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Far Cry 3 is also on sale for $49.99, and you can pick up Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Future Soldier for $29.99, in addition to all of the other deals on recent and popular games. Finally, the company's offering a buy two, get one free sale on all used Wii and Nintendo DS games, and there's an ongoing promotion that will give you an extra 50 percent credit back whenever you trade any used games in. Just in case you didn't spend all your money on this year's previous sales, GameStop will be happy to help take the rest of it.
Amazon is offering a $5 coupon on digitally distributed PC products to those who purchased a product on Amazon from publishers 2K, Ubisoft, EA and THQ during 2012. Some of these games can be activated on Steam, while others are Origin. The real fine print is when the coupons can actually be used -- anyway, it's a lot of details, which we'll get into after the break.
OK, 2K is offering $5 coupons on all digitally distributed 2K PC products on sale at Amazon (over $9.99) to every customer who purchased a 2K product in 2012. Coupons can be used from December 26 until New Year's Eve.
All products activate on Steam.
2K Mega Pack - $29.99 ($24.99 after coupon) contains:
Ubisoft does the $5 coupons on digitally distributed PC games on Amazon (over $4.99) to every customer who purchased a Ubisoft product in 2012. Coupons can only be used today, December 25. Humbug, indeed!
Sensing the theme so far? Ok, so, Electronic Arts/PC digital distribution/over $4.99/ every customer who purchased a EA product in 2012. Coupons, like Ubi's, can only be used today, December 25.
All products activate on EA's digital distribution service Origin.
THQ has the same $5 coupon today only for those who purchased a product from the publisher in 2012. There's the Tantalizing THQ Medley ($9.99 or $4.99 w/coupon) and theDarksiders 2 Franchise ($13.19).
I adore handheld gaming. I have ever since I first laid eyes on the original Game Boy in 1990. Vita and 3DS? Both day-one purchases. So it pains me to admit that my interest in dedicated portable consoles has hit an all-time low.
I've taken serious time to reflect on this, but I always come to the same conclusion; handheld consoles have lost their way.
Modern portables are just not what they used to be, or what I want them to be anymore.
I always loved handheld gaming for the convenience of portability, and I don't mean "gaming on the go" - the most overused term in handheld console marketing. I use my handhelds at home. But I don't always like to be confined to my living room TV. I enjoy gaming in the garden under the shade of my porch. I like gaming in complete ignorance of my wife's obsession with Vampire Diaries and Once Upon a Time - shows which dominate the TV for hours each week. I love gaming in bed before sleeping - that's a near nightly practice for me.But I also love portable gaming for its purity. As console games gradually became bigger, prettier, more complicated and inherently more expensive throughout the late '90s and early 2000s, portable gaming's inferior hardware forced it to remain true to the simpler origins of my lifelong hobby. I don't just mean 'old-school', but streamlined, fast, and direct.
Now, in 2012/13, we have portables that are more capable than the wildest dreams of my 12-year-old self. And having lived with them far beyond the initial honeymoon period, I really wish they weren't.
My point is, portable consoles' obsessive pursuit of "console quality gaming" has done more harm than good. It's their final attainment of this high-end performance that's ruining handhelds for what they really should be - portable, convenient and, crucially, instantly gratifying.
Let's start with that - load times. This grates on me more than any other aspect of modern portable gaming. I want to flick on my portable and I want to be playing a game within 20 seconds. I want to play a quick race during a commercial break. I want to blast through a quick mission while I wait for my wife to apply the finishing touches to her hairdo. Nevermind the scenario, I just don't want to bloody wait.
Yet it takes a hair under a minute to get to gameplay in Resident Evil: Revelations on 3DS. And no less than a minute and 28 seconds to get Vita from standby mode - not even full shutdown...standby - to actual gameplay in Assassin's Creed 3: Liberation. A minute and a fricking half.
I know, I know... huge open world, high-res textures - it's all 'triple-A'. I get it. Truly impressive on a machine that size, too. That much is undeniable. But this is exactly my point. I sit down on the throne, fire up my Vita and I'm half-way done before I even get in-game. Sorry, but that's a fail.
All those high-end visuals have an knock-on effect in other areas, too. Namely, battery life. Unfortunately, power cell technology hasn't progressed in equivalency with the increasingly power-hungry processors of today. Admittedly, most of the time it's not a huge deal - the 2.5 to four hour battery life of the 3DS and Vita is enough to see you through your average commute, or doctor wait time.
"There's no denying that this is abysmal performance"
However, I recently took my Vita out to a racing track day where I knew I'd spend most of my time waiting to get on track in a car. My plan was to keep busy with Vita during downtimes. I started the morning with a fully-charged Vita. It was dead before lunch.
There's no denying that this is abysmal performance. Anything less than 6 to 8 hours and battery life becomes a serious concern - especially for long journeys or extended periods without access to a power outlet. Convenient, this is certainly not, and it even calls into question the true 'portability' of these machines before we even touch on their size.
Let's talk about that though. Surely, portables should be portable, no? I mean, truly portable. 'Put them in your pocket even if you might not use them' portable. 3DS is just too big for that kind of commitment, and to call Vita portable in that regard is almost laughable. It's a brick. Early '90s mobile phone levels of heft.
You could argue that very few portable consoles have actually been pocketable over the years, and you'd be right. Game Boy was massive. Game Gear? Ha! The crucial difference is that there was nothing like Game Boy back in 1990. 'Snake' - the Angry Birds of the pre-smartphone era and the title that unintentionally kick-started mobile phone gaming - wasn't even programmed for a Nokia device until 1997, according to the official Nokia blog.
Game Boy evolved though, and it attained true portability with the brilliant GBA SP. But modern handhelds have seemingly thrown this all away in favour of high-end performance, cameras and rear touch panels.
Both Sony and Nintendo's latest machines are undoubtedly impressive bits of kit, but if I could sacrifice some of that horsepower and a few of those cameras for a console that slips neatly into my inside pocket, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
...
The National Rifle Association has looked to pile some of the blame for the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting on violent video games.
NRA head Wayne LaPierre decried violence in video games, and other media, during a press briefing last week regarding the tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut.
"There exists in this country, sadly, a callous, corrupt and corrupting shadow industry that sells and sows violence against its own people," LaPierre said. "Through vicious violent video games, with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse.
"And here's one: It's called Kindergarten Killers. It's been online for 10 years. How come my research staff can find it, and all yours couldn't, or didn't want anyone to know you've found it?
"Isn't fantasizing about killing people to get your kicks really the filthiest form of pornography?"
In response to LaPierre's statements, California Senator Leland Yee has called the NRA's reaction "pathetic and completely unacceptable."
Yee cites a law against violent games that went to the supreme court in 2011 - a law the NRA never supported in the slightest. The politician made it clear he felt the organization was too busy looking for a scapegoat, instead of involving itself in helping solve the real issues at hand.
"I find it mind-boggling that the NRA suddenly cares about the harmful effects of ultra-violent video games," Yee said in a statement. "When our law was before the Supreme Court — while several states, medical organizations and child advocates submitted briefs in support of California's efforts — the NRA was completely silent."
There is no "perfect answer" to doing business with video games. Let's call a halt to the pointless "zero-sum" debates that blighted 2012
A day in which you learn nothing is a day wasted; by which standard, a year in which we learned nothing would be a pointless waste of time indeed. It's worth, as 2012 draws to a close (all that's left now is the few days of indulgence before the year, in harmony with our waistbands, croaks its last), thinking about what we've learned. What did 2012 teach us that we did not before? Never mind, for a moment, the money we earned or lost, the games we played or made; did we grow? Did we advance? Did we learn? "Free to play is clearly going to be with us for the long haul; hopefully 2013 might be the year when the industry stops having ill-tempered hissy fits about this fact"
From a business standpoint, certainly, we learned a great deal. 2012 cemented the place of mobile in the gaming ecosystem, forcing all but the most ardent refuseniks (so Nintendo and... er... that's about it) to recognise mobile as an important part of their business - and even those who were slow to react to the rise of mobile gaming seem determined not to be left behind as tablets gain steam, with 2012 having shown us pretty clearly that the iPad and its myriad imitators are on track to become the primary data device of many consumers in the coming years.
We also learned some things - although not enough, I reckon - about where price points are heading. Freed of the artificial barriers to entry which define console platforms and physical retail, the App Store and Google Play have shown us where prices for digital content will inevitably trend towards - zero. In 2012, more entertaining, successful games than ever before launched at the princely price point of absolutely nothing. Plenty of others didn't debut at far above 99p, and several of my favourite games of the year would have given me change from a £10 note. Free to play, with all that it entails, remains in its infancy, but is clearly going to be with us for the long haul; hopefully 2013 might be the year when the industry stops having ill-tempered hissy fits about this fact, and starts engaging with making F2P work better rather than loudly and pointlessly damning or exalting it at every turn.
That, perhaps, is a reasonable lead-in to something that I don't think we learned this year, as an industry - we didn't learn to stop being afraid of zero-sum games that don't really exist. Discussions about mobile gaming, even among supposed professionals and experts, often descend into abject ridiculousness due to an insistence that mobile games will come to replace all other kinds of games, or that they are doomed to be a cynical, low-quality niche - neither of which position stands up to the slightest moment of intellectual scrutiny. The same applies to the vitriolic arguments about free-to-play which have washed over and back across 2012 like a stinking, polluted tide - when one side insists that everything will eventually be F2P, and the other insists that F2P is intrinsically evil and wrong, you're no longer dealing with professional debate, but with dumb fanaticism. "The idea that one form of entertainment, one form of business model or even one form of distribution will emerge to Rule Them All, is simply an idiot's fantasy"
I'm not saying, by the way, that we should all be cautious fence-sitters - there's no virtue to sitting on the fence simply because it's comfortable. Strong beliefs are good, but meaningless unless tempered by reason and fact. The fact is that cinema did not kill theatre, television did not kill cinema, video games have yet to viciously murder books, home recording did not kill music and video did not kill the radio star. Media and entertainment industries are ecosystems that accommodate an extraordinary range of different kinds of product and different business models - and that is not ever going to change. The idea that one form of entertainment, one form of business model or even one form of distribution will emerge to Rule Them All, is simply an idiot's fantasy.
I say that with absolute confidence, not just because it is supported by countless years of history and the sheer wealth of culture and entertainment they have bequeathed to us, but because I recognise where the belief springs from. It's the unique curse and blessing of the games industry that it teems with “left-brained” people - logical, analytical, mathematical, and quite different from the “right-brained” people who often dominate other creative industries. Video games were born with both feet firmly in the sphere of technology, only gradually moving to straddle the worlds of both technology and art - a marriage which is superbly creative but often fraught, as evidenced by the hissing recoil of many gamers and industry types alike when presented with the (stonkingly obvious) fact that games are an artform.
Left-brain people (yes, modern psychology dismisses this terminology, but it's so much more polite than grouping you all
...
Call of Duty Black Ops II is the UK’s video games Christmas No.1, giving Activision a run of six consecutive weeks at the top.
Sales of the game were fractionally up by one per cent in the busy pre-Christmas trading week (ending Dec 22nd for this listing).
It’s the first game of 2012 to have had such a solid run at the top spot. The No.1 slot has otherwise changed regularly over the year, with almost 30 different No.1s.
Black Ops II’s success also means that EA or Activision have, for the last decade, claimed every Xmas No.1 (except for Bethesda’s Skyrim last year).
Elsewhere the other big gains in this Christmas chart come courtesy of retailer promotions for recent big budget titles, an indicative sign of the hard battle retailers have faced in coercing punters to buy boxed video games in 2012.
Ubisoft’s Far Cry 3 made it to No.2, held off by Call of Duty. The game saw considerable sales uplift of 86 per cent, as GAME cut the price of the title to £22. It ends a good Q4 in the charts for Ubisoft, which also has Just Dance 4 (No.4) and Assassins’s Creed III (No.7) in the top ten this week.
Hitman: Absolution’s retail deals kept it high in the chart at No.3. In previous weeks the price had been cut by half of the Square Enix game, and sales were up one per cent with those offers still in effect,
Although sales were up 15 per cent week on week, EA’s FIFA 13 has to settle for No.4. Another EA game, Need For Speed Most Wanted, also climbed up two space to No.6 in the top ten, with sales up 27 per cent thanks to retail price deals also.
THE TOP 20 IN FULL:
1 - CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS II - ACTIVISION BLIZZARD
2 - FAR CRY 3 - UBISOFT
3 - HITMAN ABSOLUTION - SQUARE ENIX EUROPE
4 - FIFA 13 - ELECTRONIC ARTS
5 - JUST DANCE 4 - UBISOFT
6 - NEED FOR SPEED MOST WANTED - ELECTRONIC ARTS
7 - ASSASSIN'S CREED III - UBISOFT
8 - HALO 4 - MICROSOFT
9 - LEGO THE LORD OF THE RINGS - WARNER BROS. INTERACTIVE
10 - WWE '13 - THQ
11 - THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM - BETHESDA SOFTWORKS
12 - SKYLANDERS GIANTS - ACTIVISION BLIZZARD
13 - FOOTBALL MANAGER 2013 - SEGA
14 - MEDAL OF HONOR: WARFIGHTER - ELECTRONIC ARTS
15 - SONIC & ALL STARS RACING TRANSFORMED - SEGA
16 - FORZA MOTORSPORT 4 - MICROSOFT
17 - MOSHI MONSTERS: MOSHLINGS THEME PARK - MIND CANDY
18 - LEGO BATMAN 2: DC SUPER HEROES - WARNER BROS. INTERACTIVE
19 - NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. 2 - NINTENDO
20 - DISNEY EPIC MICKEY 2: THE POWER OF TWO - DISNEY INTERACTIVE STUDIOS
Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) has introduced a bill directing the National Academy of Sciences to lead an investigation to determine what impact violent video games have on children. Senator Rockefeller commented, 'Recent court decisions demonstrate that some people still do not get it. They believe that violent video games are no more dangerous to young minds than classic literature or Saturday morning cartoons. Parents, pediatricians, and psychologists know better. These court decisions show we need to do more and explore ways Congress can lay additional groundwork on this issue. This report will be a critical resource in this process.'"This legislation was prompted by reports that Sandy Hook shooter Adam Lanza was a gamer. A draft of the bill is available online.
It seems more than ever media outlets and commentators are keen to link violent tragedies and gaming - and sadly this week they've had more cause than usual. This morning's The Sun features the front page story 'Killer's Call of Duty Obsession', linking last week's tragic events in Connecticut, USA to gaming.According to the paper, 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who murdered more than 20 children and adults, was a Call of Duty player. It also carries a column by child psychologist Teresa Bliss, in which she claims games "can lead children to become more immune to violence and death."
Similar alleged links between the school tragedy and gaming can be found in American publications, as well as UK papers The Express and The Independent.
The reports have led clinical psychologist Chris Ferguson - an 'expert' on mass killings at Texas A&M International University - to publish a dismissal of the suggested link between the real-life tragedy and gaming.
According to Fergusson, gaming is "the wrong direction to focus on" and not a common factor among mass homicide perpetrators.
He told ABC News: "If we are serious about reducing these types of violence in our society, video game violence or other media violence issues are clearly the wrong direction to focus on.
"Video game use is just not a common factor among mass homicide perpetrators. Some have been players, others have not been."
Ferguson, who calls himself a proponent of gun control, previously came out to rubbish similar tabloid connections made between Oslo mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik and his gaming habits.
The psychologist controversially claimed that not only were such links wrong, but they also contained elements of racism.
"I know it's a little controversial to say but there's a certain type of racism in place with these killings... When shootings happen in an inner city in minority-populated schools, video games are never brought up," he said.
"But when these things happen in white majority schools and in the suburbs, people start to freak out and video games are inevitably blamed. I think that there's a certain element of racism or ignorance here."
He added: "People really want to know what kind of boogeyman can we hang this on and video games are still the top choice when it comes to any type of tragedy."
Games developed for the next-generation of consoles will still target a performance of 30 frames per second, claims id Software co-founder John Carmack.
Taking to Twitter, the industry veteran said he could “pretty much guarantee” developers would target the standard, rather than aiming for anything as high as 60 fps.
ID Software games such as Rage and the Call of Duty series both hit up to 60 fps, but many titles in the current generation fall short such as the likes of Battlefield 3, which runs at 30 fps on consoles.
“Unfortunately, I can pretty much guarantee that a lot of next gen games will still target 30 fps,” said Carmack.
Targeting a typical frame rate of 30 frames per second could also mean many displays of future console games will also come in at a resolution of 720p.
The latest gadget always makes its way to retailers’ top ten Christmas lists – and this year tablets and e-readers are fighting it out for the top position.
The launch of Windows 8 in October brought with it a host of new tablets and laptops. This, coupled with the first 7-inch tablet from Apple, and Samsung’s much sought-after Android tablets, makes for an overwhelming number of devices for consumers to choose between.
“Tablet sales go from strength to strength and we predict that they will be a must-have gadget for Christmas,” commented Johnathan Marsh, head of buying for electricals and home technology, John Lewis. “There is a plethora of models now available that offer different operating systems, price points and screen sizes, including the new 7-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 and 7.9-inch iPad mini that are highly portable.”
E-readers should do well too. Currys and PC World include Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, along with the new Kindle Fire, in its list of top ten tech gifts.
Argos, on the other hand, has dubbed Kindle rival the Nook Glow the number one gift for Christmas, while John Lewis believes the Nook Simple Touch will be the e-reader of choice for its customers.
But it’s not all just gadgets for grown- ups. Mobile devices have also made their way onto children’s wish lists.
The LeapPad2 and VTech’s Innotab both feature in Hamleys, Argos and The Entertainer’s top ten kids’ toys for Christmas.
Logically, tablet accessories should make good add-on sales this season.
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