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Pojo's Vs.
Magic |
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Money for Nothing By Pook
Greetings
all. Well, it was bound to happen –
I’m actually writing a 2nd
article! I’ve been out of the VS. loop for a little while
(mostly due to work related issues), but recently, my
interest has been greatly re-sparked. Mostly,
this has been due
to my anticipation of this summer’s Spider-man 3, the
new Marvel Team Up set (which, unfortunately, I was unable
to attend the Sneak Preview event), and the new Marvel
Trading Card video game installments. This week, Konami
finally unveiled the first edition of their online
card-battle game, and as excited as I am to pick up copy for
the PSP, I’m finding myself in a tricky situation.
Now I plan of giving a full
review of the actual game once I get my hands on it – at
this point, I’ve played about 10 minutes of the online-only
PC version, so I have no real thoughts one way or another
just yet. But in doing my research for the product, I have
come to find out that we will not just be shelling out money
for the actual game, but for the virtual cards themselves.
Initially, I was lead to believe that cards obtained in the
single-player campaign could then be used for the online
mode – this is not the case. It turns out that the game is
essentially two different versions in one – the single
player mode, and the online mode. The cards won in single
player don’t carry over into your online account, and to
make matters worse, all of the cards you are given online
are a pretty standard 60 card starter deck. So how to you
get new cards? You have to buy packs. With real money.
When Konami announced that this
game would be online, some people speculated that there
would be some sort of monthly fee to play, a la MMORPGs such
as World of Warcraft and the like. But then Konami assured
the fans that this would not be the case. They told us that
you would be able to purchase cards online to use in your
decks, but they neglected to mention that this is the only
way to get new cards (that is, aside from trading). Their
online store sells “points”, with their going rate of $10
for 40 points, and roughly 10 points per pack. The packs
you buy will contain the cards from the appropriate set, and
they will be transferred into your account. This idea just
doesn’t sit right with me. We will be paying real life
money for virtual cards for about the same price that we can
buy real cards. So essentially, we are paying for nothing.
After I heard that this was the
case, I tried to rationalize using my hard earned money to
buy virtually nothing. In the past, I’ve been burned by
monthly fees for MMORPGs (damn you, Everquest!), but at
least with those sorts of games, you’re paying for the
service, and in doing so, you are free to go ahead and play
the way you want to. Similarly, their Yu-Gi-Oh! Online was
available as a free download, and the points that you bought
were your entry fee (1 point for a single duel, 3 for a
match duel), but you were at least
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m dying to play this game. Konami is being good enough to offer a free PC download that contains the full realm of online play, but a severely limited single player mode. But I’ve been planning on picking up the PSP version since the game was announced. So this means that I’ll have to pay not only for the full game, but additional costs on top of that for online purposes – is that too much of Konami to ask of us? Does anyone else feel as if we’ll be paying for nothing concrete? Let me know how you feel about this – emails are always appreciated. Until next time.
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awarded
cards for winning. I almost feel like Konami is bilking us
for even more money by insisting we buy virtual packs, with
no assurance that we will eventually get the card or cards
we desire. I’m not claiming that they are going to cheat us
out of rare cards, but at least with the actual packs, we
have some sort of odds printed on the foil. And if you want
to make a trade for a harder to obtain card, you’re going to
need more to offer than just your starter deck, so it looks
like you’ll have to pitch in a little bit of money for
packs, even if it is just for trade fodder. My question is
simple – are we really paying for nothing?