Posts Tagged ‘Beneath The Ashes’

This Post Is Mainly About Tomb Raider

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

Last weekend, in a bid to fill out my completion percentage, I decided to breath some life into stale releases with fresh downloadable content (DLC). For a couple of reasons I typically avoid DLC. By the time developers ship it I’ve long finished the game concerned and have moved onto something else. I also feel it’s rarely worth the extra cash, and accumulating everything I’ve spent on that one game generally leaves me thinking: “Wow, that was so not worth the £60 I’ve dumped on it”.

With the past few weeks, however, the completion force within me has been strong, and so I decided to revisit some of the older titles I had finished prior to the DLC. Because I had already whored Lara Croft for 1000 points in Underworld, I decided to chase after the additional 250 points. With it being a Tomb Raider game, I figured the extra Achievements probably wouldn’t be too hard to score.

Underworld has two expansions — Lara’s Shadow and Beneath The Ashes. Both are priced at 800 Microsoft Points, with a Gamerscore value of 125 Points each. Beneath The Ashes was the first to be distributed to Xbox Live, and so it was the first DLC I purchased. It was also the cause of controversy when a begrudged Crystal Dynamic’s employee divulged it was originally part of the retail game, only to be cut at a later point and re-branded as DLC. So, Crystal Dynamics are now charging extra for a level that was originally meant to be in the retail game. Cheeky, and just plain unethical.

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Posted in General Gaming | 5 Comments »

Pop a Cap on it, ‘yo

Monday, July 27th, 2009

I don’t own Halo 3, but if I did I’d have 1750 GamerPoints to chase. I thought Fallout 3’s 1450 worth of Achievements were bad, but no, Halo takes the hardcore biscuit. Remember when retail games capped at 1000? Arcade games at 200? It seems this was only to be the case in the 360’s infancy, back when gamers payed little notice to the fruitless digits tagging alongside their GamerTag.

Now developers deliver additional Achievements, usually in the form of Downloadable Content (DLC). Whatever the case, it’s to keep gamers coming back, to give us a bit of replay value for what we pay (though, more often than not, we also have to pay for the DLC). However, there’s also a degree of agitation, for me at least, that comes with each increase in cap.

You see, gaming can be an expensive hobby, and I don’t always feel comfortable spending significant amounts of money on it. Especially right now, I’m watching every spare penny, with any pocket money being invested into my business. For that reason I’ve found it useful trading/selling games I’ve completed and am no longer needing. In fact, I believe the pre-owned market is what makes high street retailer, GameStation, the most money, and is - on the flip side - the biggest cause of concern for developers.

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Posted in Rants, Xbox Live | 19 Comments »