Microtransactions have been around for years. But with more and more games adopting the free to play business model, they're as common as ever. From Facebook to Steam, they're everywhere. But instead of complaining about how bad some of these companies are using microtransactions, I'd like to talk about some ways they're being done right.

The first example of a good use of microtransactions that comes to mind is Team Fortress 2. In TF2, you can obtain items by a random drop while playing on a server. With them, you can turn them into scrap metal and combine them with other items to make specific items. Additionally, you can trade with other players for items you want. But, if you don't want to wait to eventually get the items needed to craft what you want, you can buy them in the Mann Co. store for a fee.



The reason I find TF2's system to be done so well is the fact that the game doesn't force you to buy items. The game is 100% enjoyable whether you buy stuff or not. They're not necessary to play the game at all. Plus, buying items is really simple when using your Steam account, which makes it easier for Valve to take my money.

Another good example is Star Trek Online. Recently going free to play, the game has also adopted microtransactions. There are a few things I don't agree with, like limited chat and guild creation, but overall the restrictions for being a free player aren't bad. There are the standard things you can buy from their store, like more character slots and inventory space. The awesome things in the STO shop are the extra ships you can buy. They all, for the most part, have the same stats as the ships you can buy and earn during regular gameplay. The special thing about these ships is they're modeled after ships from the Star Trek franchise. In fact, one of the ships I ended up buying myself was a refit of the NX-01 from Enterprise. It gives me no advantage over the other ships, it just looks cool.



These two games are only a couple of several out there that I feel do things right. If the companies out there that used microtransactions for their games for fun things, like Team Fortress 2 and Star Trek Online do, people would be more inclined to spend money. Locking down a game and only giving partial access to free players is just an awful way to make people to want to spend money in your game. Make it fun, inviting, and easy. And damnit, stop taking so much of my money, Valve!

Once upon a time there was a spaceman that everybody loved named Commander Shepard. He flew around space in his spaceship called The Normandy, which was named after a guy named Norman who fought on a beach in World War II.



Shepard flew around space fighting Humanity's enemies. He even shot Voldemort with a gun, because that good for nothing Harry Potter couldn't do it.



But one day, the people who loved Shepard suddenly stopped loving him. "We demand something better," they said.



This made Commander Shepard sad. He had spent years saving humanity and pleasing people, but the people he fought to save and please were no longer pleased.



It was then when he came up with a brilliant idea: "Cake," he exclaimed to himself. "Everyone loves cake!" So he and the crew of the Normandy made cake for everyone.



It was then, when people all around the world started loving Shepard again. And they used all the energy and effort they'd been using on hating Shepard, and cured cancer, AIDS, World Hunger, war, and all the other problems that plagued mankind. That day, they stopped being regular people, and all became Shepard themselves.



THE END

HD collections. Re-releases of last generation games on current generation consoles. Some think HD collections are great, while others think of them as a quick cash grab from publishers. But with current trends it’s looking like they’re here to stay. After thinking of the matter myself, I’ve come up with a few pros and cons for HD collection re-releases.


Pros

Your favorite games, now in HD. – This one is a no brainer. Last generation consoles didn’t have high definition, but current generation consoles came with HD built in. Not to mention HDTV’s have become fairly common in households today. So instead of playing a standard definition game scaled up to fit on an HDTV, why not get it in HD? The HD collection games have been reworked to scale properly to HD resolutions, and a number of them have also gotten their textures and models reworked to look a little better than their last generation incarnations. On top of that, games that were held back by last-gen consoles, such as Shadow of the Colossus, can now be viewed in the way the developers meant for them to be viewed.

A second chance. – Jak and Daxter is one of my favorite platformers for the PlayStation 2. While I never got around to playing Jak 2 and Jak 3, I always wanted to. Now days it’s harder to find copies of some last-gen games, due to them no longer being printed. But with the Jak and Daxter HD Collection, I now have another chance to pick up the rest of the games. On top of that, I own a bunch of PlayStation 2 games, but don’t own a PlayStation 2 or a PlayStation 3 with backwards compatibility. So when I really wanted to play Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, I couldn’t. But now that I own the HD Collection, I can play Snake Eater once again. What a thrill! With darkness and silence through the night.

Multiple games, one low price. – The HD collections normally come with two or more games from a franchise. So instead of one full length game, you’re getting a few. On top of that, the HD collections are normally at a price lower than a brand new game, normally going for around $40 to $50. A bargain, if you ask me.

New content and features. – With some of the HD Collections, they’ve received new content from the developers. Take Peace Walker from the Metal Gear Solid collection. Not only is Peace Walker on consoles for the first time, but it also introduced Kojima’s Transfarring, where you can transfer your save data from the PS3 to the PSP, and vice versa. Other games have also seen new additions, like the Sly Collection’s PlayStation Move minigames. Sometimes the new content isn’t worthwhile, but it’s still new content.



Cons

New content and features. – While I named this as a pro, it can also be a con. For instance, look at the upcoming Silent Hill HD Collection. For some odd reason, Konami decided to re-record all the voice work in Silent Hill 2 and Silent Hill 3. While I feel the voice acting in Silent Hill 2 wasn’t the best, I also don’t feel it needed to be changed. And if they were re-recording the voices to have a higher quality recording, why not get the original voice actors to portray their roles again? Since the original announcement, Konami has said that the original voice acting will be in Silent Hill 2 again, but I still find it odd for them to do that. And the PS Move content I mentioned for the Sly Collection? Yeah, it's new content, but it was just slapped in there to make use of the PS Move.

New system, new problems. – Now I’m not trying to be a console fanboy here, but when a game was originally released for the PS2, and it’s ported over to the 360, you can run into some problems. Take the Metal Gear Solid collection for instance. Metal Gear Solid 2, 3, and Peace Walker all originally came out for the PlayStation family. So the migration of controls over to the PS3 was painless. But the 360 has a different control scheme, and some players had quite a bit of trouble adjusting to the controls of the 360, whether they originally played on the PS2 or not. Plus, every one of the PS2 and PS3's controller buttons were analog, while most of the 360's aren't. Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 made very good use of those features on the PS2 controller. So using these controls on the PS3 is easy compared to the 360. However, you won't come across this problem with too many games. Just the ones that used the special features of the different controller.



That’s basically it for my pros and cons. I find there are more pros to HD re-releases compared to cons. And while yeah, publishers may be using these collections as a cash grab, at least they're releasing some of the best games from the last generation and not just shoveling out everything they can as fast as possible. Have any pros or cons of your own? Let me know in the comments!

Those of you who listen to Podtoid may remember a contest held a few months ago to write an Alien themed haiku to win Aliens Infestation. I managed to be one of the lucky winners with my keen haiku writing skills. Well when I was in San Francisco for the Destructoid Show meetup last weekend, I told Max Scoville one of the haikus I rejected.

Chicken shit outfit
Game over man, game over
Rest in peace, Hudson

This got Max and I talking, and we eventually came up with an awesome idea: Bill Paxton Valentines. So without further ado, here they are. Billentines!











Happy Billentine's Day everyone!

As you may or may not have seen or heard, on Friday, February 3rd, The Destructoid Show had their first ever live show in front of a live audience! I was there in attendance for the show, and I got to play a few PlayStation Vita games as well.

First off, the show was really fun. Max and Tara kept their usual charm, even while being in front of a live audience. The first part of the show was like their regular news segments they do every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The second part of the show had Max, Tara, and several other Revision3 hosts talking about the PlayStation Vita and some of the different games they had to offer at the Vita Hill Social Club.

If you haven’t watched the whole show yet, do so! You’ll see yours truly at several points, including when Tara gave me a uDraw tablet and a couple games and Max says I’m cosplaying as him. Watch it here!



The Vita Hill Social Club was a really nice place. They had a couple PS3 stations, one of which you could try out the cross-platform compatibility of Wipeout, while the other had Uncharted 3 playing on those Sony 3D split screen TV’s. As for the Vitas, they had a menu of games that you could choose games to play from. The staff would stop by every so often and ask if there was a game you’d like to play, and then bring you a Vita with the game you wanted to play installed on it.

I didn’t play with the Vita’s main UI much, but I did like what I saw of it. All of the menus are touch controlled, which is kind of a surprise at first. But the way the UI is laid out, it all ends up working pretty well being touch controlled. As for the Vita itself, I was afraid that with all the buttons and sticks that it would end up being bulky. I was surprised to find that it actually fit pretty well in my hands and it wasn’t too much to handle.



As for the games, I checked out four different games: Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Wipeout 2048, Sound Shapes, and Reality Fighters. Uncharted was pretty fun. I wasn’t very excited to play it only because I had never played an Uncharted game before, so it was overall a new experience for me. It played pretty much how I expected Uncharted to play, with some touch controls thrown in like having to swipe the screen to cut a sheet up that was blocking my path. Wipeout was, well, Wipeout. The game was fun, but it wasn’t anything new. I expected it to have accelerometer controls, but when I tried those it didn’t work. It was most likely a control setting turned off by one of the previous users. Sound Shapes was neat, but was also kind of boring. There wasn’t much of a challenge in the game until near the end of the demo. I think the full game may be a little more fun, since the demo was trying to ease me into the challenge of the whole game.

Reality Fighters was the most interesting game I played. I started out with making a new character using my face. I then added costume pieces, picked a fighting style, picked a stance, and made a few other customizations. I played through the story mode for a while, and it was pretty neat. The only thing I didn’t like about Reality Fighters was the fact that the overall camera used an augmented reality twist to it. When you start a match you have to press the X button to “lock in” the characters. If you move the Vita, the camera moves. If you move it in a direction too much you can’t see what is happening. It’s not too bad, but with a handheld device where you’re moving it around and pressing buttons, the camera took a little getting used to.



Near the end of my time with Reality Fighters, Anthony Carboni came up and said we were going to go to a bar and drink all the beers. This was a challenge I needed to take part in. I followed him and several other Revision3 personalities to the bar where we attempted to drink all the beers. I didn’t drink all the beers, but I sure got drunk.



Overall, the Vita felt like a solid portable that has a lot of potential. None of the games sold me on the device, but they were fun nonetheless. My only concern for the Vita is that it has the cameras and the front touchscreen and back touchpad and accelerometer and probably a coffee maker somewhere in there. Reason this concerns me is because I feel that developers may either over utilize the device and make games that are overall confusing to play and control, or just make basic games that don’t use any of the extras the Vita has to offer. I hope I’m wrong about that, but we’ll see in the coming months when the Vita is released and more games come out for it.

As for the event itself, I had a great time, and it was one of the best days/nights out I’ve had in a long while. It was great to see Max and Tara again for the first time since PAX, and it was also great to meet some of the other Revision3 people like Anthony Carboni and Zac Minor. If The Destructoid Show and Revision3 decide to have another meet and greet event in the future, I will definitely be there.

This year I took it upon myself to make my own Christmas cards and send them out to friends and family. It took me a week or so to think up of what I wanted on the cards, how big to make them, etc. I ended up making a single sided 8.5" wide card with a gaming themed picture and pun on the front. Since I wasn't able to send out cards to everyone this year, I figured I'd share what I made here on the C-Blogs. So without further ado, here they are!



Coming up with a Skyrim themed card was hard. While the image was easy, writing a a pun related to Skyrim on the front was the part that stumped me. I eventually came down to making it into a dragon shout. I wanted to put a description of the shout on the card like the shouts in Skyrim, but I also wanted to keep it simple. The description was going to be something like "Spreads holiday cheer across Skyrim for 24 hours."



The Zelda one was another easy design, yet hard to write card. My roommate (who has recently made himself known around here as Shredded Angel) came up with the perfect quote, and I ran with it. I had two designs, one of my face being regular, and the other being watercolored. The watercolor seemed to be the best choice, since it fit in with the card best. Unfortunately it's not as easy to see on the digital version as it is on the printed version.



Half-Life 2 is my favorite game ever, so why not make a card based on it? I basically just took my header image and put a Santa hat over the hat in the image, and put the quote on. This one was the easiest to do. The quote came to me almost immediately.

And that's it for the cards! I'm hoping to make some new ones next year and to be able to send them out to more of my Dtoid community peeps! Hope you all like them!