In this day and age, video games come with a butt-ton of content. I remember spending $50 on the NES game Shadow of the Ninja, which can be completed in 12 minutes. By comparison, look at Halo 3: it features a single-player campaign (with several hidden items and difficulty levels to keep you busy, not to mention offline and online co-op), a multiplayer experience so robust I can’t begin to list it, the ability to save films of every match you play, a level editor, and downloadable content to keep the fanboys at bay. And you can buy the game used at half.com for about $20 right now. Games today have so much in them that I feel bad trading them in to GameStop after I’ve played through them the first time, knowing that there’s more to them that I just haven’t seen yet.
Xbox 360 games in particular have a great incentive for replaying them: achievement points. Those little “bloop” sounds are enough to make me want to go back and milk my games for all they’re worth. That being said, I’ve gone through my Xbox 360 library and sorted out the games that I would like to re-experience some day, and the achievements/items that I still need to get. Here are the likely contenders:
Mass Effect (only did one playthrough)
The Orange Box (still need to get all the lambda locations)
Assassin’s Creed (I actually want to get the flags/templars)
Crackdown (need all the orbs, but my save game got corrupted)
What about you? Do you have some rainy-day discs that could use a little lovin’?
Russ Crandall:
Tyler Miller:
Steve McKay:
Giang Cao:
Call of Duty 3 for me. I went back in to Assassin’s Creed a few months ago, but the only cheevers I need are to get all the flags and kill all the Templars. I found some great location maps online, but I couldn’t keep track and I didn’t want to start all over.
I agree with you. I remember my day buying me Paperboy 2 for NES $50, and we all know how little that has to it. It almost seems that we should be paying more for our modern games if you look at all the content and adjust for inflation.