Where's the meat?

Neatly placed in front of you are two items. On the left is a neatly arranged stack of 10 dollar bills amounting to 70 dollars. To your right is a new copy of EA’s newest sports title on the Xbox 360. Sure it’s missing a few features from the Xbox and PS2 features, and there are a few bugs in there that they will most likely never fix, but hey it’s new game right? You can have one of the items, which do you choose?

The split decision breakfast which has been served up by increased pricing for videogames has forced many gamers to think about what exactly they will spend their hard earned cash on, especially if the multi-platform title has significantly less features than it’s other counter parts. Is this what the next generation has in store for us, increased eye candy at the expense of standard options? It’s the equivalent of buying a new model Mercedes without air conditioning.

Personally speaking, I find Blockbuster my best friend these days, whereas I used to buy a game or two a month, I can’t rationalize spending seventy dollars after tax on anything less than a AAA game. It doesn’t help thing’s that a large majority of the new titles are sequels featuring marginally updated graphics as well as a healthy sampling of sloppy code leading to glitches and bugs. Is that where my extra 10 dollars is going? I’ll save my money and buy a steak, at least I’m guaranteed it will come with the same amount of meat as last time.