tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-221689372024-03-08T13:48:20.056-08:00Whicken's BlogAn eclectic collection of musings and imagination.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.comBlogger117125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-11833489465292939552011-10-25T17:46:00.001-07:002011-10-25T17:51:20.455-07:00Top 100 Christmas Songs<div class="entry"> <p>An old favorite post of mine from a since retired blog, I hereby offer the 100 most popular Christmas songs according to MusicDNS as of Dec 15, 2006. Popularity is based on how likely someone is to have at least one version of this song in their collection. On the old blog, traffic would start coming from organic searches looking for this information right when Thanksgiving started, up until Christmas day itself. We'll see how long it takes search engines to index this repost, and whether it has the same appeal.</p>
<p>In the meantime, if you're here looking for Christmas music, enjoy! (You might also enjoy this list of <a href="http://whicken.blogspot.com/2007/12/top-performers-of-favorite-christmas.html">Top Performances of Favorite Christmas Songs</a>)
</p><p></p><pre>1. Silent Night
2. White Christmas
3. The Christmas Song
4. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas
5. Winter Wonderland
6. Jingle Bells
7. O Holy Night
8. Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
9. I’ll Be Home For Christmas
10. Silver Bells
11. Sleigh Ride
12. The First Noel
13. Joy To The World
14. Blue Christmas
15. Away in a Manger
16. Carol Of The Bells
17. Ave Maria
18. Frosty the Snowman
19. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
20. Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree
21. Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!
22. The Little Drummer Boy
23. God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
24. O Little Town Of Bethlehem
25. Little Drummer Boy
26. Hark! The Herald Angels Sing
27. O Come All Ye Faithful
28. Jingle Bell Rock
29. Santa Baby
30. Deck the Halls
31. We Wish You A Merry Christmas
32. What Child Is This?
33. It Came Upon A Midnight Clear
34. Angels We Have Heard On High
35. Last Christmas
36. I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus
37. Please Come Home For Christmas
38. The Twelve Days Of Christmas
39. Auld Lang Syne
40. Feliz Navidad
41. All I Want For Christmas Is You
42. O Tannenbaum
43. Do You Hear What I Hear?
44. Merry Christmas Baby
45. We Three Kings
46. Little Saint Nick
47. Greensleeves
48. Here Comes Santa Claus
49. Good King Wenceslas
50. Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town
51. Adeste Fideles
52. The Holly And The Ivy
53. Let It Snow
54. I Saw Three Ships
55. Do You Hear What I Hear
56. It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year
57. It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas
58. Christmas Time
59. God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen
60. The Christmas Waltz
61. Mary’s Boy Child
62. This Christmas
63. Baby, It’s Cold Outside
64. A Holly Jolly Christmas
65. What Child Is This
66. Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer
67. Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)
68. Merry Christmas, Baby
69. Christmas Eve (Sarajevo 12/24)
70. Step Into Christmas
71. Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow
72. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer
73. In Dulci Jubilo
74. Go Tell It On The Mountain
75. Run Rudolph Run
76. Christmas Song
77. Oíche Chiún (Silent Night)
78. Happy Xmas (War Is Over)
79. What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?
80. Silent Night, Holy Night
81. Do They Know It’s Christmas
82. When A Child Is Born
83. Coventry Carol
84. Walking In The Air
85. You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch
86. I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day
87. Christmas Time Is Here
88. Christmas Wrapping
89. Merry Xmas Everybody
90. Wonderful Christmastime
91. 12 Pains of Christmas
92. O Christmas Tree
93. I Believe In Father Christmas
94. Christmas Day
95. Lonely This Christmas
96. My Favorite Things
97. Oh Holy Night
98. I Wonder as I Wander
99. Pretty Paper
100. Merry Christmas Darling </pre> </div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-83802407677362856042011-10-24T20:22:00.000-07:002011-10-24T20:25:15.213-07:00And This Is Number Three<p>PCWorld rates Scorched Earth the #3 MSDOS game of all time. While I'm justly flattered, I think there's some pretty stiff competition in that list.<p>
<p><a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/241668/the_10_greatest_msdos_games_of_all_time.html">10 Greatest MSDOS Games of All Time</a></p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-58707116717486331622011-08-04T23:01:00.000-07:002011-08-04T23:07:41.074-07:00Before there was Scorched Earth...<p>Hey look... it's a mini-meme: <a href="http://www.reddit.com/search?q=scorched+earth">Before there was Scorched Earth...</a></p>
<p>Personally, I'd go with: Before there was <a href="http://www.touchgunner.com/gunwars">Gun Wars</a>... there was <a href="http://www.whicken.com/scorch">Scorched Earth</a>.</p>
<p>The original launch of Gun Wars didn't get most of the good stuff we had planned, but development is running on this game again, and I hope to start releasing updates soon which show some of the directions this game is moving in.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-51936840562313716922011-08-02T22:20:00.000-07:002011-08-02T22:28:37.964-07:00Have you made the flip?<p>If you've tried Lion, the newest version of OS X, you've probably noticed that the scroll motion is opposite everything you've trained yourself to do. If you're like me, you might have found this pretty disorienting.</p>
<p>I stuck with it for a few hours, trying to undo muscle memory, and then switched back. However, my brain was already half in transition, so I decided to press forward. The paradigm is now more focused on the page, and less on the scrollbars, and I think it's going to end up being the right decision.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, I still have to use some Macs running Snow Leopard. If you've flipped like I have, you might find this tool useful:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/37872/scroll-reverser">Scroll Reverser</a></p>
<p>This is a simple program to do the flip on earlier versions of OS X, and just might make your life a little bit easier. It did mine.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-44827600352687088342009-08-18T17:33:00.000-07:002009-08-18T17:34:54.555-07:00Welcome, GoogleNine days after updating the <a href="http://www.whicken.com/scorch">Scorched Earth</a> web site, Google is the first search engine out of the gate to start sending traffic to the new URL instead of the old page, which is now a redirect. Congratulations, Google!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-68870664414794326252009-08-09T14:15:00.002-07:002009-08-09T14:18:30.848-07:00Web Site Changes<p>Just a quick note: the official Scorched Earth home page has moved from <a href="http://classicgaming.gamespy.com/">ClassicGaming</a> to my own site, <a href="http://whicken.com">whicken.com</a>. Thanks to ClassicGaming for hosting this for many years. I'm hoping to aggregate a bit more of the information scattered across a few locations into whicken.com over the next few months, but don't expect anything to happen too quickly.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-57144408599303454672009-03-10T19:22:00.000-07:002009-03-10T21:10:59.958-07:00Whicken's Greatest Hits<p>From time to time, I check Google Analytics for the blog here. It's
not too exciting, typically sitting around 20 visitors per day.</p>
<p>Although there aren't tons of posts here to wade through, there are a
few posts which do attract the lion's share of traffic. Under the
assumption that those are the subjects people are most interested in
hearing about, I will dedicate the next several posts to further
exploration of what I call my <b>Greatest Hits</b>.</p>
<p>Which is appropriate, since one of the most popular blog posts I've
ever done was actually over on the <a href="http://blog.musicip.com">Hear Here</a> blog, back in December of
2006. This post covers the <a href="http://blog.musicip.com/top-100-christmas-songs/">top 100
Christmas songs</a>. Every year, right around Thanksgiving, traffic
starts going up for this page - getting stronger and stronger until
December 24th. On the 26th of December, the traffic goes back to
zero.<p>
<p>In 2006, that page got 355 hits.<br/>
In 2007, that page got 4,095 hits.<br/>
In 2008, that page got 6,669 hits.</p>
<p>On this blog, the most similar item comes in ranked at number 7, my <a href="/2006/02/valentines-day-playlist.html">Valentine's Day
playlist</a> from Feb 2006. Although not nearly as popular, it does
get a small spike every February (and here's a hint - don't play it
for your Valentine's sweetheart unless you're breaking up).</p>
<p>So, what are the other <b>Greatest Hits</b> for Whicken's Blog? Stay
tuned and find out. And just maybe I'll create some new favorites...</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-40941707455128256412009-02-27T21:08:00.000-08:002009-02-27T21:21:05.993-08:00Let's call a spade a spade<p>I've been following the new administration more closely than I have politics in the past, due to the new white house blog. Kudos for that. One bit of political double speak dribbled through today, though, from the Office of Management and Budget. At issue here is a proposal to limit charitable deductions made by the extremely wealthy. Regardless of how one might feel about the proposal, it's <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/blog/09/02/27/TheBudgetandCharitableDonations/">double speak like this</a> that makes me unhappy:</p>
<blockquote>Third, there’s a question of fairness. Non-profits play a critical role in our society (indeed, I have worked at several of them in the past). But let’s look at how the tax code treats two different contributors to a non-profit. If you’re a teacher making $50,000 a year and decide to donate $1,000 to the Red Cross or United Way, you enjoy a tax break of $150. If you are Warren Buffet or Bill Gates and you make that same donation, you get a $350 deduction – more than twice the break as the teacher.</blockquote>
<p>So, let's unravel that.</p>
<p>Under the current system, if you donate to a non-profit, then you don't pay taxes
on that money. It's more or less like you never earned it. In the first example, the teacher would pay $150 taxes on the $1000, and gets that $150 back. Warren would have paid $350 on the same $1000, and so gotten his $350 back.</p>
<p>While on a strictly numerical level you could say Warren got twice as much back as the teacher, it's only because he paid twice as much up front. Calling that "a question of fairness" seems to me completely preposterous.<p>
<p>If the real issue is that the country needs more money, and the only people that can afford to pay for it are the extremely wealthy, then let's just call a spade a spade, and add another higher tax bracket. Games like this just complicate the tax code, and serve no real purpose other than to create a shell game for government revenue.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-59407426252551076632009-02-15T09:39:00.001-08:002009-02-15T09:41:45.051-08:00Now with extra brainsJust enabled a new widget for the blog: <a href="http://www.outbrain.com/">outbrain</a>. This lets you rate your favorite posts, and find other stuff based on your prior ratings, and the content of the posts you like (or something like that). You can see the widget right under this post. My hope is this will help make the blog more useful to people who are just dropping in to look for a particular topic.
Enjoy!Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-18751094038688964032009-01-07T14:06:00.000-08:002009-01-07T14:11:48.827-08:00My Tips For Selling on Amazon<p>Although I've only recently started selling things through
Amazon, I think it's been a productive week. In this post,
I'd like to pass on a few more tips.</p>
<p>First up, a quick status report. In less than one week, I've
posted 134 items. Of those, 47 have now sold. This leads to the
first tip on this post (which is an obvious one, but may be useful for
new sellers).</p>
<p><b>Tip #1</b>: If you are going to sell more than 40 items per
month, sign up as a Pro Seller. Normally Amazon will charge an extra
99 cents per sale - paying 39.99 per month waives this fee. If you
aren't sure, you can wait and play it safe - but if you're going for
volume, go Pro.</p>
<p>I attribute most of my success to the quality of my collection
(my CDs are all in very good condition), and to my method for listing.
As mentioned earlier, I only list items where I can profitably list
at the new lowest price. This keeps items which are worthless from
cluttering up my store, and makes sure that people looking for used
CDs will find mine first.</p>
<p>The interesting thing is that I'm not the only one doing this (naturally).
After about a day, almost 30% of my inventory is no longer listed at
the lowest price. The marketplace is actually more dynamic than
it might seem from just browsing the Amazon site - there's a fair
amount of competition driving prices down. If you want a used CD,
but aren't in a rush, wait a few days and it might be cheaper. On the
other hand, cheap items sell fast, so you may risk losing an item by waiting.
</p>
<p><b>Tip #2</b>: Review your inventory regularly to make sure your
listings are competitive. In my case, I do so about once a day.
Generally I'm perfectly happy to drop a few cents or a nickel to get
the lowest price. For a high proft item, I'll gladly drop a buck. On
the other hand, when I see someone competing with a price too low for
my preferences, I'll review other offers, and sometimes bring my price
up - once the competitor sells this puts me in a good position for the
next customer.</p>
<p>I'd also like to note that Amazon has really excellent support for
their sellers. Just push a button on the web site, and you will get a
phone call from their support immediately. This bypasses the usual
security questions since you are logged in to your account to initiate
the call. All the support people I have talked to were very friendly
and helpful. So, kudos to Amazon. If you have any questions, feel
free to call them.</p>
<p>If you're interested in buying quality used CD's, please check out
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/shops/whicken">my store front</a>.</p>
<p>Finally, I've found a new outlet for those CDs which I just can't
get any value for no matter what - promotional CDs, overstocked junk,
whatever. These are going to go to a local artist, and be recycled
into various art projects. If I get a chance to see any interesting
pieces created out of the donations, I'll try and post pictures.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-83522468267521817462009-01-02T13:34:00.000-08:002009-01-02T13:55:35.011-08:00The Economics of Selling CDs<p>Hopefully someone out there is interested in these numbers - my hope is these details may be useful for anyone thinking about selling their own CD collection. With that in mind, here are some concrete numbers after my first batch of CDs was processed. This post will focus mainly on the associated overhead - at the moment, I'm only shipping in the US, so these numbers are all limited to that context.</p>
<p>When you sell merchandise through Amazon, you receive a credit to help cover the shipping costs. These are fixed by Amazon, so will not necessarily correspond directly to your own costs. At the moment, I'm getting a credit of $2.98 for each CD I sell, regardless of the CD.</p>
<p>My costs depend on the supplies I buy to ship, and the postage. In my first batch, I picked up the supplies from the post office. To ship a double CD set costs me $1.99 for a small box and $2.70 for postage - that means I'm losing $1.71 against my selling price. In other words, I want to make sure I'm charging more than $1.71 on those sets, or I'm losing money.</p>
<p>For a regular single CD in a jewel case, I pay $1.09 for a card sleeve, 16 cents for bubble wrap, and $2.02 for shipping. That's a total of $3.27 for a loss of 29 cents. On the cheaper side, for CDs which come in cardboard sleeves, shipping drops to $1.85.</p>
<p>After running the numbers, I decided to get some cheaper supplies. At Target, I
can buy CD-sized padded envelopes for 65 cents each. This means I will actually be making a small profit against the shipping credit for most CDs, and only losing on the larger disc sets - which tend to have higher selling prices anyways.</p>
<p>If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-69868998851645176312009-01-01T12:09:00.000-08:002009-01-01T12:22:34.744-08:00Selling CDs Online<p>This is a follow up to my previous post, with some notes on my experience so far selling off some of my music collection. First off, it's amazing how many CDs you can buy on Amazon for 1 cent. Of course, there's shipping involved, which is where the margin is - but that's pretty much rock bottom for physical media. So competing in that arena is not something I'm interested in.</p>
<p>At the moment, I've gone through one legal box full of CDs. This is about 150 CDs. Of those, 35 were worth listing on Amazon at the new lowest current offer price. Withing 24 hours, 5 of those CDs have already sold, at an average selling price of $10 per disk. Of course those were some of the more collectible disks, but it's still a good start.</p>
<p>Of the remaining 115, I've decided to add another option to my process: <a href="http://www.secondspin.com">SecondSpin</a>. They are willing to buy most of my CDs, ranging from (so far) 5 cents to 5 dollars. Of the 18 CDs I've checked so far, I've
decided 5 of them are worth going this route, which is a pretty decent percentage - getting me on average 2 bucks per CD.</p>
<p>I may post a list of whatever's left here on my blog - $2 each + whatever shipping is appropriate for the set. I wonder if that would get any traction?</p>
<p>One other point: a lot of these disks have upwards of 18 tracks. At 99 cents a track for a digital copy, that's 18 dollars to buy lossy digital copies versus 1 buck to get the physical media which can be ripped to get perfect, <a href="http://whicken.blogspot.com/2007/11/wishbox-abundant-fable-in-five-parts-1.html">DRM-free</a> copies of all 18 tracks. If I were a record label, I think I'd be all over the digital model in this marketplace.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-21182735224124490722008-12-31T15:34:00.000-08:002008-12-31T15:47:33.211-08:00Cleaning The Garage<p>So, my next big project is cleaning the garage. I've got so much stuff out there accumulated over twenty years that it's just time to make most of it go away. While some of it will just get thrown away or given away, I'm hoping to recover at least a small amount of money for some of the stuff, particularly a few collectible items.</p>
<p>After poking around the various options, here's my current plan:</p>
<ul>
<li><b>Amazon</b><br/>
I've set up an <a href="http://www.amazon.com/shops/whicken">Amazon Storefront</a>. This will be used to sell books, CDs, and DVDs which have moderate resale value. Anything I post will be the lowest value used item currently available when I post it, or it gets moved into one of my other "liquidation" piles.
<li><b>eBay</b><br/>
I'll be using eBay to sell some more notable collectible items, like an original Thunderhawk model in the custom hardwood case. Also, if I can make bundles of items, like my set of L5R miniatures and rulebooks, those will go up on eBay as well. More on those as they show up.
<li><b>BoardGameGeek</b><br/>
<a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/">BoardGameGeek</a> specializes in board games. I'm going to remove the part of my collection I never use, and hopefully trade for some games that I do want. Probably a 2-for-1 sort of deal, 2 of my games for 1 that I want, to help the inventory move faster. <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/collection/user/whicken?trade=1&columns=title|status|rating|bggrating|plays|comment|conditiontext|commands&ff=1">Click here for my current trade list</a>. I'll be adding more to this list soon.
<li><b>ComicBookRealm</b><br/>
<a href="http://comicbookrealm.com">ComicBookRealm</a> is where I track my comic books. I'm hoping to liquidate a couple thousand back issues. <a href="http://comicbookrealm.com/user-for-sale/8566">Click here for my sell list</a>. Prices aren't really set there yet - if you're interested, assume half off list price, and make an offer if you want to pay less.
</ul>
<p>Anything that falls through the above filters will turn into garage sale fodder,
or donations.</p>
<p>Got any useful experiences trading or selling stuff online? Leave them in the comments. I'll post updates on any experiences if people are interested.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-7428151750963289562008-11-27T06:38:00.000-08:002008-11-27T07:02:38.894-08:00Giving Thanks<p>Today's Thanksgiving, the holiday of giving thanks. Even with all the crazy stuff going on around the world, I've still got a lot to be thankful for - right now, it's raining, and I love the rain. I want to say Thank You to all my friends out there, for all you've done for me over the years.</p>
<p>Along with Thanksgiving, there's another "holiday" called Black Friday. This is a commercial event/tradition of sales kicking off the holiday shopping season, so named because it's anecdotally the day where many companies turn a profit - being "in the black" as it were. I expect Black Friday will not be quite as profitable this year, as many people are feeling the pinch of an economic crisis.</p>
<p>So I have a suggestion.</p>
<p>This weekend, as you consider all you have to be thankful for, visit the <a href="http://kiva.org">Kiva</a> website. Here's a blurb from their homepage.</p>
<blockquote>
What is Kiva?
Kiva lets you lend to a specific entrepreneur in the developing
world - empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty.
</blockquote>
<p>It works like this. Kiva partners with local micro-lenders, typically offering
loans of less than $1000. These lenders identify people in their communities who will use this money to support themselves. The loans are typically repaid over a few months, with repayments starting after just 30 days. The money might be used to buy wheat to make bread, or repair a car to deliver goods. A small amount of money can make a big difference in the ability of many less fortunate people to support themselves.</p>
<p>Here's where you come in.</p>
<p>From the Kiva site, you can read the opportunities to help, and choose any you would like (they are all worthwhile). Contribute a small amount, typically $25, and when the full total required has been collected, the money is loaned directly to the individual or group of entrepreneurs. As the money is repaid, it goes right back into your Kiva account. You can then either take your money back, or reinvest it in another entrepreneur.</p>
<p>The only cost to you is that there is no interest repaid, and if the loans are faulted on, then you will only get a portion of your investment back - proportional to how much money was collected. The risk levels for each investment are clearly marked, but most loans are repaid in full, as the field partners work closely with the entrepreneurs.</p>
<p>So, if you're thankful this holiday season, consider investing in your fellow human being. These are hard working people who just need a little nudge to materially improve their own conditions.</p>
<p>Thanks to Rand for turning me on to Kiva.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-72280784922465415192008-10-24T22:11:00.000-07:002008-10-24T22:14:57.049-07:00Even More Customer Abuse<p>Sigh...</p>
<p>I was hoping to have an end of my phone bill problems, but this story, regrettably, has a sequel.</p>
<p>New month, new phone bill. This one's even higher than the previous month. And not only that, the extra fee which was allegedly waived last month, as it turns out, wasn't. So they said they took care of it, and they didn't.</p>
<p>And the new charge? Well, last month, I reviewed all the subscribed services, and made sure nothing was turned on. It seems the web site neglects to include an extra internet plan (which we don't use, and specifically asked them not to enable when we signed the contract), to the tune of 15 bucks a month for two of the phones. There is no way to see that you are subscribed to this (automatically when you start a new contract) when you visit the website, except for the bill.</p>
<p>On the phone again, sorting this out - they will now (allegedly) take the new fee off, but I'm going to have to pay it first (it's not even due for another week), and have a credit show up the following month. Why? According to the service person, because "it's really complicated" to do with an immediate credit. In the meantime, Verizon gets to sit on 50 bucks and collect interest for another month (20 from the previous month, and 30 from this month). Multiply that across several million subscribers, and it's not a small amount of money.</p>
<p>Verizon, you should be ashamed.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-62108288228356848842008-10-07T22:17:00.000-07:002008-10-07T22:19:52.035-07:00How to Abuse Your Customers<p>Here's a lovely example of how not to treat your customers.</p>
<p>My son, a typical teenager, is a text messaging fiend. His plan was
set up for unlimited "in network" texting, and 500 "out of network"
messages. About six weeks ago (two weeks into a billing cycle), he
noticed he was approaching his 500 limit. So, he decided to upgrade
to the 1500 out of network for an extra five bucks a month. Through
the rest of that billing cycle, he ended up with about 950 out of
network messages.</p>
<p>Come billing time, we've got a $20 fee for 200 messages over the
limit. No matter how you slice it, that doesn't seem to make sense -
we paid an extra five bucks to get 1,000 more messages.</p>
<p>Here's how the phone company justified it: when the plan was upgraded,
they canceled the old one, and pro-rated the time. With half the
time, he only was allowed 242 messages, and hence was 192 over. Those
were billed as overages instead of rolled over into the upgraded plan
(which ended up alloting another 823 extra messages, only 518 of which
were used).</p>
<p>So, somehow upgrading our service to cover more minutes (surely the
desired goal of the phone company), turned into a penalty for doing so
mid-month.</p>
<p>The only silver lining is that after calling the phone company and
explaining the issue, they did eventually waive the extra fee, although they
tried hard to convince me their billing was correct first. As I said
to them, "I understand why a computer would do such a thing, but
surely people can be smarter than that."</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-90166217776032220552008-04-18T19:53:00.001-07:002008-04-18T19:57:04.453-07:00Amazon Love<p>Nothing breeds customer loyalty for me better than free money. I just got this delightful email from <a href="http://www.amazon.com">Amazon</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
You are receiving this e-mail due to your purchase of an HD DVD player
from Amazon.com before February 23, 2008.
As you may know, manufacture of HD DVD players ceased February 23,
2008, and major studios in the U.S. have ceased production of HD
DVDs. In recognition of this development, Amazon.com is providing all
customers who purchased qualifying HD DVD players a credit for $50...
</blockquote>
<p>This certainly eases the pain of having bought one of the devices on the losing side of the format war (which may still turn out to have more than one loser...).</p>
<p>Kudos to you, Amazon.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-34395830277224562642008-04-14T19:56:00.000-07:002008-04-14T20:03:54.584-07:00Official Scorched Earth T-Shirts<p>Thanks to the mad design skills of my friend Richard, I'm happy to introduce the first ever <a href="http://www.cafepress.com/officialscorch">Official Scorched Earth T-Shirt</a>.</p>
<p>Echoing a popular sentiment, this all-black classic features an exploding funky bomb and the slacker slogan
<blockquote>I wasted my education playing Scorched Earth</blockquote></p>
<p><i>(also available in military green, naturally)</i><p>
<p>This shirt is now available at the <a href="http://www.cafepress.com/officialscorch">Official Scorched Earth Cafe Press Store</a>. If you have ideas for shirts you'd like to see, let me know in the comments. We have a few other ideas, but we'd like to know what <i>you</i> want to
wear.</p>
<p><i>P.S. As an official Scorched Earth product, you are hereby absolved from any guilt of having never registered your copy of Scorch, once you buy a shirt. Doesn't that make you feel better?</i> :^)</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-58991027574271637662008-03-01T20:17:00.001-08:002008-03-01T20:19:00.227-08:00Are You An Overachiever?<p>Late last year, I introduced my notion of an <a
href="http://whicken.blogspot.com/2007/12/are-you-getting-full-value-from-your_07.html">A,B,C</a>
rating system to determine how much value you're getting from the
games you purchase (or rent, for that matter).
After building this system into my own personal database (which
I hope to blog more about at some point), I've found a few areas
which deserve revisiting.</p>
<p>First, some games get played well past their C lifespan, and it
seems fair to note this fact if I'm using the data to draw any
conclusions. Thus, the obvious notion of an extended D rating (played
the game to death). This covers games which I continue to play well
after they've earned their C ranking. In fact, a decent ballpark
metric for a D game is that I've at least doubled the playing time
since the game was marked as a C. This includes my recent favorite,
Rock Band (which I hope to review soon).</p>
<p>Second, some games have a notoriously difficult to mark C goal. In
my earlier post, I defined C as "completed", while leaving that term
loosely defined as "getting the core entertainment value." In
practice, I've often been linking it to the credits - if a game has an
ending, with credits, that marks the C point. Or if I beat all the
levels, or reach the "standard" ending. For Burnout Paradise, I've
chosen the Burnout License as my C goal, even though there's an
Elite License to be earned after that (a possible candidate for a D
goal).</p>
<p>The most difficult edge case for me lies around many XBLA games -
these tend to be shorter, arcade-style games, often with no clearly
defined ending. In something like Galaga, you can try to get
all the achievements, but there's no real ending as such (at least
none that I know of).</p>
<p>A possible solution now enters in the form of <a
href="http://www.mygamercard.net/">MyGamerCard</a>, one of the mashups
I mentioned in a <a
href="http://whicken.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archive.html">much
earlier post</a>, and which brings us to the title of this post.
I quote from their home page, describing a new feature they've just launched.</p>
<blockquote>Recently, we added indicators that gave an at-a-glance
view of whether you were ahead or behind the curve based on the
Community's average GamerScore.</blockquote>
<p>If you have more achievements than average, you are given an
<b>overachievement</b> rating. An in the opposite case, you get an
underachievement rating. This nicely indicates when you've played a
game more than the average person, and are either madly in love with
it, or the game simply sucks so badly that no one bothered to play it
very much. This gives me a new alternate goal for achieving C rank -
when I pass the overachiever threshold, the game changes status.</p>
<p>Regrettably, a rigorous approach to this method would mean that a
game might drop from a C status to a B status if the community
collectively starts getting more achievements - in practice I'm not
really worried about this. Once a C, always a C. As always, my own
judgement prevails when rating my own games.</p>
<p>Some quick examples before wrapping up this post - you can see my
<a href="http://profile.mygamercard.net/d/MightySprig">full
overachievement list</a> at mygamercard.net. My biggest
overachievement so far is for Overlord, and I was definitely achievement
farming that game for a long time. Next up is Rock Band,
unsurprisingly, assisted by the marathan Endless Setlist, which pushed
this game into D, and threatens to introduce the E ranking for "endless"
gameplay. My most recently overachieved game is GripShift, which
would otherwise have a very difficult C definition. (beating every
level? unlocking every vehicle?)</p>
<p>The underachievements indicates games where I probably have lots of
interesting things left to do. My list has over 30 of those, although
some of those are games which I'm simply no good at, and am unlikely
to make much more progress (I'm looking at you, Bejewelled). Such
games will perpetually remain B's unless I come up with a new
definition.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-68313499133945372772008-02-25T20:25:00.000-08:002008-02-25T20:30:01.232-08:00The $50 USB Port<p>With the recent death of HDDVD, Microsoft's add-on drive for the Xbox 360 has now dropped to a scant $50, which includes <b>six</b> free movies. And hey, if you don't need the HDDVD drive (cause who does, anymore), they nicely <a href="http://gamerscoreblog.com/team/archive/2008/02/25/557717.aspx">point out</a></p>
<blockquote>Provides an additional USB port for your Xbox 360 and includes USB 2.0 cable</blockquote>
<p>So, there you have it - for just $50, you too can get an extra USB port for your Xbox 360. <b>And</b> a USB cable.</p>
<p>The historic HDDVD drive is just there for the ride.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-78334732545725195522008-01-15T22:24:00.001-08:002008-01-15T22:24:54.618-08:00Whoops!<p>The new iPhone firmware (1.1.3) came out today. While I generally
applaud the new features (although the faux gps can frequently provide
highly dubious results - many miles off course), I luckily ran across
a notice of one key change which is easily overlooked.</p>
<p>Gmail accounts which were set up to use POP will be automatically
switched over the IMAP. This seemingly obscure technical detail means
that users who are used to deleting messages harmlessly on their
phone, are now also deleting the originals on Gmail.</p>
<p><b>Yikes!</b></p>
<p>Luckily I found this out before doing any irreversible damage, and
recovered the files from my Gmail trash. For more info, check out
this <a href="https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=86615">tech
note</a> from Google.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-66878721906568099222007-12-24T17:18:00.000-08:002007-12-24T17:21:11.401-08:00Self Publishing with Kindle<p>I haven't really blogged about the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FI73MA/ref=amb_link_6050242_1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=right-plog-0&pf_rd_r=1ZV64M18A96GMZX4T3T5&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=342217901&pf_rd_i=507846">Kindle</a> yet, as I
didn't have anything particularly relevant to add to the many
discussions going on about this device, and I'd rather comment after
seeing one first-hand. In case you haven't run across those many
discussions, the Kindle is Amazon's new e-reader, an electronic book
with tight connectivity to the Amazon store.</p>
<p>I'll leave specifics about the device aside, as I still have yet to
see one in person. However, I came across this fascinating tidbit -
anyone can self-publish e-books to the Kindle, using Amazon's new <a
href="http://www.digitaltextplatform.com">Digital Text Platform</a>.
Books can be between .99 cents and 200 dollars, and the author gets
35% (read the legal contract before signing up, the terms may change).
One interesting tidbit is that you must agree to allow Amazon to sell
your book without DRM, even though they do not currently do so.</p>
<p>In order to try this out, I e-published my earlier story, <a
href="http://whicken.blogspot.com/2007/11/wishbox-abundant-fable-in-five-parts-1.html">WishBox</a>, affordably priced at <a href=http://www.amazon.com/WishBox%253a-Abundant-Fable-Five-Parts/dp/B0011N1LVM/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1198545457&sr=8-1"">one dollar</a>. (Not so
affordable if you are counting per word price, but hey, you can read
it here on my blog for free, so nothing to complain about, right?)</p>
<p>If there's interest, I may publish the old Scorched Earth manual as
an ebook - that's officially out of print now (a collector's item if
you happen to have one) - although I doubt the demand is very
high.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-5827286452551942862007-12-10T21:36:00.000-08:002007-12-10T21:38:14.210-08:00The Comic Value of Entertainment<p><b>Comics as Collectibles</b></p>
<p>In this post, I will revisit my <a
href="http://whicken.blogspot.com/2007/11/value-of-entertainment.html">value
of entertainment</a> article with respect to comics.</p> Let's start with a comment by <a href="http://rwp42.blogspot.com">RwP</a>:
<blockquote>Unfortunately, you have served to highlight just what a
bad 'deal' comics are in the entertainment scale of economy. ;-) Won't
stop me from collecting them, though.</blockquote>
</p>
<p>In my graph, comics had the second worst cost per hour, at about
$18 per hour. (The worst was a cd, if you only listen to it once - but
that's a topic for another post). I think one of the keys to the cost
is the other phrase RwP used: "collecting". More so than
most other entertainment media, comics strive to present themselves as
collectible. There are <a href="http://www.mycomicpile.com">entire
websites</a> and <a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comics_Buyer's_Guide">magazines</a>
dedicated to tracking the prices of back issues - speculators may
"invest" in comics, hoping to turn a profit. I think this
is intended in part to justify the higher price.</p>
<p>Let's do a quick test and search eBay for Conan, my example in the
earlier article (chosen more or less at random). Issue 46 has a cover
price of $2.99, and is still readily available at most comic shops.
It looks like there are 858 listings for Conan categorized under
Comics. A bunch of single issues from 1975 are at a starting bid of
$1.00, still with no bids. (And of course, the $2.50 shipping extra
cost.) The cover price is $.25 for that issue, which gives us a 4
times increase in value over a 32 year investment. But it's not
selling. At the moment, quite a few of the current series (issue 19
for example), are listed with starting bids of $.99 (and no takers),
(with $3.41 shipping). That's a 66% loss over something you just got
off the shelf.</p>
<p>So, at best, treating comics as investments is a fidgety business,
particularly recent releases, which more often than not can be bought
6 months later in bargain bins for $1 per issue. Real value lies in
significantly older issues, with the accompanying effort to maintain
high grade issues. If you build old issues in quantity, you can often
get them for pennies on the pound.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, in order to maintain the market as much as possible,
the current big two publishers often release runs as close to the
initial demand as possible, so they sell out, and create a short term
bubble of demand, driving up prices very temporarily. As a reader,
this creates a rather significant nuisance - you can't always rely on
being able to follow a series.</p>
<p><b>Comics as Art</b></p>
<p>A further argument for the value of comics is that they are works
of art, and should be appreciated in same way as a Picasso or a
Rembrandt. Maybe. The reality of big publishing is that it's much
more of a business. You may be reading a perfectly good story, when
some fill-in artist creates an issue to meet some deadline. Then
you've got some potentially mediocre drawing, with a churned out
by-the-numbers story, with the same cost as your best artwork by your
favorite artist. Artwork quality can be dodgy, and writing quality
equally so, especially since meeting a fixed schedule over a long
period of time can challenge even the best writers.</p>
<p><b>Comics as Marketing</b></p>
<p>There are some interesting trends in comic marketing worth noting.
Traditionally, comics have been published as individual issues,
perhaps 32 pages - if you miss an issue, you have to hunt around
conventions, local shops, or perhaps go online to find them. Sitting
on top of a large pile of content, though, publishers have realized
there's a bigger market for that content. Most books can now be
bought in collections (trade paperbacks), often collecting 4 to 8
issues in a single nicely bound volume. Generally these cost about
the same as the equivalent single issues, with the benefit of no ads
interspersed in the story, although they don't lie flat.</p>
<p>A market for premium versions is also evolving - with hardcover
editions, or my personal favorite, oversized hardcover editions. For
example, <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/Absolute-Sandman-Vol-1/dp/1401210821/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196920492&sr=8-2">Absolute
Sandman</a> contains 20 issues of material, with extra bonus content,
in a deluxe oversized edition for $99 (about $5 per issue if you break
down the price). These are indeed closer to art books, and generally
only popular or quality content gets this treatment.</p>
<p>One of my favorite series, Invincible, provides a wide spectrum of
buying choices - once per month, you can get the single issue. Every
6 months, a softcover TPB is released with 6 issues. Every year, an
oversized hardcover is released collecting 12 issues. Every other
year, a limited super-oversized hardcover with more premium hoo-hah
(the technical term) is released. You might end up buying the same
content multiple times, depending on what you want, and how often you
want it.</p>
<p>And sometimes, the TPB will contain extra material not in the issues,
or vice versa. All of which can detract from the core entertainment
of reading a story, but feeds into the collectible mindset of comic
collectors.</p>
<p>At the other end of the spectrum, you can get <a
href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000VW2RZ8/sr=8-3/qid=1196922148/ref=pd_cp_sw_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1196922148&sr=8-3&pf_rd_p=309530501&pf_rd_s=center-41&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=B000P9IIFA&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=03X27FETGMM98N520A8Y">500
issues of Iron Man</a> on CD for the low price of $49.99. And Marvel
recently started a subscription service for all you can read comics
online.</p>
<p><b>Free Comics</b></p>
<p>If you want to read some online comics for free, you can try the
new <a href="http://zuda.com">Zuda</a> website by DC, an experiment in
online publishing which I hope to participate in. Or, there's my
favorite web comic, <a
href="http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0001.html">Order of the
Stick</a>. Also, the <a
href="http://www.myspace.com/darkhorsepresents">online version of Dark
Horse Presents</a> has a monthly series featuring the same quality of
talent as their offline offerings.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-80829311775203216662007-12-07T08:46:00.000-08:002007-12-07T08:49:43.200-08:00Are You Getting Full Value From Your Video Games? (3 of 3)<p><b>The A,B,C Rating System</b></p>
<p>In the two previous posts in this series, I covered the idea of
using achievements to figure out how much value you're getting out
your Xbox 360 games, and showed how to compare your progress to that
of other users. As promised, this post will bring things a little
closer to home. How much value do <i>I</i> get from my video
games?</p>
<p>Since getting my Xbox 360, I've been trying to be much more careful
in what I buy - checking reviews, deciding whether I'm likely to
actually play a given game, or whether it will just sit on my shelf.
Partly this depends on how attainable the achievements are (i.e. how
accessible the game content is), and partly this depends on how likely
I am to play the game in question. As a rule, I don't really enjoy
the traditional sports titles - even if it's the best
Football/Baseball/Basketball title on the market, I probably won't get
very far. And my favorite genre, best exemplified by games like Jak
and Daxter or Ratchet and Clank, isn't very well represented on the
360. But I have been enjoying combat racing games, first person
shooters, and a variety of other games.</p>
<p>After all of the previous, relatively complicated analysis, I decided
to break it down to the A, B, C's. Each game I purchase is given a very simple
ranking.</p>
<p><b>A</b>: An "A" game is one which I haven't started playing yet,
or I popped in and ran through the opening setup, but haven't gotten
any farther.</p>
<p><b>B</b>: A "B" game is one which I have played through for at
least an hour, often more, but for one reason or another I stopped
short of completing the game, or getting far enough in a game without
a solid conclusion that it felt incomplete. </p>
<p><b>C</b>: A "C" game is one which I have completed. This doesn't
need to mean I'm done playing it - maybe I want to squeeze out a few
more achievements, or just play more because I like it so much. But
in terms of getting the core entertainment value, these ones are
done.</p>
<p>Using this simple scale, I was able to quickly sort my games into three
piles. As it turns out, I have the following ratios:<br>
A: 38.8%<br>
B: 27.7%<br>
C: 33.3%</p>
<p>While creating this list, a few things popped out.</P>
<p>1. I have a lot of games I haven't started playing yet. Some of these
I bought on sale, and others I just haven't gotten around to starting.</p>
<p>2. 33.3% completion, for me, isn't bad. I've gotten this far
because I've been focusing on completing games - rather than bouncing
between titles, I find it more rewarding to focus on one title, with a
specific goal. I won't let myself move on to the next game until I
reach that goal. Achievements are a big help in setting and tracking
these goals, however you use them.</p>
<p>3. Of the games labelled B, the issue is occasionally one of
difficulty. If I reach a point in the game where it's too hard to
progress, I'm stuck. Sometimes you can get past this with the help of
an online guide, like <a href="http://www.gamefaqs.com">GameFAQS</a>.
Don't be ashamed to get help to move past an area where you are stuck
- this is entertainment, and if you aren't having fun, you're doing it
wrong.</p>
<p>4. Of the games labelled C, I do have a fair amount of DLC
(downloadable content), which I've purchased, but not played. I
should either make an effort to use that, or stop buying it.</p>
<p>5. I've got a bunch of games I want to play more. Looking at the
games I still have to complete makes me want to go back and work on
them some more. For the most part, I'm pretty happy with my
collection of games.</p>
<p>Enough blogging about games... time to get back to playing
them!</p>
<p><i>This wraps up my look at video games for the moment - I've got some
more ideas related to the family of topics I've been covering
recently, but if there's anything in particular you would like to see
discussed, leave a note and let me know. Ideally we could have some
more open discussion here, even though it's "just a blog".</i></p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22168937.post-83911635084601215142007-12-06T06:10:00.000-08:002007-12-06T06:11:42.035-08:00Are You Getting Full Value From Your Video Games? (2 of 3)<p>In my last post, I described the Xbox 360 achievement system, and
shared some thoughts on what works and does not work about the system.
In this post, I will go over more specific examples.</p>
<h2>My360Stats</h2>
<p>One nice thing about the Xbox 360 is that there is an API to
interact with Xbox Live (a not so nice thing is that access to this
API is limited to a very small number of services). At any rate, one
of these services is <a
href="http://www.my360stats.com/games/completed/">My360Stats</a>.
This site tracks data from a large sample of gamers. Using this data,
you can learn all sorts of interesting things about how people are
responding to a given game. In particular, you can see how many people
are actually completing any specific game.</p>
<p>One of the simplest reports available is the <a
href="http://www.my360stats.com/games/completed/">Completed Games</a>
report. This shows what percentage of people who have played the game
have earned every possible achievement. The highest completion ratio
goes to Avatar, with a whopping 97.5% of users who've played the game
having earned every possible achievement. Close behind is TMNT, with a
72.5% completion rate. These games are generally considered easy,
since most people can beat them completely. These are the games
people like to play during challenges to earn achievement points
quickly - five hours of King Kong, and you've got 1,000 points for
relatively little effort.</p>
<p>At the bottom end of the scale, we have Guitar Hero 2, with a
dismal .3% completion rate (108 of 33,341). It's safe to say you are
unlikely to get 100% gamerscore for this game. Let's look at this game
<a href="http://www.my360stats.com/games/info/?g=192">more
closely</a>. The average completion rate (by achievements) is 46.6%
(by score it's 34.9% - this is a common pattern for games which give
big rewards to the hardest achievements, and is the reason I'll only be
using percentages for number of achievements in the rest of this
post).</p>
<p>If you look at the graphs for how many people have completed how
many achievements, you can learn all sorts of interesting things.
Looking at <a
href="http://www.my360stats.com/games/info/?g=192">Guitar Hero 2</a>,
you can see a very large hump, centered around 25 achievements (the
half way mark). This means that most players get to about 50%
completion, and stop playing the game. What's interesting about this
game is that the hump is so broad. This means there is a lot of
variation about how long people play the game, well spread out. The
end of the graph is always interesting - it indicates how likely you
are to be able to get 100% of the points if you really try. If
there's a large spike at the end, it means a good number of people who
were trying for the end were able to reach it. If the end is very
small, it indicates people tended to give up before getting that far.
Guitar Hero 2 has a pretty small spike, so you can count on it being a
hard game in this sense.</p>
<h2>Achieve360Points</h2>
<p>To see all the achievements, check out the site <a
href="http://www.achieve360points.com/">Achieve360Points.com</a>.
This lets you see all the achievements for any game, often with guides
on how to get them. Note that this may include spoilers, as some
games have secret achievements you are only supposed to figure out
during game play - the names and goals of these achievements may give
away certain elements of the game. (Unfortunately, I know of no way to
determine what the success percentage is for any specific achievement
- that could be an interesting number.) For <a
href="http://www.achieve360points.com/game/guitarheroii/">Guitar Hero
II</a> there are a number of Online Mad Skillz achievements (Get
1,000,000 points on a song in Cooperative), and some other offline Mad
Skillz (Earn five stars on all songs in the Expert tour). I expect
these are the source of the low completion rate.</p>
<h2>Overview of Recent Games</h2>
<p>Some quick analyses of a few other games mentioned recently in this blog:</p>
<p><a href="http://www.my360stats.com/games/info/?g=274">BioShock</a></p>
<p><b>Average completion</b>: 57.4% (Only 5.85% score 100%)<br>
<b>My score</b>: 94% (47 achievements)</p>
<p>Here I've pretty thoroughly trounced the game, and I hope to still
earn the last three achievements.</p>
</p>Looking at the graph, we see:<br>
9 indicates the first "give up" point.<br>
29-31 indicates a point where some people tend to give up<br>
43-45 means "completion" for many gamers<br>
50 shows a nice spike, indicating %100 is reasonably possible</p>
<p>It's interesting to see the game abandoment happening around 9 and
again at 29-31. These problem correspond to completing specific areas
in the game, and losing interest.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.my360stats.com/games/info/?g=297">Halo 3</a></p>
<p><b>Average completion</b>: 46.9% (Only 7.08% score 100%)<br>
<b>My score</b>: 24% (12 achievements)</p>
<p>Here I've beaten the game in co-op, but done essentially nothing else.
This has only scored be a fourth of the achievements.</p>
<p>
12 - first give up point<br>
27-29 - second completion point<br>
49 - big spike</p>
<p>Here I am, clearly at the first give up point. The second spike
likely applies to playing a reasonable about of multiplayer, and 49 is
probably getting most of the doable achievements - leaving the
remainder as serious Mad Skillz goals.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.my360stats.com/games/info/?g=146">Gears of War</a></p>
<p><b>Average completion</b>: 39.1% (Only 1.56% score 100%)<br>
<b>My score</b>: 12% (12 achievements)</p>
<p>I beat this game in co-op, and only got a meager 12% of the points.
Clearly I still have work to do if I want to earn what this game has to
offer. It's an awesome game, but how many times do I really want to play it?</p>
<p>
1 indicates the first give up point. (wow)<br>
10 indicates second Casual<br>
23 indicates third Hardcore<br>
30 indicates fourth Insane<br>
48 indicates fifth (Co-op, Online Play)<br>
relative small bump at 57, hard to complete</p>
<p>The give up points here map fairly well to achievements. Looks
like a lot of people get stuck early one - one achievement. The other
give up points seem to correspond fairly well to the difficultly
levels, each of which have their own achievements. Note that the
Co-op and Online Play achievements wouldn't necessarily break out
exactly as shown above.</p>
<p>That concludes this part of my analysis - you can easily pick your
own favorite games, or games you are thinking about buying, and see if
you can guess where you will lie. In the next post of this series,
I'll conclude with a final set of more personal observations about how
much value I get out of a typical video game.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01510503239378369244noreply@blogger.com0