For screwing a lot of people over with your “new” by-law! If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then let me give you the summary.

The new trading in games by-law in Manitoba (and only in Manitoba for the moment) is that you pretty much can’t get anything free anymore by just trading in games. That means no free systems with 6 games, no 2 games 1 free game, NONE of that exists anymore in good ol’ Manitoba.

So what DO we get?

Well the government pretty much said, “We don’t want people getting games and/or systems tax free, that’s not good for us”. So here is their answer to that (Well at EBGames at least):

- You can only trade in software FOR software, doesn’t matter which platform it’s for, that’s all. You cannot exceed the value of the game you’re purchasing. If you do, you have to pay at least 1 dollar from your own pocket and then any credit left over MUST be used towards something else, even if you only have 4 dollars left. There is no Edge card anymore.

So lets do an example, of this, I’ll use what I did yesterday. You go in with a handful of games, you look at the game you want. You go up and say “I wanna trade these games for this game”. They’ll be like “Ok, let’s value your games”. So the amount of games I traded in were 117 dollars. Now I wanted Resistance 2 for the PS3, so I ask him for it. He says I should get another game. Which is reasonable, I have 117 dollars afterall. This is basically his push for the whole use your credit all in one shot (So that means if you wanna buy ONE game, take in about 10 games, since I had 21 to trade in). So I bought Fallout 3 as well. Total of both games came up to about 130 dollars. This is pretty good considering now I only have to pay 13 dollars for 2 brand new spanking PS3 games.

Now let’s go back a bit and let’s change my total to 116 dollars to allow my credit to go over my total. If this happened, I have to now pay 1 dollar, at least, to pay for the games and then I get 1 dollar left over in credit. And I have to USE that 1 dollar or take my losses.

This is pretty much the same for hardware, only hardware can be traded in for hardware. I didn’t have any hardware to trade in, but I’ve got a feeling it’s a big hassle for that too.

It isn’t exactly what I call a good deal anymore, for the customer OR the retailer. Blockbuster won’t even offer their trade in 4 get a free game deal anymore. I asked and they said they got rid of trading all together at the Kenaston location. What does this mean for Future Shop when it starts trading in games as well? Who knows. All I know is, we all got screwed over.

So, I got Resistance 2 and Fallout 3 yesterday for a nice amount of 13 dollars. Not bad if you ask me, brand new games and they’re about 6.50 a piece.

So I popped in Resistance 2 first and man, I can say that I haven’t played an FPS on a console for a LONG time. Controls are gonna be hard to get used to, the game so far is pretty good, ample amounts of weapons, unfortunately the enemies are small sometimes and I find myself shooting aimlessly in the air trying to hit them. Also, it’s really annoying to have cloaked enemies in the game that can kill you in one hit start to shut off cloak when they’re 2 feet from you. I can’t tell you HOW MANY BLOODY TIMES I died to it. Online multiplayer is pretty cool. The co-op missions are little objectives that you do with other ppl (up to 8 players) and you get to choose between a heavy weapons guy, soldier, or medic. Each time you hit something with your weapon, you gain XP, which then unlocks new abilities or weapons. Pretty neat. The 30 vs. 30 is really good too, provided you don’t get trapped in a server with a bunch of 10 year olds.

Fallout 3 is interesting as well, I’ve never played the first two Fallouts, but I remember hearing about this RPG that you utilizes guns and stuff. So getting this was kind of a way of closure from the past. Anyways, the game is made by Bethseda, the same guys who did Morrowind and Oblivion, and it seems to follow the same type of engine, which can and cannot be annoying, since FPS mode is really bland and third person mode kind of stinks too. Other than that, the moral choices you make and such make the game a lot like a futuristic, non-kiddy version of Fable/Fable 2. I’ve just started the game restarted the game, just to change a few things I did in the first time through thing. I’ll have to see where I go from here, I want to be a charismatic, gun totting, scientist!

Other than that, I think that’s all I have to state today in this week’s news. The gaming gatherings are happening this weekend I believe. I will be missing at least one of them to hang out with a friend whom I haven’t seen in a while. 2 weeks until Fight for the Future 2, let’s gets some practice in before hand guys! Anyways, until next week, GGPO!

James “Korea” Kim