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Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure
So my little brother just got the starter pack for this game for his 3DS.
I've played it, and it's quite good. Really good, in fact. Probably the best since the Playstation trilogy.
SO WHY DO THEY HAVE TO RUIN IT BY MAKING IT A FUCKING RIPOFF AR GAME?
Seriously, this thing cost sixty fucking dollars, and that's the portable version. And you have to buy more figures to get 100% completion!
Comments
On the other hand, little kids have fun taking their Spyro over to their friend's place and plugging it in.
It's kind of weird that ripoff AR games actually feel like more of a ripoff when they're good than when they suck and are easily dismissed.
My sister and I will probably never forgive the people responsible for putting Spyro into a merchandise-driven series like Skylanders, even if he's still the protagonist and the game itself isn't actually that bad considering the target audience.
I'm not saying the Legend of Spyro games were absolutely horrible either, but ever since A New Beginning I could tell that this franchise had started heading downhill without the brakes on. I'm holding onto the original series until the day I die.
Very important question
AR?
what is an AR game
Augmented Reality.
In this case, buy a shitload of plastic figurines for your cartridge to scan and unlock stuff that's already on the cartridge.
augmented reality
edit: beaten
You realize that since it's on the DS it's probably gonna get cracked soon anyway, especially as this it's an obvious cash-grab title that automatically draws the ire of the people who crack stuff.
In this case AR stands for augmented reality, and specifically it's referring to the fact that certain parts of the Skylanders game can only be progressed through by plugging seperately-sold figurines into the "Portal of Power", which then reads the codes built into the figurines and unlocks the corresponding content.
Damn ninjas.
It should be noted that the figurines are, themselves, the characters they generate, though.
So, you can like... buy a Spyro, and plug it into your game and play as him, then go over to your friend's house and play as that same Spyro.
Bitches don't know about my choice scarf.
@Nova: Wait, you mean the figurines actually store data that makes your Spyro/Cynder/Boomer/whatever unique among other Spyros/Cynders/Boomers/whatevers?
Okay, I'll give them that. I guess it does a little more towards justifying the price of each figurine if they all have rewriteable data chips inside them...
Meh. They might as well have just been able to transmit those stats over wifi. But that doesn't bring in $.
Yes, alright. I used to think the figurines were keys and nothing more, but now that I've heard all this...
It should also be noted that the game isn't actually meant to be that bad, averaging between 7.5/10 to 9/10.
There are legitimate complaints, like the fact that it does feel like Spyro was just placed in the game to add his name in rather than growing organically through the plot. Outside of those things, though, it's meant to be a pretty fun game.
^^ They're memory cards that could have been replaced altogether by the wifi and online stuff that the platforms already support. It's not exactly a step up.
It's also more complicated for little kids to mess around with, and it's more fun for kids to actually have the figures themselves to play around with than it is to just have characters transmitted over wireless.
Yeah, Bee. You are forgetting that the game is primarily aimed at a demographic that averages something like 10 years of age. It's not exactly uncommon or surprising for kids that young to have a lot of difficulty understanding just how much they can do with memory cards and wireless networking.
It's the designers' onus to make that as accessible as possible inside the game's interface. It's really not that hard to mask out the gritty details of setting up online play -- often it comes out looking less complicated to the player than the main Wii/PS3/X360 interface they had to use to start the game up.
If they really wanted to keep the whole "bring an external memory thing to your friend's house" deal, they could've gone the Pokéwalker route. But again, that wouldn't be gratuitously expensive.
The figurines are also something kids can play with without the actual game. Little kids love toys.
It's really surprisingly hard to access data from your game's save file from someone else's console. Short of something like an account-making interface. It is the reason you cannot really go over to your friend's place and just load up your Monster Hunter file or your Call of Duty file.
Which is the primary factor here, I am pretty sure; you can very easily go over to your friend's house and just plug your character in and go. It is not nearly as easy if you do not have a physical object you can collect data from.
^ And that, which I mentioned above, too.
As expensive as the figurines themselves may be, this could also extends the game to some of the kids who can't exactly afford to buy their own computers or consoles, or even their own copies of the game. A lot of these kids at least have enough money for a figurine or two, and in some cases they'll have noticeably wealthier friends who are kind enough to lend the video game to them often. So there you go.
sorry, i missed you saying that
Dragon Quest 9 did exactly that in a pretty idiot-proof manner. Hell, it was the entire point of the game (and conversely what held back its usual writing but I digress).
Ultimately what you're transmitting is a small handful of stats -- nothing more. Chances are there's more verification data in there than actual gameplay data.
Yes, but are Toys for Bob the same people who made DQ9?
No, they aren't. Toys for Bob are a small-time video game company founded by two people who also happened to really love physical toys. I wouldn't be surprised if they originally founded the company with the very dream of bringing video games and physical toys together somehow.
No, they're a subsidiary of Activision as of 2005.
Hence peripherals.
Erm, no. You needed to load your character off of a physical object- in this case, the game card.
Which is a lot harder to do if the console the game is on is not a portable one. Such as a PS3.
And yes, you can quite easily launch a multiplayer game from your console, much as you can in, say, CoD. But it is much harder to just casually bring your PS3 over to your friend's place, plug it into their TV and play co-op.
Again, I can see why an external memory thing would be useful -- once more, I loved the Pokewalker even if I didn't use it much.
What I don't see is what justifies making them $10 apiece and basing the main content of the game around buying a fuckton of them. I mean I can buy a $3 flashdrive the size of my thumbnail with enough memory to hold about 100 million Skylanders characters, a 1$ GI Joe, and a 1-cent stamp to stick one to the other's ass.
Like, the humane approach to this would be to just package one with the game that can hold all your characters, sell more if they feel like buying more, and not mandate buying tons of expensive shit to unlock stuff already on the disk.
Yeah, but they aren't just memory cards. They are also toys in and of themselves. And, again, kids. This way, they're not even just something that they can plug into a game and go nuts with; they're something that you can play with outside of the game, which is great because kids like to do that.
I think it's a pretty great idea. You spend $10, and you not only unlock a character within the game that you can go over to your friend's house and play with, you're also buying a figurine from the game to play with outside of the actual game itself.
There are plenty of toys around that are the same price, and you can't even plug them into a game and play them.