Things have gotten a lot better in recent years with regard to the delay between US and NZ release dates for video games, but often when there is a delay for a PAL release, the UK is a good market to watch because Australasia usually isn’t any more than a few weeks behind.

It was with great interest therefore that I read EA’s announcement yesterday that Rock Band would finally be releasing on May 23rd in the UK after having been unavailable anywhere but the USA since last year. I’ve spent countless hours playing the Guitar Hero series and have been looking forward to Rock Band for a long time.

So that’s the good news, because purely on that information it means that NZ might have a chance of seeing the game before the end of next month.

The bad news however is that the game has been priced at a whopping 180 pounds. Once converted to US dollars, that is more than double the price that US consumers have been paying. What a shocker. That potentially puts the New Zealand price up over $400 and possibly even as high as $500; and the higher the price gets the less likely the game will even make it to NZ. I’m suddenly wondering if our market is big enough for Rock Band… and I won’t be surprised if it isn’t.

Fingers crossed I’m wrong.

Is this the wake-up call to global warming that the world needs?

Climate change could cause a drop in beer production within 25 years, a scientist has warned.

Source

I’m scared.

Interesting - just a few days after I mentioned the apparently poor sound quality at Vector Arena, there’s an article about how the venue plans to improve things this year.

I doubt they’re reading my blog.

It sounds petty - hell, it is petty - but the anti-piracy warnings that seem to come standard on all DVDs seriously annoy me. These things can’t be skipped with the “fast forward” or “next scene” functions so I’m forced to be reminded every time I watch a movie that I didn’t actually copy it… presumably if I had copied it, those warnings could have been edited out.

This has been a feature of the PC gaming industry for some time as well. To combat the problem of piracy, game makers started requiring CD keys, or that CDs be left in the drive at all times, or in some extreme cases advanced solutions are implemented which makes things harder for crackers but much worse for legitimate users. Regardless of all this, the games eventually get cracked anyway and the pirates get their game; maybe they just had to wait an extra couple of weeks.

Anyway, the point of this - and this applies to the music industry as well as DVDs and games - is that it sucks to pay for something and then be treated as a potential thief. I recently picked up Galactic Civilizations II (currently $29.95 by the way, awesome deal for a great game) and it’s quite a breath of fresh air. I’ve installed it on my desktop PC and my laptop and I can fire the game up on either completely disc-free. This is how it is supposed to be. The developer even lists this as a feature on its official site:

• “No CD copy protection. Once you install, you never need your CD again. You can even use the included serial # to re-download the entire game from us years from now.”

Brilliant.

It’s been some time since I last gave away any clues on the progress of Gameplanet Store’s New Site project… so I thought I’d write a quick summary of what’s been going on recently.

Firstly, this is taking a lot longer than we hoped! As developers we are probably fussier and more thoughtful than we need to be at times - as an example our new category and product pages have both been through at least two or three overhauls each since the originals were “almost done” a couple of months ago. I’m pleased to say however that it’s looking good and at the moment (today?) I’m really pleased with our category designs. They should prove to be more useful as we have added a few browsing options for most sections including the oft-requested “Best Sellers” section so you can see the top products from key categories.

We’ve also split up the Release Schedule into “New Releases” and “Coming Soon” which we think is a definite improvement.

Another thing that is keeping us very busy is back-end changes. I won’t go into detail here but our product database has been overhauled (for both speed and expandability reasons) and of course this has created the need to recreate many of the back-end tools that the entire team uses on a daily basis. There’s the obvious things like product management but also major site components like order processing (there’s another reason this has become more complex which I’ll explain at a later date) and certain areas of customer service. Recoding stuff that we already have isn’t the best task; but it has also allowed us to improve on some administrative pages which we haven’t touched in years so it will eventually be worth the effort.

We’re slowly getting there though and we’re still very excited and eager to get it launched and share our efforts with you. More news soon.