujah, a recreation of one of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq War. My father was in the military and even served overseas for months at a time, so this particular topic strikes a special chord with me. But most of the points I would make about the game, or its recent cancellation in the face of numerous outraged protests, have already been said for me, very eloquently and passionately, here. Have a read, and see how far our favorite entertainment medium has fallen.

Art. Yeah, right. Not if it can’t even be allowed to make a point about life, the universe, and everything in it.

When Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was first released on PC, it was apparently a buggy, near-unplayable mess. Instead of thoroughly beta-testing, Bethesda released an unfinished product and then released patches throughout the months following its initial release, eventually forming it into the masterpiece it is today. PC gamers have been dealing with this for years. A game ships, there’s a lot of problems with it, people complain to the developers, the developers release a downloadable patch to fix the bugs. Console games didn’t have that luxury, until recently. When a game was released on any system before this current console generation, that was it. If there were bugs or glitches, they stayed in consumers’ games and minds for eternity. You made sure you released a finished product, because there would never be another chance to restore the public’s confidence in you. Now that every system is connected to the Internet (except the Wii… ha!), game companies can release patches even before a game hits retail shelves. I’ve bought games on release day and ran home and popped it in, only to be informed, “An update is available for this game from Xbox Live. If you decline the update, you will be signed out.” What the crap is that? A game is broken before it even ships? In today’s disposable society, nothing is immutable anymore. Now, it appears that games are called “software” because they are always susceptible to outside forces molding them into something other than their original form. I don’t like it. I miss the days of good ol’ fashioned game cartridges: sturdy and eternal. Now… sometimes it just seems that nobody tries as hard as they used to.

Best Buy had a $10 game sale today. The details were leaked on the web a few days ago, but it wasn’t until the Sunday newspaper ads came out that the clueless public knew about it. There were about 100 games for $9.99, spanning Wii, PS3, 360, and DS, and I was most excited for Devil May Cry 4 and Infinite Undiscovery… two cool games that I just didn’t want to pay full price for. By the time I showed up at Best Buy at about noon however, I was too late. Sold out. People that read the newspaper get up early! Sure, there were still plenty of copies of Quantum of Solace and Alone in the Dark and even the crappy Wii version of Samba de Amigo… but who cares? I almost settled for GTA: Chinatown Wars for $20 (what a steal!), but then I remembered that I don’t ride buses or planes enough to get handheld games. And when I’m home, I can pop in GTA IV and be infinitely more entertained. So I bought some new shorts instead (not at Best Buy) and went home to play some of the stellar games I own yet haven’t even opened. Americans are so wasteful and greedy! Sucks to be us, I guess.

New games on PS3 and 360 pretty much all have the same price: MSRP $59.99. The boxes are the same size, and they take up the same amount of shelf space. The covers have the same generic border, and the manuals all contain the same legal mumbo jumbo. But games are not all the same value. The latest Wii shovelware is obviously inferior to the latest Bethesda masterpiece. Yet they cost the same. Games are like books – eventually, they all just sit on the shelf, collecting dust. The money you spent on them is not spent on a product, but an experience. If it wasn’t worth the price, then what was the point? You just wasted your time on an inferior product, and your money, and they time you spent to get the money. Game decisions are important. Should I buy this one or this one? You are stuck with your choice; you can’t resart from your life’s last checkpoint. Sure, you can always trade it in, or get a new one, but that time will never come back. Good luck making the right decision.

If you have Xbox Live Gold and you’re not an automatically renewing member, sooner or later, it will expire. After that time, you will log into Xbox Live one day and it will demand of you, “Give us money or revert to (gasp!) Silver status!” Honestly, I didn’t play many games online. Sure, I spent a good chunk of time climbing the Rock Band leaderboards, and there’s plenty of SF IV achievements that you can only get by playing online, but it was never really a big deal to me. Growing up, I was one of those gamers that lived in his parents’ basement, gobbling up the latest RPG’s while effectively ignoring the fact that there was a big glorious world right outside full of girls and war, happiness and regret. Now that seemingly everyone is online, it’s hard to keep myself from even not having the option. I started looking around for a new year-long Gold card in stores, because if you buy it in real life you get the 13th month free! I found it cheapest at Sam’s Club – $43 for 13 months. Not too shabby, less than 4 bucks a month, even after tax.

Then today, I got an e-mail from Microsoft itself! “Come back, we miss you. Here, have a year of Gold for $40!” Sold. Now I can go back to ignoring my “friends” and playing online once every few months. At least my dashboard won’t continuously remind me that I don’t have Gold and am not hip enough to hang with their crew. Passive aggressive Microsoft jerks.

In Japan, video game soundtracks are pretty huge. Sure, even over there, Nobuo Uematsu’s latest epic won’t top the charts, but at least Japanese gamers care. In America, the only way to get most soundtracks is to import them. A few companies like Atlus will include it in a collector’s edition of a particular game, but they’re all about the fan service. It’s not an everyday occurrence.

Th problem is that good music in a game may not be the kind of music you want to listen to in real life. Plenty of RPG’s have sweeping orchestral pieces that may interest people that are into classical music. But besides that… much game music is just game music. It’s ambient and it makes a point. You don’t want a climactic point made at you while you’re driving down the interstate. You just want to enjoy yourself. Instead of being crafted solely for your listening pleasure, game music is supplemental to game action. Taken as a whole, the game experience can be incredible, dramatic, and moving… a total greater than the sum of its parts.

I love the music in Quentin Tarantino films. It plays into the action perfectly in every instance. It’s actually one of the things his movies are most well-known for, his perfect ear for scene-stealing music. But I listened to the Pulp Fiction soundtrack the other day, and it’s kind of lame. The songs are too long, and they’re mostly slow oldies. When taken out of the context of the film, the songs really lose their luster. The same can be said about a lot of game music. Metal Gear Solid had sharp, interesting music. But without Solid Snake’s supplemental stealthy shenanigans, it’s just hard to care.

One thing I might want to do when I grow up is open a retro video game store. It’s not going to be a lame little mall kiosk. There will be cartridges upon cartridges, all organized into beautiful alphabetic rows. I will know what I have, and if I don’t have what you’re looking for, I’ll know where to find it. Behind the counter, I’ll keep the super-valuable games behind bulletproof glass under lockdown so people can ogle them while also knowing there is no way they’d ever be able to afford my unopened copies of Dragon Warrior 4, Chrono Trigger, and Final Fantasy VII.

I’m not sure how to go about starting a store like this. Historically, game stores always felt like they were charging way too much for many of my favorite games, while in my head, I knew they were actually worth the sale price. Every so often, I scour eBay for a huge game collection that I can scoop up for pennies on the dollar. Most of the time though, even large collections are too expensive, and I would never be able to make back while re-selling what I spent to buy them. Like this one. $32,000, over 1,600 games… but that’s almost $20 a game. Too much! I want to pay like $2 a game and then sell them for $5 to $10. I should start hunting through pawn shops for deals now. Fortunately for many game collectors, most pawn shops are oblivious to game values, opting instead for the “All Genesis games – $4″ type of business model. Works for me. Should I just go to pawn shops and buy out their old game inventory, filling my car and apartment in hopes of a future that may not even occur? Maybe. There are worse ways to spend money… If nothing else, I’ll have shelves and shelves of games on my walls, ensuring that my nerdy friends are jealous and my female friends won’t talk to me again once they see my shrine to geekery. Yay!

Throughout history, there have been attempts to create the Perfect Game – the one game that you will be able to play forever without ever having to buy another (Spore, WoW, etc.). They have all failed. Not for lack of ambition – it’s just that citizens of today’s disposable society are always looking for something bigger, better, brighter, and newer. There is no perfect game, as there is no perfect person.

The same problem can be seen when trying to determine the Greatest Game of All Time. Even determining the Greatest Game of the Year is problematic. Someone will always complain that this game is better than that one, or they’ll complain that the voters were influenced in a digital payola scandal. As technology advances, what we expect out of our games changes. We want bigger, better, more. And we should. After 30 years of video game history, game developers should know what works and what doesn’t while still being unafraid to try something new and innovative. (I hate how the word “innovative” is tossed around so recklessly nowadays as well, but that will have to be saved for another post.) Also, now that consumers are spending more money on games than ever before, it’s not too much to expect that we get our money’s worth. Otherwise, we will find a more economical distraction like drugs or old muscle cars.

Games can be artistic, but first and foremost they are software. A person is interacting with a computer in a way that evokes some kind of emotion. Without a seamless amalgamation of man and machine, the other aspects of the game are rendered pointless. The Great Games control well, and they are pleasing to the eyes, and the music suits the gameplay. Besides taste and smell, games cater directly to our sensory experiences. The best games are here for us and with us. They do not exist in a vacuum.

Think of your favorite game. Well, favorite games. It’s far easier to choose from a specific genre than from the complete collection of all software ever produced. And the more specific the category, the fewer choices. This is why many lists on the ‘Net often go by a format like “Top 10 PlayStation Racing Games” instead of “10 Best Games of All Time.” The Best Games of All Time list is totally subjective, yet numerous titles from throughout history appear on nearly every list. Super Mario Bros., Tetris, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Half-Life 2, Final Fantasy VII, Space Invaders, Pong, Ms. Pac-Man, Super Metroid, Resident Evil 2. What do they have in common? Not much, except that they all appeal to our basest human instincts: run, hoarde, kill. Instead of video games being used as a form of escapism, they represent a world we will never know, and we are okay with that. Even flawed digital worlds are more orderly and palatable because everything is in it’s place. Every piece of trash littering the digital streets was put there for a purpose, even if that purpose is merely ambiance. What purpose does garbage on our real-life streets serve? Ambiance for our real-life, crappy lives. Sometimes it feels that even the worst games have higer lows than our highest highs…