Sheikah

The base price for a 160GB PS3 console at Sainsbury's is £160 here (possibly in-store too). Then it would be fairly easy to pick up UC3 somewhere for less than £40 to be under a total of £200. Not sure how long it will be that price for though.

Awesome. My main character in it is Skeith (good old .hack), I could help you run through some stages you wouldn't normally be able to tackle at your level to get you some of the early levels if you like. Can't recommend this game enough, was probably my favourite ever game on the gamecube.

Thanks for letting me know about this. All of you in this topic, fancy playing some PSO Blue Burst on the private Schthack servers? I'm willing to get back into it again, after all the PSO hype. For those who haven't gone on Schthack before, it's really easy to setup and free, and it's essentially the good old PSO we know and love with extras and server sided saving (greatly reduces hacking). You can download Blue Burst here, and signup while downloading here. This is a great opportunity too for those hearing of PSO2 that haven't really played the original much.

But that's assuming you're the best at graphic design (you're not), the best at coding (you're not), the best at publicity (you're not), the best at research (you're not), and more. The reason why you're not? Partly because you're trying to do all the things at once, a jack of all trades. Partly because people that are amazing at these things tend to have worked solely in that field for a long time. No offence intended Serebii, because I respect you, but you're coming across a bit arrogant.

Actually, the best of the best do delegate. Why become the best if you can't throw millions at a private island and live on it while grunts do your work for you?

No it isn't, while it might scare you to many uninvested casuals it looks arty, cool and modern. They've got their own selling USP which certainly helps bolster their 'cool' image. Personally though I don't like the stores.

Well that depends... on how hardcore an MMORPG you're playing. Some MMOs that are smaller like Phantasy Star Online don't require too much time and are pretty awesome. Whereas some attract that kind of antisocial nerd and require vast amounts of time, dedication and money.

You could always just explain you're Pokesexual, then go on to say why your Pokemon figurines glisten with such splendour.

Genuine lol moment for me.

It's still good to know that we have shops like GAME pay heating and lighting costs and passing this on to customers. Because if there's two things I know it's that that game disc boxes need both light and warmth.

Just tell her you're gay. She won't ask you any more questions.

Yeah I signed up for the beta too. Phantasy Star Online is one of my favourite games ever, it was truly ahead of its time. Really hope this is done right...

I got Oath in Felghana a few weeks back. It's decent, the voice acting is annoying as hell though. And I certainly wouldn't write home about it to be honest. If you want an absolutely amazing RPG, sign up a US account and download Chrono Cross onto your PS3 ($10, can buy these off ebay for 8 quid-ish). Stream it over remote play and play it that way, the game will utterly dwarf any RPG that was made for PSP.

Buy Final Fantasy VII Crisis Core or Dissidia instead. The latter isnt an RPG really but still heaps of fun.

I had the keyboard version which developed a major fault on 2 separate models. Got the smaller version which so far has been flawless, and page turns are quicker and smoother.

Watch it, it's amazing. Thought this episode was a good taster of things to come. Having read them all there's some scenes I can hardly wait to see.

To be fair to you I do understand that it's not necessarily the be all and end all if they introduce pay for goods, but seeing that the trade system worked so well on blue burst it would be a shame if they moved away from it.

It's just cheap. Having real money should have nothing to do with the money/items you have in the game. If someone is really prepared to throw loads of money at the game, even if it's in randomised packs they can shoot to the top quickly. In acquiring items this way they may otherwise not need to trade with others, harming the economy. But I've said all this already, and you seem to just be ignoring it. Notice how a few examples you had to buy a copy and subscribe for a while before they switched to free. They're offering it for download straight away. For a game that's not throwaway like an app, this is a serious amount of money that I imagine they'll subsidise by selling stuff for cash other than customisation items. But most importantly, I never said they couldn't make more money this way, you misunderstand. What I'm saying is that they will likely be offering more than customisation items, ie. things that help you gameplay-wise. I couldn't give a flying fuck if this was good for their profits; I'm not a shareholder and that won't affect me in any way. I'd rather you paid for the game and have a better gameplay experience, where people had to trade and party more with no dependence on buying stuff for cash. Trading on the console versions became fairly pointless due to the actions of dupers. I can categorically say that you'd be proven wrong if you downloaded PSO Blue Burst and played on the schthack servers (pretty much the standard way to play the old PSO). Unlike the original PSO all saving is server sided so duping is at least extremely difficult. Log on and have a look at the room names - a lot will either start with B>, S> or T> (Buy/sell/trade). The standard currency is photon drops rather than zeny, although people often trade weapons and armour too. The economy is important for a game in which your character can only find like an eighth of all the available stuff in their own game, to suggest otherwise is just silly.

But if it's the case again whereby you can only find a select number of items on your actual character then trading will be the way. Of course if people can just buy the items they want for cash, the incentive to trade with others is lessened. I know these are 'ifs' and 'maybes', in that they may not even sell weapons and the like, but if they did I know it would probably peeve a fair few who liked to put in hard work (yourself excluded). Skill and time invested are perfectly reasonable things to why people can outclass you, I just wouldn't be happy if the reason was instead plowing cash into the game. I would have no problem if paying for it was purely promotional, it's just I don't believe that would be financially feasible (at least not outside Japan). They're foresaking charging people to get a copy of the game, so £30-40 is written off straight away (although more customers will come to it if it's free so that's not entirely accurate). If it was purely non-battle related gimmicks I honestly don't see how they are going to cover the cost, considering most wouldn't pay a thing. Not if you had absolutely no real advantage from paying for it. Whichever way you look at it, even if it was using booster packs they gave away equipment it still wouldn't be fair and would introduce an element completely separate to working for your stuff. I think I'd probably have a hard time convincing you though since you weren't even aware of there being an economy in PSO.

No they haven't solved it, you overlooked my explanation of that. I said that either there would be a limited trade function (ie. can't trade the stuff you buy) or it would just outright affect the economy if they were tradable. Either way it's bad, as it either removes trade or devalues it. Even if trade is blocked only on items you pay for, people still have an 'easy route' that doesn't involve acquiring in game cash/items and they may be less likely to trade with others. Really though, I just hate the idea of buying your way in terms of devaluing real achievement. I'm well aware that little detail on this has so far surfaced, and I did suggest that the paid for stuff may not in fact be anything related to giving you a battle advantage. But then if that were the case, it seems utterly insane that they could make more money from this game from cosmetic add-on purchases (more than the £30 they may have expected from customers if they sold the game). But hey, this topic is for discussion. I'm all up for discussing logical ways in that they could be implementing paid for add ons that don't tend to outclass people who want to work for it.

Yeah, they did, until hackers destroyed it by duping a million Tsumikiri J swords (not even kidding). But of course, with the potential for it not be client side saving any more this could be pretty much negated. But if they're selling weapons for cash then that would really de-value hard earned stuff. A trading economy was (meant to be) at the very heart of PSO; every character had one of several colour IDs. This meant that a person with the skyly colour ID, for instance, could only find certain items and was not able to find most of the stuff in the game. So you'd basically have to trade with others, or create masses of other characters or play in other people's game a lot. Obviously your character would accrue many repeat items specific to your ID so you'd want to trade them with others. Yeah there was a safe trade system on the old PSO. No auction house but people could go AFK in a lobby with a message saying what they're selling. But also, no reason why they couldn't put one in these days given the idea is now out there. It may be more financially successful but I think it makes for a worse gameplay experience, personally. At least for an online game that is meant to have an economy. Really though, I'm not sure how they'd make more money than if they sold the actual game; this isn't available to as many people as with phones (unlike game apps); at least not the main game title that'll be on the Vita/PC.

It's not a problem unless it's online, which it is. Likely trade would be limited as a result of this, else people would sell you a Raging Boner Axe + 2 for 10 real pounds to undercut the £15 cost if you bought it from an NPC. Even if they found some workaround, there's no doubt it would harm the in-game economy in that loot would be worth less due to being able to buy it. Or whatever they're selling. And it's a bit of a cheap way out. Of course, if it was just stuff like costumes you could buy then that wouldn't be as bad, but I can hardly see them making more money than the £30 they could have charged each customer had they charged for the game. Oh well. We'll see. To be fair, PSO originally had no subscription and no charge for items. Seeing as you only need to connect to 3 others at a time and one person could be host, I don't see why they would have needed to charge a subscription when it could be made possible using regular PSN (aside from the lobby). It's not like MMORPGs that usually charge to have massive servers (with PSU it was obvious greed).

Good lord..

Then you set a reserve price (and postage is an extra cost you add on for the customer); either way you earn a lot more than if you sell it to GAME. They're just trying to take you for a ride.