Just after Sid Meier released a little game called Civilization, there came Colonization. To tell the truth, I tend to prefer this game over any of the Civilization games, and I’m not sure why. It’s just as complex and still offers a very open game world for you to play in. When it really gets down to it, it might just be the nifty background music that plays as you discover The New World and ravage it for your country’s own particular benefit, at least until you revolt. Either that, or the fact that I just like to discover strange new lands and make lots of money doing it.

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Tags: Retro, Retro Tuesday by Teh Bagder
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Various Nintendo DS deals, at least $5 off the MSRP of all.

Tags: Uncategorized by Teh Bagder
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A number of deals on Amazon.com right now for the Xbox 360.  These have also been loaded into the IATB Amazon Store.

Tags: Uncategorized by Teh Bagder
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While building the store lists for the IATB Amazon Store, I popped into the Playstation 3 section, and was presented with the above image. It might be a little small, so here it is at 1:1 screen size:

As you can see, the Xbox 360 version of GTA is leading the Playstation 3 version by 60:40 right now. That’s rather interesting because of a number of factors:

• These are preorder numbers from a single Internet retailer. They’re probably indicative of trends across the US though, even in the B&M stores.
• The GTA series was born on the PC, but then moved to console. It eventually became recognized as a major Playstation brand, with Xbox and PC ports coming out later than Playstation versions.
• GTA games have been system sellers in the past for the Playstation.
• Microsoft spent a lot of money securing advance rights on downloadable content from the GTA developers and stole a lot of Sony’s thunder in doing so.
• The Xbox 360 version may suffer from the fact that Microsoft is pushing for it to work across all versions of the 360, including the Core, which doesn’t come with a hard drive.
• There are certainly more Xbox 360s in the hands of consumers than there are PS3s.
• The price for both games is the same, but the price of the console isn’t. It’s still cheaper to get an Xbox 360 than it is to get a PS3, even with the price drops.
• The release date for both is October 16th. That’s a little less than 2 months away.
• Most journalists and analysts will focus on sales out of the gate, rather than over a year or so.

There’s also a whole lot of discussion going on at the Amazon comparison page.

My thoughts are this: GTA is one of those seminal brands that has a core following of players behind it. Most of these players will have played it on one platform and will continue to play it on that platform. The battleground really becomes generating sales to new gamers that haven’t played the game before, and this is where the 360 has the lead. Of course, the 360 also has a habit of dying on gamers, so this might affect things a little. Ultimately, sales of this game will be strong no matter what. Once the price drops by about 25% more people will pick it up and will play it. 

Keep in mind that these numbers can change. There’s still almost 2 months to the release date, and in the past the GTA franchise has sold systems. Tie this into the fire sale that Sony has had on the 60Gb and you might get a bunch of sales leading into October. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Tags: Opine, Uncategorized by Teh Bagder
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I’ve been messing around with Amazon.com and its aStore functionality. One of the cool things that it allows you to do is to make a virtual store populated by lists, which can be modified whenever they need to be and the store will dynamically reflect the items on the list.  I’m in the process of setting up a store that will allow me to lists good Amazon deals in one place.

The store can be found here, at least until I can upload the new theme for the IATB site and integrate the Amazon store directly into it. I’ll be populating it over the next day or so.

Tags: Administration by Teh Bagder
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I decided to go through Amazon.com and pluck out some good deals from a number of categories, and to try an experiment. There’s usually some decent stuff hidden in the catalog, so I ran a search through the Wii listings to see what kind of deals came up. The experiment side comes from trying a new layout for items; instead of simply having a list of items and prices, I’m going to use the pretty version that Amazon provides.

 I’m also going to change the format for this post, so let me know what you think about this type of listing as opposed to the more normal straight lists that I create.

Amazon has a number of features that I’m looking to use, including setting up an Amazon Store linked from this site that I can keep maintained with the deals that I find, allowing good deals to be added and bad ones to drop off. I can also follow up posting the newly found deals to the main IATB site.

I don’t want this site to simply become a front to an Amazon store, but I do want people to be able to see at a glance a bunch of good deals, and if many of the deals happen to be from Amazon, that’s not a bad thing, especially considering shipping is free for orders over $25.00.

Let me know what you think about this format. 

Tags: Uncategorized by Teh Bagder
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As today is Retro Tuesday, I’d like to send a Shout Out to Retro Remakes, a great blog concerned with retro games and gamers remaking theses games. In general blog posts point to other articles or games on other sites, but there are a few gems in the site, including their own Top 100 Games listing. If you’re interested in retro gaming, you’ll want to check it out.

Technorati Tags: retro

Tags: Shout-Outs, Web by Teh Bagder
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