So, at the pace I’m going (I passed the infamous suspended level two days ago, without the help of my sister), I’m afraid I’ll be completing Ratchet and Clank before the end of April. So I’m looking for other games to play in the next months.
It’s interesting how the only way for me to be quite productive in my work is to stop and play games. I suppose this is what a stress relieve should be, rather than trying to relax by writing a new software.
Anyway, what really baffles me is the price for PS3 titles in Italy, especially when I compare it with Amazon’s prices (yes I know Amazon is even more evil, but allow me to be pragmatic on this, I’ll show you why…).
I’ll take two titles I’m actually looking forward to buy soonish: Unreal Tournament 3 and Devil May Cry 4. Of the latter I’ve played a demo and it looks seriously cool (and Mark confirmed it beforehand too), of the first I don’t need one, UT was one of my favourite games, and it is a very nice way to relieve anger, rather than simple stress.
They would cost me respectively €75.99 and €79.99. A lot, which would mean I wouldn’t buy either for a couple of months and maybe buy one of them in the summer. Or look for a second hand copy of them.
Straight from my wishlist, instead, the above titles cost £29.98 and £24.96, which standing from Google’s conversion are €38.52 and €32.07. This is almost half and less than half the price in Italy! It’s also subverted the pricing, as DMC4 costs less than UT3.
The same pricing difference seem to apply to all games. It’s a huge difference, and you can’t simply explain it as the Amazon’s copies not being translated: I’d expect all games to be released in a multi-language disk; and I see similar difference on some Nintendo DS titles I know are multilingual (Yu-Gi-Oh games). I sincerely hope I read it right on most sites that PS3 games are either not region-locked or simply region-locked with DVD-style regions, which would mean Italy and UK being on the same Region, as that would really save me a huge amount of money, to have the same playing material.
On a totally unrelated (for this blog post, but much more related to this blog) note, Tuesday I ’ll go shopping for the cables, and for a WiFi card. I’m not sure what I’ll pick up, I’ll see if I can find some very very cheap card that could be expected to work in Linux. If it works I’ll have my Gentoo box online Tuesday night, so I’ll be hacking (even though I’d be working from the laptop as console), you’ll have to wait me for my return possibly at the end of the week, when the “new” office will be up and running. I’d rather not start moving this way the router and all the network stuff before moving in the furniture, but I can bring here enterprise’s case and the UPS for the time being.
Ah, and somehow Parallels messed up Bootcamp’s partition on my Mac, so I’ll have to recover it. Luckily booting bootcamp directly works fine so I don’t have to waste time for my job to continue. Good thing I did change the setting of that two weeks ago. I’m also using a partition on the external drive so I don’t waste too much of my internal disk’s space for Windows…
Have you had a look at Play-Asia.com? They have a UT3 and DMC4 combo pack.
when ps3 will follow into psp footsteps (which means, that people will totally unlock it with custom firmware) prices wil drop like hell.btw did you tinker with psn yet? there is some free stuff to try, maybe also for ps3. i have only psp and ps2 and some psp titles are really cheap via network service.
I don’t know if it is valid for games as well, but if you’ll look at books their is a very similar difference between the UK and Holland.The reason in that case is that in Holland it is not allowed to sell books cheaper then the suggested retail-price to protect bookshops. England doesn’t have such a restriction, which often results in far cheaper prices when buying online or in the supermarket.As you can see in the case of Unreal Tournament….Amazon has reduced it from the suggested retail price of GBP 50. This was indeed ~75 euro a couple of months ago. Note that the pound has been falling a lot against the euro, so even more attractive to buy it from Amazon.ps) If you buy multiple items in one go, the shipment costs from the UK are not that high. Well worth it I think.
In Germany (amazon.de), UT3 is €52.95 and DMC 4 is €47.95. So it’s kind of a higher middle ground.The interesting thing is to see the prices of UT3 over the different consoles. Also, the special editions or US versions sometimes are cheaper than the “local version”.I seriously don’t get the pricing on games anymore.
BT, I had to rule it out quite a long time ago, as they don’t ship most of their catalogue to Europe, that combo pack included :/Yoshi, I’m afraid that PSN titles are limited to smaller games. I certainly don’t see a 50GB game to be downloaded through the net ;)And moesaji’s point can actually be the good reason for all this, I’ll dig deeper into that, if it holds true for Italy too!