"Poorly-Photoshopped Representation"

If you could put your ear to the tubes that make up this internet thing, you would hear thousands of people talking about digital distribution. There is no question that digital distribution is the future. You can already download your favorite songs, books, movies, and thousands of games. In the future, there might not even be discs or cartridges. Everything will just download out of the ether onto some crazy futuristic device.

I am a Steam weekend deal addict. My PSP memory sticks are full of PSP Minis and old PS1 games. I have so many Xbox Live Arcade, PSN, and Wii downloads that I am a little embarrassed. I have nothing against digital downloads, but it seems to me from looking into the muddy waters of the future that a war is coming between digital and physical goods.

The opening salvos in this war have already been fired.

As I write this, Valve’s Steam service has well over a million users online, downloading and playing games.

But does a digital copy have the same value as a physical disc? There are pros and cons to both. If I own a game, I can take it over to a friend’s house to play. I can even lend it to them. I can pretend it’s a Frisbee if I want, or use it to make my coffee table stop wobbling. I can even throw it in the microwave and watch the light show. The point is, it’s mine and I can do whatever the heck I want with it.

This is not always the case with a digital copy. Read the fine print. Go ahead, we’ll wait. In many cases you are not buying the game, but rather access to the game. There is a subtle but profound difference between the two. In one case, it is yours. In the other, it is someone else’s, and they are granting you access to it.

Amazon’s Kindle users have already had issues where books that users thought they had purchased once and forever were removed from their devices because of contract disputes. Amazon would need to send a SWAT team if they wanted to break into my house to take a physical copy of a book back. (My dog Buttons would annihilate any interlopers.) Can you imagine Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft deciding that the copy of Sonic that you purchased wasn’t really yours after all?

Should I have to pay as much for a physical copy that is mine (for good or ill) as a digital copy that I might own until some corporation decides that I really don’t? Is the convenience of a digital copy worth the loss of the physical copy? My digital copy of Serious Sam won’t ever get accidentally stepped on by my roommate, but at the same time I can’t loan him my digital copy to play in his room.

What gets really crazy is when you start getting into digital items like clothes for your Xbox Live avatar or themes for your dashboard. There are communities that have sprung up around customizing everything from digital cars, to people, to little Sackboys. Personally, I wouldn’t give a single real world penny for my Oprah to get a new digital sweatshirt (my Xbox Live avatar is Oprah. Don’t ask). Other people are happy to part with their money for things that differentiate their little digital representations. Is it worth pre-ordering a game so you can get a special set of armor? Gamestop sure hopes so.

The digital revolution is already upon us. The path the revolution takes is up to us. In the meantime I am going to go check out the latest Steam sale.

"Because there's always room for more Valkyria Chronicles."

It’s hard to believe it has been almost a full year since the last Valkyria Chronicles DLC was released. By this point, I had almost forgotten that more was on the way. But when it finally came, I was eager as ever to return to my “Game of the Year” of 2008.

The “Challenge of the Edy Detachment” DLC pack will cost five of your earth dollars and contains six new skirmish battles. Unlike the last DLC involving Edy, you will not be locked into using a specific set of characters. Instead, you’re free to select your own characters from your squad, complete with the levels and equipment set you left them at last time.

Each mission focuses on the strengths of a specific job class. Before you start, you’ll be briefed by the character within the Edy Detachment of the corresponding job class. Because this DLC was localized such a long time after the game’s release, you won’t be able to select English voices. But let’s face it, the Japanese voices are better anyway.

Susie’s Challenge: The Wildwood I – Scout Trial

In the scout trial, you’ll need to protect your base while eliminating sneaky enemies. The map is littered with patches of grass and branching paths. This is probably the easiest mission in the pack. The only tricky part is the boss unit in the end. Get near his gun and you’re toast. But take him down and you can earn his weapon: a high powered, short range rifle.

Jann’s Challenge: Naggiar Plains North – Lancer Trial

Being a challenge for lancers, it should come as no surprise that the mission is littered with tanks. But it’ll take more than just lancers to clear the challenge effectively. You must defend your base in the center while eliminating a well placed sniper, hidden shocktroopers and scouts, a ridiculous amount of tanks, and whatever other reinforcements show up before you capture their three bases.

Marina’s Challenge: The Wildwood II – Sniper Trial

This is quite possibly the trickiest challenge in the pack. At the start of the mission, you’ll have only two slots to deploy units. The goal is to prevent enemies from reaching their own base for several turns. If so much as a single unit reaches the base, it’s Game Over. The problem is that your base is isolated on the opposite side of a ravine as the enemy. And since snipers won’t reactively attack on the enemy’s turn, you’ll need to be extra discerning in who you choose to shoot.

Homer’s Challenge: The Warehouse District – Engineer Trial

Ah, my favorite challenge. This is the only challenge that takes place in the city instead of the wilderness. The objective is to get your tank from the south east corner to the north west corner. The problem is that your treads are broken and your engineer (and whoever else you deployed) is already at the north west corner. You have to get an engineer to fix the treads and send the tank back home. Visibility is low thanks to all the tall buildings and danger is waiting around every corner. It’s very well put together.

Edy’s Challenge: The Arboreal Wastes – Shocktrooper Trial

In the shocktrooper trial, Rosie is stuck on the left while your other units are on the right. You’ll each need to eliminate the enemies while making sure none of them get past your line. But if you finished the last DLC like me, you’ll have already unlocked Ruhm, a high power machine gun with near sniper-level range and accuracy, leaving Rosie with little to no problem fending for herself.

Edy Detachment Challenge: Barious Ruins – Tank Trial

Remember the map in the main game where you had to slow down a giant tank by knocking over walls of ancient ruins? Well, now they’re in the way of YOUR tank! You’ll have to blast them away while avoiding enemy fire as you attempt to get your tank to the destination on the opposite side of the map.

Final Thoughts

I found the lack of difficulty settings a bit disappointing, but the motivation to replay the missions is still strong since you’ll want to achieve the highest rank on each one. The addition of several new weapons to acquire from enemy units is a nice, unexpected touch.

While many, if not all of the missions use maps from the main story, the objectives, enemy and base locations, and other special circumstances make them so radically different that they are practically unrecognizable. Since each mission focuses on the strengths of a single class, they all have a very unique flavor giving the battles a great sense of variety. At less than a dollar per mission, I’d highly recommend the “Challenge of the Edy Detachment” pack to anybody hungering for more Valkyria Chronicles content before the sequel drops on our shores.

"Good thing this machine-gun/sniper rifle has a flamethrower on the end of it!"

It’s no secret that I love Valkyria Chronicles. Not only was it my favorite game of 2008, it was also my very first review here at Wing Damage. Long have I awaited for the promised downloadable content. Was it worth the wait and, more importantly, the price of admission?

Read on and decide for yourself!

3 separate packs of DLC were released simultaneously for $4.99 (US) a pop. I find it a bit strange that they are all equally priced when at least 2 of the packs have vastly differing amounts of content.

The shortest of the packs is the Edy’s Detachment mission. This mission was very obviously made to promote the new Valkyria Chronicles anime series that made it’s debut in Japan recently. The mission focuses completely on characters that are not part of the main plot, but have a larger role in the show. Interestingly, you don’t get to choose your units from a larger squad. You are stuck with the units you are given. In addition to this, if one of your units dies, you have no medics to bring them back. The units you start with must last you until the operation’s completion.

This map looked awfully familiar.  I’m nearly positive it was used in one of the side missions within the normal game. Even still, it is a unique mission with split objectives. At the start, you are simply trying to hold down a small area for 3 turns. The objective isn’t particularly hard, but is kept interesting since there is a variety of units wanting to take you down including multiple tanks and snipers. Once 3 turns have passed, you then have to make a specific character reach a destination while still protecting the original spot. I was happy to see the mission expand this way.

Edy’s Detachment wasn’t particularly difficult, but it still managed to keep me on my toes. Honestly, I think $5 is a bit steep for this mission, especially considering I don’t think the map was new, but it was still fun and I don’t regret my purchase.

Next up, we have the beefier pack entitled “Behind Her Blue Flame”. What surprised me is that this pack contains 4 missions. Your actions during the first mission determine whether you progress to one of two other missions. If you receive an “A” rank on all three of these missions, you are awarded a fourth mission as a bonus.

This pack puts you in control of the Empire. In each of the missions contained within, you will fight the Gallian Army (in the main story, you control the Gallian Militia). Most importantly, you can take full control of Selvaria Bles. For anybody that didn’t get far enough in the game to know this, she uses a gun called “Ruhm”. This can be described as a machine-gun with amazing accuracy and range. To make matters more ridiculous, Selvaria is considered a scout class, allowing her to cover an enormous distance. If you didn’t get your power fix enough from Ruhm, the bonus mission allows you take control of Selvaria in her Valkyrur form. This means you get to shoot lasers out of your space lance and blow through tanks and any unfortunate souls who happen to stand in a line with a single shot.

Though this pack isn’t particularly hard, beating 2 of the missions contained within unlocks Ruhm for use with one of your shock-troopers in the game’s normal campaign. Since all my shock-troopers are elite by this point, a flamethrower is also fashioned on to the end of it. This makes for one ridiculously amazing gun. I was able to take down 2 soldiers with full health in the same turn with this gun. However, even Ruhm couldn’t save me from the new “Expert” difficulty.

I can’t fully review the extra difficulty DLC because, frankly, I can’t get anywhere in it. When you start a New Game + on Valkyria Chronicles, a Hard mode becomes available. The Hard mode introduces new deployment locations as well as new mission objectives for all the skirmish battles. Expert mode takes those new missions, gets rid of both of your tanks, and then dumps a bucket of new enemies on top of the existing ones. When I started the first mission, I was in the center of the map with several mortars pointed at my cluster of soldiers and a sniper aiming at me from high atop a tower. There was also a bridge full of gatling turrets and a gobs of other enemies. My units dropped like flies.

The DLC description boasts the introduction of new weapons as well as mentioning something about new melee combat. Unfortunately, I just can’t survive very long. I don’t recommend skipping the Hard mode and going straight to Expert unless maybe you’re over-leveled. It did not work well for me.

I think “Behind Her Blue Flame” is the strongest of the packs. Not only do you get 4 missions out of it, but you are actually awarded an amazing gun for completing it. Though I don’t understand the pricing structure, I encourage giving more money to such an amazing game. After all, you wouldn’t want a sequel to be Japan-only, would you?

"Mario Tractors"

On a very special tenth episode of “Barrel Roll! – A Video Game Podcast”, we are once again joined by our good friend Wesley Johnson from InsulinFunk.net

We are also having a contest, the details of which are found at the end of the episode. More info is located after the break.

What we’ve been playing this week includes “Dragon Quest 4″, “Scene It? Box Office Smash!”, “HAWX”, the Wipeout HD patch, The Pitt (Fallout 3) and more.

Our NEWS section is very Wii focused, with discussion of the Wii Motion Plus on Virtua Tennis, Giga Mac in the new Punch-Out! and Konami’s new Wii-Ware racing game.

In “Let’s Talk About Stuff”, Patapon 2 and the future of the disc-less game system is pondered. Jesse also relates his experience at Sakuracon.

Finally, in “Movie Time”, several of us subjected ourselves to “Dragonball: Evolution”.

Download

RSS

iTunes

Show Links:
Jesse’s Sakuracon Pics
That Sakuracon Commercial
Insulin Funk Interview with Kieron Gillon
Space Quest Retrospective Outline

GIVEAWAY!

We put together a bunch of stuff we picked up from Emerald City ComiCon, including some posters, comics, pins, and more! At the end of episode 10, we tell you what to post in the comments section of this post. We will randomly pick a winner from all those that correctly post in regards to the contest in the comment section below. One entry per person, please.

Questions? Email us at podcast [at] wingdamage.com.

"View the latest sections of your disc, now available for purchase!"

In our modern age of online-capable gaming consoles, downloadable content (DLC) is becoming increasingly common. There’s no denying this fact. But is this a positive trend? On the outside, it would appear so. DLC allows developers to continually provide their users with new content for games that might otherwise be put back on the shelf quickly after their release. In theory, it’s a wonderful system to potentially add a great deal of longevity to a game over time. Unfortunately, developers don’t always use this concept in a way that’s fair to their users. That’s right. DLC has a dark side.

I remember when Beautiful Katamari came out for Xbox 360, several news sites were reporting that DLC that included entirely new stages were contained in a file too small to be the stages themselves. The files were most likely doing nothing more than unlocking existing content already on the disc. This wasn’t the first time a situation like this occurred, but it received added attention due to the fact that buying all the DLC would move the game from “budget title” status to the normal sixty dollar price tag. It was a game of deception.

Sadly, this kind of practice is becoming commonplace. Games are getting released the same day as their first DLC pack, at times. Things that in days past would be unlocked as a reward for your actions in the game, are now unlocked by how much extra money is in your wallet.

Worse still, DLC is even used sometimes to manipulate our actions. Soul Calibur IV had console “exclusive” characters. The Xbox 360 version had Yoda and the PS3 version had Darth Vader. Despite that there was clearly a space for the absent Star Wars character of your choice on the character selection screen, the game’s director, Katsutoshi Sasaki, states that they had no plans to bring the absent players to their respective versions through the use of DLC. People desperate enough to play as both Yoda and Vader bought both versions of the game. They were in for a surprise. Months later, new Soul Calibur IV DLC was released that contained the absent characters. This just happened to fill the suspicious empty spaces from earlier. Now why would they say they had no plans to do something if they already prepared for it in advance? Hmm.

Another example of this manipulation, though much less severe, is Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm. Their DLC packs are all free. Truly they must be generous to give us new content for free, right? First off let’s take a look at the content itself. Each new pack contains a new support character to be used in Vs mode.  So what’s wrong with that? Well, as you progress through the single player story mode, you will take on the role of several different characters in the battles. In some of these battles, your support characters are people that will later be released as DLC. All the DLC will do is allow you to use these support characters in Vs mode battles instead of the specific story mode battles featuring them.

What is the advantage of holding back this already existing content if no money is even exchanged for it? I wondered that myself, that is, until I read Dave’s article on used games. Think about it. If that content was unlocked through normal progression of the game, somebody could blow through the single player, unlock everything, and exhaust those new multiplayer features in a relatively short amount of time. After this, they might trade in the game for something new, allowing the next guy to pick up the used copy at a reduced price. As Dave pointed out in his article, the developer sees none of this money. If the developer lures the purchaser of their game to hold on to it because free DLC is coming, the amount of used copies on store shelves would be lessened.  Now it’s all coming together.

This is not to say that all DLC is bad. The rhythm genre, for example, has legitimately been able to provide its fans with new songs to rock out to as additional copyrights are acquired. Games like Little Big Planet are able to add entirely new gameplay mechanics such as the “paintinator” featured in the Metal Gear Solid pack. DLC can truly be a wonderful thing. But sadly, some developers are going to continue abusing this system of exchange and frankly, I don’t see a light at the end of that tunnel.