So I was at EB and Gamestop today...

[A Black Falcon]

(for the first time in a while; most of the time I just get stuff in town)... and the results are probably about as expected.

EB:
plenty of X360s, some piled by the enterance; plenty of PS3s too (nine perhaps, I think they said?), in the back. Wiis? They had none when I arrived, but later some came in -- said they got six, I guess three went to preorders or something. They don't usually actually get to put any Wiis out on the floor... the three lasted maybe an hour, behind the counter (not visible unless you looked for them). I managed to not get one by debating the issue in the store back and forth until they sold... kind of a relief really, since I'm going back to school I'll be playing less videogames anyway (stupid television I have there...), and I have Zelda for GC. It'd be nice, but... I can wait...

Gamestop:
Similar. PS3s and X360s are available, though not out like at EB. Three Wiis were brought out while I was there; they sold in all of fifteen minuites.

Best Buy:
The only next-gen console I saw was a lone X360 Core...

... as for what I saw people buy at EB/Gamestop? Two people got X360s, and six Wiis. No one got a PS3; one person said friend of his had gotten one and regretted it... the guy in the store agreed, and he said he was a big Sony fan. I think his biggest complaint is the lack of interesting games... (though that's a fault the Wii currently shares, as far as Q1 releases are concerned... though the Wii definitely has the better launch lineup by far.)

...oh, and only Best Buy had any copies of Wii Zelda in, and they had only one... also, World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade is going to sell insanely well. The Gamestop has a sign saying that they have something like 450 preorders (and Gamestop/EB is doing a midnight launch for the game)... I should have thought of that, given how well WoW has sold, but somehow I hadn't...

In conclusion? Nintendo should have made Zelda Wii exclusive. If they had I'm sure I'd have one now. :)

(Meanwhile, my local gaming store, not part of a chain that can get them supply, has no PS3s, X360s, or Wiis, I'm pretty sure. Certainly no Wiis, and I sure didn't see any of the other two the last few times I was in there... the backlog for getting a Wii is long... Wii is currently into February for sure there... I should ask more specifically about the other two next time though, it'd be interesting to compare...)

[A Black Falcon]

... would people care more if I said that while there, I got a DS? One trip downtown today later and $212 total expenditures later, I have a used original (silver) DS, Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, Guilty Gear: Dust Strikers, Lunar Dragon Song, Touch Detective, The Rub Rabbits, and Metroid Prime Hunters.

... just got back with those latter four so I haven't played them yet... (oh, and no wi-fi here. Probably not at school either once I return next week, but I'll see.)

... still though, no one has any comments about the sales situation? When in the local gamestore today looking at DS stuff I asked about their backlog... they had two X360s on the shelf this time. PS3 they've mostly caught up with the preorders. Wii? They still have fifteen... though the guy running the store seems to like the PS3 a lot.

[Dark Jaguar]

Original DS?! ORIGINAL?! Eh, okay. At least one of those games is online. Too bad Prime Hunters is not exactly the best of games.

[EdenMaster]

Sony has alienated a lot of gamers with their decisions of late, Nintendo has something new and fresh to offer, and X-Box is just doing what it did last gen.

The crrent favorite is the Wii. Nintendo can (nay, must) keep this up and prove that their system, while graphically inferior, offers something better than its competitors.

Oh, and nobody is buying a system that costs $599 US Dollars as an impulse buy.

About your DS, come here. No, closer.

*SMACK*

Why didn't you buy Mario Kart??

[Great Rumbler]

You didn't get Mario Kart?! Failureton.

And you should have gotten Contact, Magical Starsign, or Children of Mana instead of Lunar Dragon Song [which is not a very good game].

[Dark Jaguar]

Did you know that RUNNING is PUNISHED in the Lunar DS game?

[Great Rumbler]

Yes.

[A Black Falcon]

Original DS?! ORIGINAL?! Eh, okay. At least one of those games is online. Too bad Prime Hunters is not exactly the best of games

Actually, Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin is online too. It's pretty much just a 2-player boss challenge thing, but it IS online...

As for why it's an original...

Used original DS at EB/Gamestop: $90
Used DS Lite at EB/Gamestop: $120
Used DS at local store (almost always just original models; original and lite would both be the same price, but that'd require actually finding a used Lite there, which I don't think I've ever seen...): $100
New DS Lite: $130

... so of course I got the cheapest option available. :)

And you should have gotten Contact, Magical Starsign, or Children of Mana instead of Lunar Dragon Song [which is not a very good game].

I got Castlevania and Guilty Gear new with the DS yesterday, then today I got Touch Detective new and then the other three used -- it's buy two, get one free, so I had a limited selection... at $25 there was Metroid Hunters, Yoshi Touch n Go, and Dragon Quest Heroes Rocket Slime, and at $15 there was The Rub Rabbits, the first one in that series (XX/XY whatever), Lunar, and that's about it...

One store does have some good prices though -- $2 to $6 below list price for a lot of new games... so (listing games I'm interested in getting)
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin - $30.90
Touch Detective, Megaman ZX, Summon Night 1 or 2 (GBA; I have the first one, but not the second) - $26.33
Children of Mana, Magical Starsign - $28.60
Mazes of Fate (GBA) - $27.something

I could have gotten two of those games or one and three used ones, and I chose the option that got me more games... and I was tempted by Children of Mana, Megaman ZX, and Magical Starsign, but I stuck with Touch Detective.

... and besides, though I know it's probably not that good, I loved Lunar on Sega CD and liked Lunar Legends on GBA enough to actually finish it, so...

Why didn't you buy Mario Kart??

I'm sure I'll get it eventually, but it's $35 here in town and was $30 used at the mall, but I didn't get it. (I didn't own any Mario Kart games until last year, you know... Super Mario Kart last year (which is good, but somewhat overrated), then Mario Kart 64 (great game) this year, and that's what I have...) If there was a good DS futuristic racing game I'd almost certainly have gotten it though... F-Zero, classic-style Rush, Wipeout (I know, PSP), Extreme-G, whatever...

Sony has alienated a lot of gamers with their decisions of late, Nintendo has something new and fresh to offer, and X-Box is just doing what it did last gen.

The current favorite is the Wii. Nintendo can (nay, must) keep this up and prove that their system, while graphically inferior, offers something better than its competitors.

Oh, and nobody is buying a system that costs $599 US Dollars as an impulse buy.

Yeah, that's definitely true. PS3's biggest problem is definitely the price, though its lacking game selection isn't helping things... the Wii's Q1 lineup is pretty bad, but PS3? I don't think it's got much either, and its launch lineup is so much worse...

X360s are selling, though, and they are not cheap to say the least (and have a horrible reliability record), so people WILL buy expensive systems if they think it's worth it... PS3 is just too expensive, and hasn't proven itsself worth it. You know you've got a problem when game store employees even have bad things to say about Sony... :)

[Great Rumbler]

... and besides, though I know it's probably not that good, I loved Lunar on Sega CD and liked Lunar Legends on GBA enough to actually finish it, so...

Lunar on the Sega CD was actually a good game though. Dragon Song is really broken.

[A Black Falcon]

Lunar on the Sega CD was actually a good game though. Dragon Song is really broken.

Lunar Legend had some real problems too... not as many as this game, probably, but still, it's almost certainly not as good as the Sega CD version of the game (and not even close to Eternal Blue, which I like more than the first one, I believe)...

Anyway, those were all new, so if I'd wanted them I'd have to either spend even MORE money or not get the three used games and get one new one instead (probably Children of Mana), and I didn't do that.

[Dark Jaguar]

Children of Mana is fun, but they have once again failed to properly deliver good multiplayer. You see, you CAN'T SAVE in multiplayer.

Why can't they ever recapture the joys of Secret of Mana? By the way, there is no reason why multiple cartridges should prevent anyone from saving the game.

[A Black Falcon]

Sword of Mana somehow had a two-player team through the whole game without any multiplayer at all, so that's an improvement, weak as it is...

*starts Lunar* Initial impressions are okay, once you accept that you can't run without losing health and can only get XP or items in battle, not both (there are two separate modes), and you only get money by selling items or doing quests, not from enemies... oh, and you can't move around (like in Lunar 1/2 on SCD/PSX) or choose targets in battle (well, you can for healing spells and stuff, but not attacks)...

... what, that makes it sound bad? Perhaps by that description it does, but it IS fun, at least so far... they were trying to make it different from the average console RPG, and they succeeded. Whether or not that is a good thing depends on the person playing...

[Dark Jaguar]

That's basically everything I heard about it alright, and yes, it makes it sound VERY bad. Those are not the sort of "innovations" I like to see in a game.

[A Black Falcon]

Then why am I two hours in and mostly having fun?

... yeah, being able to get both gold and items at once would be nice, but they were trying something different (and there are some other differences between the two modes -- in XP mode once you defeat an enemy group a timer starts. If you find another enemy group in that zone before the timer runs out, it resets; if you don't, that enemy respawns. Kill all the enemy groups in the area and that area's blue chest is unlocked and you get the item in it. In items mode, on the other hand, enemies simply respawn after a while...)... and as for the XP thing, it makes things a bit more tedious, but as your HP goes up it starts to matter less (as the rate of degradation does not increase over time), and walking's not THAT bad, just slower...

... and it's got Lunar-style artwork and decent graphics and music. The nice combat graphics almost make up for the lack of actual options and features in the battle system... they don't, but they almost do. :) Moving around, targetting opponents, more magic (though that might come later in the game, right now I have the good character and the one that heals three times and then becomes near-useless.. though mages usually start slow, so that's not really a problem, just an observation.) or just a more unique magic system like Eternal Blue-SCD had (heck, a little over two hours in, I'd just be happy to actually get attack magic sometime soon...), etc... sure, they'd be nice, but this works, and the game still has Lunar's Autofight option, and if you hold L or R it speeds up the combat animations, making battles faster. (the Tech option, to make preset turns to select, is gone, but with the simplification of the battle system and touchscreen support that doesn't matter much...) Though every Lunar game has Autofight (as well as Save Anywhere), so that is to be expected. Still, those two features make the games so much more playable... there's no way I'd have finished Lunar Legend if I'd had to deal with savepoints FF-style...

Game Arts always seems to like to experiment with the Lunar games... just look at SCD Lunar: Eternal Blue's save and magic-boosting system, where after each battle you get both gold and SP (or BP or something? Forget the term...), and you use that to save (and each time you save the SP cost to save the next time increases a bit) and to upgrade most of your characters' magic lines (each one has one line that auto-upgrades as you level up, but the others need to be manually upgraded with those points.)... it's an interesting system. And they completely removed it from the later PSX/Saturn(Japan-only for Saturn) version. Lunar 1's three different versions also each have some unique gameplay mechanics... to such a degree, actually, that it could possibly be considered three completely different games despite all having the same basic story...

[Dark Jaguar]

From being completely opposed to the very idea of random battles to defending insane design choices in various Japanese RPGs. You have ADAPTED ABF!

Well, I may give it a shot. It's just that such "features", on the face of them, simply don't sound good.

[Great Rumbler]

Then why am I two hours in and mostly having fun?

Well, I mean, I don't want to just come out and say it...

[A Black Falcon]

Well, I mean, I don't want to just come out and say it...

What, "you have bad taste"? :)

From being completely opposed to the very idea of random battles to defending insane design choices in various Japanese RPGs. You have ADAPTED ABF!

But DJ, this game doesn't have random battles... you can see the enemies. :D

... What? I'm intentionally misrepresenting your point? I know... :)

The timer-for-respawns (with item reward if you clear the area) is an interesting idea though. Where it evidently gets annoying is when you get jobs (quests essentially) which require specific item drops which you can only get from item collection mode...