Topic: The Chit Chat Thread

Physical is a lot cheaper for me. €50-52 at launch vs €60 or €70 in the digital stores.

@Tasuki I find Physical a LOT cheaper. I was referring to the prices of Physical games online compared to the prices in a 'bricks and mortar' store. Maybe in the US its much more competitive to buy Digital but the UK PS/XB stores are not accurately reflecting the $ -> £ price. Its closer to $1 to £1, than the $1 = £0.71 that the current exchange rate is. This means a Game that is £40 in a retailer is often £55 in store. Sales are rarely as cheap as I can buy them from Amazon, GameSeek etc. Where you may get a game on offer for say £20 with a saving of £35 (based on digital pricing), I could have bought the game Physically for £40 and its now going for £12-15 in an online retailer (Saving £25-28 but its still cheaper).

Its not often that Digital sales can beat the price of the current Physical disc. Although I did buy The Division Gold edition digitally for £22 because the Physical Gold edition is no longer available 'new', I could probably of bought the disc and the Season pass (basically the gold edition) for less.

It seems to me though that in the US, the digital and physical prices are much closer. Physical is cheaper but only because of retailer competition that means the games are not sold at RRP as they would lose out to the store down the road selling the game at a few $'s less. Online stores can offer bigger discounts - not only because there is bigger competition but because they don't have the overheads that retail stores have. They have big warehouses so can buy in bulk, often not in 'Prime' locations with high rates and so undercut retailers. PS/XB Store has basically no competition and so can charge RRP so they end up costing more despite much lower overheads - manufacturing of discs, cases, printed material, distribution etc. If you had an open market place with opportunities to buy from various retailers - not just Playstation or Microsoft, then you may see much cheaper digital prices too...

@Tasuki Yeah and @Octane can attest to this, I was looking for copies of DOOM for cheap and the best option was the eShop at £33. Thing is that is so rarely the case.

Even on PSN, it is still cheaper to go physical, which bothers me as I find myself going digital not because its cheaper, its the opposite here, but because its all going to install anyway so whats the point?

But back to my first point, you guys in the US get a good deal on digital stuff. We dont.

For instance, and I worked this out, a copy of say, Super Mario Odyssey for you guys is $60, plus tax after. One I spoke to who lives in Chicago says it came to around $68 for him.

For us, a copy of Mario Odysdey is £50 with tax included. What does that translate to? $70.

Lets take...I dunno. Bloodborne Game of the Year Edition. I recently saw that on the PSN for...£39.99. That's $56.05. Damn near full price for you guys across the pond.

Or I can go on Amazon and get a physical copy, new and sealed. £24.77. That's $34.72.

That is a huge saving. Over here it is far, FAR more efficient on your wallet to go physical.

I'm in the US and I still consistently find better prices in physical. Price drops don't happen or take much longer from what I've seen. Flash sales aside. Especially buying used at Gamestop, with a 20% discount. That's something that scares me about digital games being the future. Everything will be so dang expensive. I also jsut like physical better. $30 is the hard limit for a digital game for me. IF it's more than that, it better be physical.

Agree with @YummyHappyPills, digital is only cheaper with sales or discounts here in the UK and even then, that is rare. Most of my digital games are digital only or heavily discounted. Physical games are almost guaranteed to be cheaper after a few months.

Maybe it because I don't have to many places near me that sell physical games. I mean I have Walmart and Target but except for the occasional buy two get one sale very rarely do games go on sale. Now price drops are another thing but by the time a game drops in price at those places I already usually have it cause of a sale on PSN.

@Tasuki be glad you don't live in my town there is NOWHERE that sells games anymore, we had a GAME but when the chain went bust the store was closed and wasn't reopened when the chain was saved, i have to order all mine online

@Tasuki You're quite lucky then.

This is very much not only a country dependant thing but even regional.

A good read regarding MGS.

https://www.gamesradar.com/how-metal-gear-solid-manipulated-i...

As a game, I can appreciate why not everyone thinks number 2 is the best one in the series. But really, all things considered, it's leagues ahead of the other instalments. It has to be one of the most important video games of all time.

Rose: Raiden, you seem to think that our plan is one of censorship.

Raiden: Are you telling me it's not!?

Rose: You're being silly! What we propose to do is not to control content, but to create context.

Raiden: Create context?

Colonel: The digital society furthers human flaws and selectively rewards the development of convenient half-truths. Just look at the strange juxtapositions of morality around you.

Rose: Billions spent on new weapons in order to humanely murder other humans.

Colonel: Rights of criminals are given more respect than the privacy of their victims.

Rose: Although there are people suffering in poverty, huge donations are made to protect endangered species. Everyone grows up being told the same thing.

Colonel: "Be nice to other people."

Rose: "But beat out the competition!"

Colonel: "You're special." "Believe in yourself and you will succeed."

Rose: But it's obvious from the start that only a few can succeed...

Colonel: You exercise your right to "freedom" and this is the result. All rhetoric to avoid conflict and protect each other from hurt. The untested truths spun by different interests continue to churn and accumulate in the sandbox of political correctness and value systems.

Rose: Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large.

Colonel: The different cardinal truths neither clash nor mesh. No one is invalidated, but nobody is right.

Rose: Not even natural selection can take place here. The world is being engulfed in "truth."

Colonel: And this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

@kyleforrester87 @KratosMD Another champion of Metal Gear Solid 2 here.

Whilst I usually prefer Guns of the Patriots for being a more straightforward, emotional ending for all the characters you've come to love, I can objectively adore Sons of Liberty as the pinnacle of the franchise. I always hated how it's been forever judged by the knee-jerk reaction at launch, a reaction crafted by a much smaller online gaming community and a handful of print-based journalists.

If it were released today, I think its legacy would be incredibly different... but then that's always the deal with pieces of art that are ahead of their time, and we might not be having this conversation now.

Thanks for posting this.

@kyleforrester87 🤯
Whoa. Mind blown. Great article. Very well researched. I have enjoyed playing the MGS games; they are among my favorites, but I never really followed the story that well. The jumping around in time and the complex interplay of characters and themes is a lot to take in and so I just have enjoyed them at face value and never really pondered deeper meanings in the story. Actually, to be honest, I figured Kojima was kinda making stuff up as he went along. And maybe he just got lucky that the world he created in his games has turned out to be prophetic in a way. Or maybe he has a crystal ball.
But yeah, MGS 2 released Nov. 2001. (But the design document was finalized Jan 1999.) Facebook launched in Feb 2004. And it would make sense that the spread of digital memes began to peak several years later to the point that all this information comes of be utilized for the manipulation of society through data mining and creating illusions of opinion and the smokescreen of exploitation for some outside goal. So clearly Kojima was way ahead of the movement toward the modern digitized society and how it could be manipulated. Again, it may all be coincidence. An interesting conspiracy theory created by circumstance. But it does make me appreciate MGS more. I probably need to replay them all again sometime from the beginning. Clearly these themes went way over my head when I played them years ago.

And it also makes me very, very interested in Death Stranding. If he follows form, then Kojima could be predictioning something about society in 2035.

"Art".

Though it is uncanny how on the nose some of the themes in MGS2 are to today's society.

Of course it also gets bonus points for being more game than MGS4.

@kyleforrester87 I read that yesterday, is a good article. Pretty crazy if ya think about it.

You know I don't remember if I actually enjoyed MGS 2. I remember not being liking Raider as the main playable character and I found the ending quite pretentious. I think that I remember the first game more speaks volumes.

I played the remaster of MGS2 again little over a year ago and was indeed impressed with how current it was. The game is pure art.

@Th3solution I think Kojima sees the MGS more as a vehicle of expression than something that needs to be coherent necessarily. I thinnk that contributes a lot to the plot feeling a bit disjointed or made-up-as-you-go at times.

@Th3solution I have no doubt Death Stranding will impress. And Kojima will definitely follow form and continue putting a lot of social commentary in the game. Death Stranding's title itself is already a reference to Metal Gear Solid. All codenames in MGS5 were references to Moby Dick (the whale), and now his new game is as well.

@Kidfried I haven’t read Moby Dick, but I do know the basic jist of the story since it is such a popular classic. It’s interesting that it has inspired Kojima so much.
I have been tempted to buy the MGS2/3 package for Vita. I wonder how they hold up on the handheld. I rarely ever turn on my PS3 anymore.

Man April Fools Day was a riot.

Probably some genuine announcements in there somewhere sadly. There always is.

Also found out that SEGANerds now have the record for fastest time onto my block list.

This is why I dont like AFD.

@YummyHappyPills I like how you posted that as soon as AFD was over...

@JohnnyShoulder Unintentional

@Th3solution The Metal Gear HD Collection on PS Vita is surprisingly decent. There's a little bit of touchscreen nonsense with the inventory, thanks to the lack of L2 and R2, but it's not the worst I've seen on the console. I've played them both through once (and started a second playthrough of Sons of Liberty which I was unfortunately distracted from, and it's been too long to easily jump back in now, so I might start it again) and found no other problems. They're excellent ports; they look gorgeous, run smoothly and give you tactical espionage action in bed. What more could you want?