Monday, October 25, 2010
Boom Headshot a really interesting Game but not the first one to do this..
Sunday, October 24, 2010
Last month Valve issued a sizeable update to its popular team-based online shooter Team Fortress 2 called the Mann-Conomy. The odd title shouldn't divert your attention from the impressive results and interesting potential long-term consequences. Basically, the update added a microtransaction store to the game. It offered a variety of headgear, weapons, and other random items like paint buckets to players for a price. You didn't have to buy anything, but could spend $17.49 on a crocodile hat if you wanted to.
Maybe you already knew that. What you probably didn't know is how much the community is not only contributing, but profiting. Not only is Valve putting its own items up for sale on the in-game store, but it's allowing players to submit designs for approval. If they're good enough, Valve assigns appropriate statistics and a price and pushes it live, letting anyone who likes the look to make the purchase. Valve's not keeping all the profits; it's cutting out 25 percent and giving it directly to the creators.
So, should you be fortunate enough to get an item on the store, not only do you get to play around with items you created, but you get to directly profit from your passion for Valve's products. How much can be made? Well Valve just flew players out to its studio in Bellevue, Wash. and handed over checks. Steven Skidmore and Spencer Kern, amongst others, were given royalty checks for sums ranging from $39,000 to $47,000, and that's just for two weeks.
Silly hats for fun and profit.
"I was pretty flabbergasted," said Skidmore. "You don't really assume it would catch on that well. When it did go through and you see the success of it, it shows that this is really the future of gaming, putting the games in the hands of the community."
"When we got here we both estimated what we were going to get," said Kern, "and we were just blown away by how much we actually received. It's astounding to know that that many people took an interest in all these custom items coming out of the community. It's great to see that people actually want to have the community items and that they're not just an afterthought."
Of course the idea of a community driving a game's development and evolution isn't really something new. From modding to monitoring user feedback to contribute to ongoing updates, the player base has always played a part in how a game develops. It's just that in this case, you can make quite a bit of money doing it. The initial few might be the luckiest, though. Presumably, should the process of creating user items become popular enough, it might be difficult to get your item visibility, similar to the issues developers face while vying for attention on the cluttered App Store, though Valve is confident community feedback will bubble up the what's best
So what's the process like? The official instructions are up on Valve's site, and Robin Walker, lead designer on Team Fortress 2, offered up some additional details about how the approval process works.
"Right now the process is we look through all the submissions that come in, the artists and the TF team look at those submissions and decide the ones that make the most sense, fit the style the best, and so on and we put them in the game," Walker said. "Our goal would be to try and push out some new ones every couple of weeks. Right now we're sort of not in a place where we can do that as fast as we'd like, so one of the things we're investing in heavily now in response to the Mann-Conomy update's success are much better tools to allow these guys to get their stuff into the game. Allow them to do things like ship their own updates and do iterations on their versions, get stats on where their items are being bought the most and who likes them, and be able to build a channel direct to their customers so they can find out why they like some of the choices and why they don't like them so they can get a better sense of what they should do next time around."
Even though Valve is currently assigning statistical benefits to the items, the idea is for the community to take over aspects of that as well. Walker said there are a lot of great ideas out there and Valve is working to try and facilitate cooperation. That being said, There are many potential pitfalls to the process, something Valve's managing director Gabe Newell elaborated on.
"If you sell levels, there's a negative externality of that which is you fracture your community around ownership of the level," Newell said. "How can you reward people for creating a level without fracturing the community? One example of an idea, not necessarily one we'll implement, would be that people could buy a badge or some other piece of affinity appearance-altering merchandise that say 'I really like this level,' and that's the way the level designer gets compensated. And someone who has that affinity object gets advantages or distinctions when playing on that level. Coming up with solutions like that is coming up with the designer of these kinds of frameworks. How do you build a system where the community can maximize its contributions to the shared experience."
Considering how confident Valve is that this type of player-driven microtransaction market is the way to go, how the company will prevent Team Fortress 2 from veering into total anarchy is a point of interest. According to Robin Walker, that's something that again will be monitored by the community.
Clearly the Heavy is excited. Also, on fire.
"Some of the things we've shipped in the past have in a couple cases been deliberate data-gathering on our part to find out are we crazy here," Walker said. "The community itself has a good understanding of what's good and what's bad and to some extent the system here is the ultimate in connecting the community feedback system to the content being released."
Gabe Newell added, "Even down to the level of individual items there's now there's way more opportunity to the community to signal 'this is cool' and 'this is lame.' I know the five people that were involved in this first release are incredibly interested now in how they can build on this success. They're going to be very responsive to what they see, in terms of people purchasing stuff and people talking about it, they're going to look at that in a very fine-grained way and get information back pretty quickly, 'Oh I correctly interpreted what people are saying' or 'Oh, actually they don't want more alligator stuff.'"
One question dangling off the end of this issue is: now that Valve considers the system a success, how widespread will it be throughout other Valve products?
"We tend not to, somewhat annoyingly to some of our customers, not do the thing we did before over and over again in exactly the same say," Newell said. "It's hard to predict how we'll use this new information. As I'm reminded of on an almost daily basis, we seemed to be really excited about that episodic thing with [Half-Life 2] Episode One and Episode Two, and then we've gone completely radio silent subsequently. Sometimes it's even dangerous for us to predict what we'll do next.
"We certainly recognize that this is very interesting, that we need to think about the implications of this for anything we do." According to Newell, that could include single-player or multiplayer experiences.
And since the Half-Life Episodes were brought up, we had to ask: any update on Episode 3? "Gabe opened the door and I'll shut it," Valve VP of Marketing Doug Lombardi said after a round of laughter.
In past years, the World of Warcraft class panel at BlizzCon is where players would get a preview of the future of their characters. New talent trees and talents would be showcased at this panel for attendees to mull over. Not this year, though! With Cataclysm only a month and a half away, class changes and new talent trees are open and available to everyone, and future abilities have been playable on the beta for weeks.
So instead of holding the traditional class panel, the developers opened the floor to the public. For anyone who has seen the end of any previous year's class panel, the Q&A sections can be cringe-inducing. This year was no exception, and the hour-long session began with one player bringing up the hunter class and his perceived weaknesses. After the devs tried to give him what sounded to be a pretty legitimate answer, he basically called them wrong, and everyone booed at him. Later, someone tried to ask like fifteen longwinded questions and got booed too. Hunters and retribution Paladins voiced the most complaints by far, which reinforced all those stereotypes about the classes that have basically existed since launch.
Outside of these moments of terrible, some valuable class information was collected:
Hunters won't be getting any 'fun new melee enchantments' for their weapons. Sorry! Regarding the Hunter's minimum range -- the distance they have to stand before they can use their all-important ranged-weapons -- the developers don't see it as an unfair weakness when balanced against other classes, adding "You can shoot while moving while a mage can't channel while moving, so there's a tradeoff."
Paladin damage has shifted more towards the physical end of the spectrum lately as a response to the fact that holy damage, which was the Paladin's other main damage type, can't be resisted by normal means. The change in resources for Paladins from mana to holy power (more akin to Rogue energy) was intended to give paladins "more gameplay for their resource," with the devs also stating that mana simply didn't feel right for the class. The Consecration ability was also addressed, with the longer cooldown being explained; the class developers wanted Paladins to make a conscious decision to use the ability based on the situation, rather than use it whenever it was available.
The Rogue off-hand weapon mechanic might be considered for change in the future to give rogues a little more flexibility in their choice. As it stands, the fastest weapons are typically considered the best for the Rogue off-hand slot, and those are usually daggers. It was also acknowledged that the combat talent tree for Rogues could use some work, and that the developers intend for it to play similarly to the Mage's arcane tree.
When Druid ability Wild Mushroom was cited as lackluster by one of the attendees, a developer replied that he believed that most people simply didn't know how to use it properly yet. He said that using it at the spawn point of adds (extra enemies) during a boss fight made it one of the best methods of add-grabbing for Druid tanks.
Priests will be relying less on Power Word: Shield come Cataclysm, and developers expect Death Knight tanks to be more viable, but the other classes were hardly mentioned, if at all.
In more general terms, the developers ruled out a means to change class anytime soon, and have no plans to homogenize racial abilities.
UTAH JAZZ VS CHICAGO BULLS
BOSTON CELTICS VS CHICAGO BULLS
LA LAKERS VS CHICAGO BULLS
It's a start for me to post my PC game experiences on this blog. Playing NBA 2k11 on PC with MJ was really a fantastic experience.
Tuesday, June 22, 2010
One week ago, I wrote that the theme of E3 2010 would be Innovation. I was wrong. The real theme was Schadenfreude, in every possible way.
It was slamming motion control on the Xbox and PS3 non-stop for a year, then finding one game that genuinely sold its potential. It was professional PS3 basher Gabe Newell stepping out on Sony's stage and thanking people for not punching him in the face. It was Shigeru Miyamoto unable to get a Wiimote to work live in front of a thousand chuckling people, and then blowing those same people away with the 3DS.
And more: It was admitting Treyarch may have stepped up to step into Infinity Ward's size-12 shoes. It was Dave Jaffe eating years of flat-out denials to unveil a high-def Twisted Metal. It was Nintendo passing out sacks of candy after years of broccoli. It was getting excited for Gears of War multiplayer again. It was Microsoft ignoring XBLA at its own press briefing, then unveiling an evolved Xbox. It was the PSP getting a ton of love and a new mascot, two years after many wrote it off. It was Epic producer Tanya Jessen dropping the s-bomb for Bulletstorm and Dead Space 2 scaring the dicks off people, and even giving Scribblenauts another chance. It was Grand Theft Auto V, Milo, the Vitality Sensor, Wii HD, The Last Guardian, Pikmin 3 and Resistance 3 all pulling no-shows and nobody even minding too much, because there was so much Awesome to wrap your brain around.
It has never been so satisfying for so many people to be proven so wrong.
WTF?: Pay attention, future generations. This is how you launch a major, if not revolutionary piece of electronics hardware: give it a silly (if copyright-friendly) name, surround it with French Canadian performance artists, then make every journalist covering the premiere event surrender their dignity by forcing them wear white ponchos with gimmick light-up shoulder pads, just to build up some extra good will. They even made Tomonobu Itagaki wear one That should've been somebody's ass right there.
I've paid to see Cirque du Soliel on several occasions and strange things happen with regularity at a typical E3, but "The Natal Experience as imagined by Cirque du Soliel" will be spoken of with derisive laughter and counted on "Worst Ever E3 Gaffes" lists for years to come. Man, I wish I'd been in on that meeting. "I've got it... ponchos! We'll make the whole presentation look just a few hoods shy of a backwoods meet-and-greet and have a jungle tribe pretend we've introduced them to fire! Oh! Oh! And we'll sneak into journalists' hotel rooms while they're on the show floor and put creepy Kinect ads on their bathroom mirrors!" Then Microsoft Entertainment Division President Robbie Bach and CEO James Allard stand up and say, in unison, "We quit." The End.
Most Awesome Moment: Microsoft brought Cirque du Soleil. Sony brought Kevin Butler. Advantage: Sony. While KB didn't host the entire event - hard to picture Jack Tretton giving that up - he did make an unannounced walk-on to take over from Peter Dille just as Sony's conference started dragging, and then he got a little something off his chest . Mr. Butler laid it down in less than four minutes. Walk-off homers and headshots. Drifting a turn at 100 mph and boss battles with a 600 ft. tall Greek god who may or may not be your father. A ridiculously huge TV in a tiny one-room apartment. Staying up 'til 3:00 a.m. to earn a trophy that isn't real. But IS. This is gaming.
Amen, KB. Swing by my house and I'll officially knight you with my Buster Sword.
Biggest Coup: Microsoft's exclusive deal with ESPN - and making that content free to Gold members - is nothing short of huge, and another big step towards the MS vision of convergence. A few people at IGN are already thinking of cancelling their cable packages. Special kudos to SportsCenter's Josh Elliot and Trey Wingo for showing up to show everybody how on-stage banter is done, and for taunting the Lakers mere yards away from Staples Center, where 19,000 screaming Lakers fans in playoff berserker mode waited to tear them to humorous shreds.
Genre to Watch: Oh yes, shooters were well represented, even over-represented, but turn your attention to all the driving games. You get a lot of overlap in all that gunplay, but the driving games this year are showing a lot more diversity... Joy Ride's causal kart racer, Need For Speed's arcade asphalt-ripper, Driver: San Francisco's car-hopping tactical fantasy, Twisted Metal's darker, flaming chainsaw fantasy, and big daddies Forza 4 and Gran Turismo 5's photo-real simulators. It's going to be a very good year for anyone who likes to burn rubber.
Dropped Kinections: After all the hype, it wouldn't be fair to say Kinect and Move hit with a thud, but they sure didn't nail the landing. Nobody's disputing the technology works, though maybe it's got a case of the hiccups. Rumors persist that Kinect has trouble tracking subjects who are sitting down; Microsoft reps insist you can "use" Kinect while seated, but it's unclear if "use" means motion control, voice control, or both. Regardless, of all the Kinect features demoed at Microsoft's conference, the coolest were all non-game related. Unless you count the insultingly canned "Girls can use it too, tee hee!" video phone feature as demoed by Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite.
Or maybe you heard the groans when Move was priced at a minimum $80 entry point. Sony released a back-pedaling statement days later pointing out you could just use half a Dualshock and save yourself thirty bucks on the navigation control. Why, thank you, Sony, for telling us half your new hardware is unnecessary. Of course, Microsoft didn't even price Kinect, the more sophisticated piece of technology.
That's not a cause for concern, right?
Best Reasons to Get Kinect or Move: That said, I laid out my ground rules for a good core Kinect/Move game a week ago, and a couple of titles at E3 actually met them. Child of Eden from Rez creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi lets you play Kinect like you're conducting a symphony, instead of jumping and leaning and kicking like a maniac, and the result is magical. Over on the Move, Sorcerer is the Harry Potter game Harry Potter fans have wanted since they first enrolled in Hogwarts. I've been talking about motion-wanding for years, and Sony looks to be the one who will finally make it happen. Shame, Nintendo. Shame. And if you're skeptical about the Harmonix Kinect title Dance Central, rest assured. Several IGN editors who would normally never be caught dead dancing in front of a television had to be dragged away from the thing.
So, anyone else want to make a cool Kinect/Move game? Anyone?
I Expect You to Die, Mr. Bond: The return of GoldenEye is major. Popular shooters on Nintendo platforms are rare, but this one's the gold standard of shooters on any platform, and a contender for best motion control shooter in a suddenly crowded field. Oh, I'm sure somebody's willing to spend an extra $80 to play SOCOM 4 with Move, but I'm also sure they're in the minority.
The Matrix is All Around You: While body-swapping in the middle of a firefight for Square Enix's Mindjack opens up intriguing possibilities, I'm not feeling it nearly as much as the Shift feature in Ubisoft's Driver: San Francisco. Here's an entirely new way to play a driving game: pause it, leave your car, and instantly hop into any other car in range. That range expands as you level up, until it encompasses the entire city. So you can, say, shift out of a pursuit car, drop into an 18-wheeler a mile up the road, and steer into a head-on collision with the person you're chasing. That's how an Agent of the System rolls, baby.
Miss Manners: Kinectimals is cute enough to send weaker men into diabetic shock, but it's so much more insidious than that. Sure, I'll take a cute baby tiger named Skittles if I can order him to maim and devour my enemies, but lacking that, I'm going to have some fun with my furry little homunculus. Except you can't. See, you call out names until the Kinectimal you're adopting wiggles its ears in approval... meaning it can reject names you come up with. So after emptying your wallet to get an Xbox, a Kinect, and the game, you can't even name your new friend Hitler or Whorebags or [CENSORED]-Slurp. Way to suck the fun out of life, Microsoft.
(Don't Call Them) The Comeback Kid: The word "momentum" was used at least five or six times during the Sony conference. I can't honestly say they picked up any new momentum coming out of E3, but they didn't lose any, and after years of Microsoft sticking it to them by breaking former Sony exclusives, they did manage to get a little of their own back. Valve gave them a great big sloppy wet kiss for all the mean things they've said over the years with Steamworks support for Portal 2, which implies (unconfirmed) exclusive content. More implicit were exclusive content deals with EA, including special edition Medal of Honor and Dead Space 2 packages with Medal of Honor: Frontline and (Move-enabled) Dead Space: Extraction bundled in, respectively. An exclusive multiplayer beta for Assassin's Creed Brotherhood pretty much sealed the deal. It's not Epic suddenly taking Gears of War 3 multi-platform, but it's a start. Best of all, nobody pushed the Insomniac defection in their face.
Though it has to be said, Jack Tretton himself announced to the world that people play a PS2 more often than a PS3, four years into the newer console's life cycle. That's a bit sad. It's also why you'll never, ever see backwards compatibility on the PS3. Sony just can't give up that pipe.
And I Care Because...?: Anybody else get the feeling Sony's regretting not charging for premium PSN memberships, and then bragging about not charging for premium memberships for so long? The PlayStation Plus add-on to the PSN, running at $50 a year, is promising "hundreds of dollars' of products" and exclusive content (that you lose if your subscription lapses), which might be worth hundreds of dollars to somebody who isn't me. Early access to betas sounds nice, but at least those come with a full game like Crackdown or Halo 3: ODST when Microsoft does it. Even less appealing is EA's Gun Club, which promises the exact same thing. Who to join first? How about neither, because I'm expecting this weak-tea trend to quietly evaporate before E3 2011.
The Sound of Cruel, Cruel Laughter: There are two games I didn't see enough of, but what I did see left me giggling like a happy little maniac. Metal Gear Solid: Rising's Zan-Datsu cut-what-you-will gameplay already has me planning how to ginsu everything in sight. But for sheer badassery, I direct you to the trailer for Tomonobu Itagaki's first Tecmo-free project, Devil's Third. Remember what Itagaki did for edged weaponry in Ninja Gaiden? Now he's adding firearms and explosives. Katanas and mini-guns and bazookas, oh my. I can't wait to take out wall-running ninja with a rocket launcher. That should be one of my rights as an American.
Don't Judge Me!: As if chainsawing your way through the zombie apocalypse wasn't enough fun, I saw a demo where Dead Rising 2 protagonist Chuck Greene ditched his motorsport leathers for a cute sports bra and Daisy Dukes right before braining more undead with a baseball bat. SO much hotter than the cocktail dresses Frank "I'm a Journalist!" Black was stuck with.
Financial Crysis: Okay, what the hell is with those guys at Crytek? I appreciate their commitment to making the best looking games in existence, and they're single handedly the best argument for 3D console gaming thus far, but if you thought Crysis had a high price point to get the full effect, stay tuned. You had to shell out for a boss PC rig to run the first game properly. You're obligated to purchase a 3D LCD television (from Sony, who makes them) and glasses to appreciate Crysis 2's stereoscopic violence. Presumably, you'll have to buy an entirely new house for Crysis 3.
All the Rage: Sorry, Sony, but the best graphics aren't on the PlayStation 3 anymore. Not only is id's RAGE gob-smacking gorgeous, but there are no reused textures in the entire environment. It's all hand sculpted and hand painted. Everywhere you go, wherever you turn, you will see something new. That's Gamer Heaven in a nutshell. I wish Fallout looked this good... maybe if I squint a bit, I can pretend this is Fallout, yes?
Shooter of Shooters: Killzone 3 is Killzone 2 with jetpacks. Rage is pretty and Bulletstorm funny. Ghost Recon: Future Soldier's aggro-stealth amuses and Halo in Space makes me giddy, but it's the Medal of Honor reboot that looks the most intense, with Call of Duty 4's campaign and Battlefield: Bad Company 2's class-based multiplayer, with CoD killstreaks. If Treyarch doesn't deliver on Call of Duty: Black Ops, Medal of Honor will be the new Modern Warfare. Then Activision investors circle Bobby Kotick's mansion with torches and pitchforks.
I Should Be More Excited : So, Heroes On the Move. What could be more natural than a mash-up of Insomniac characters and Naughty Dog characters? Hell, the first Ratchet & Clank game was built on a Jak & Daxter engine. Yet there they all were, just sorta standing around, doing... what? Where's the morph-o-rays? Where's the insanity? Wake me up when they demo the Rainbow Afronator.
WANT: Portal 2. Yes. Yes. Yes. You Monster.
The Loser: Original games. Towards the end of Day One, I started counting the number of non-sequel, non-licensed, non-franchise games made for core gamers. Six. Rage, Bulletstorm, Child of Eden (which could easily be called Rez 2), Mindjack, Sorcerer and Devil's Third. If I missed any, it's because I couldn't see them through all the numbers. C'mon. I like well-done sequels that improve on the original, but let's see something new, eh?
The Winner: There's a lot of criteria you could apply to get the result you want. The system with the most games I personally want to play? That's Xbox. Best moments? Sony got me on my feet five times. But if the Electronic Entertainment Expo is about whipping gamers into a rabid frenzy over what's coming in the next twelve months, hands down, this E3 belonged to Nintendo and no other.
A few Nintendaddicts called me out for calling them the underdog in my Nintendo conference write-up , but they mistook the context. Going into this E3, all eyes were on Microsoft's Kinect and PlayStation's Move. Anything else was afterthought. Then those challengers arrived and fumbled under the weight of way, way too many dance games, mini-games, exercise games... in other words, they pulled straight from a hyper-myopic version of the Nintendo playbook, while Nintendo showed up with an entirely different playbook. Microsoft touted Kinectimals. Nintendo debuted The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. Sony offered Heroes On the Move. Wii rearmed GoldenEye.
The list of old friends coming back after extended absences was nothing short of astounding, every smile bigger than the last. I've heard complaints it's merely a rehash of old properties, but those people must have trouble counting. By my reckoning, it's two years between Halo games, Gears of War games, Killzone games; Call of Duty, Need for Speed, and Assassin's Creed only went one year between installments. It's been twenty years since Kid Icarus flew in a game of his own, fourteen since we last went to Donkey Kong Country and four since Kirby ate a thing. They're due. Overdue, really.
That would've been enough. But Nintendo also delivered new hardware of its own. It handles better, with a new analog stick. It's a new experience - mobile, glasses-free 3D gaming - that doesn't lock out all your old 2D games. And then more old friends: Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, one of the greatest games ever made, a Pilotwings sequel, Starfox 64, Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Animal Crossings, a collection from the 8-bit era, all re-mastered for the 3DS and developers from Hideo Kojima to Motohide "Okami" Eshiro talking how excited they are to make new games for the platform. It even addresses the growing threat of the iPhone by adding motion control and a gyroscope, and while deals clearly aren't in place to put 3D movies on the 3DS quite yet, incoming announcements were strongly hinted at.
They didn't ignore the casual players - nor should they - but it was as if Nintendo suddenly remembered their core fans, and heard them, and responded. This year has people talking about dusting off their Wiis for the first time in a long time, and I'm one of them. I want to play Epic Mickey and Kirby's Epic Yarn and GoldenEye multiplayer into the wee hours, just like we used to.
Here at E3 2010, Nintendo stood up proud and reminded a generation of gamers why they became gamers. They win. We win.
Let's get this out of the way up front: it looks like I've been wasting my life. I'm nearing the 75-hour mark in my Patapon 2 save, and it looks like that data won't carry over to Patapon 3. I started a new game and Patapon 3 didn't ask me if I had played before and if it could load my old save like the game did in Patapon 2.
Luckily, the game is packed with awesomeness, so I really don't care.
Patapon 3 keeps all of that. Kind of. When I started a new game, I needed to choose what type of hero I would be. That's right; what type of hero I would be. Previous Patapons have cast you as the army's God, but this game looks like it's casting you as one character. Yeah, you still have a squad with you, but you choose this one masked hero who will be taller than normal Patapons, but you're the one beating the drum. You're not some slick omnipresence.
This is definitely a change, but it makes sense because of the way Patapon is setup; this game is meant to be played with your friends. You can play by yourself if you like, but the game totally encourages you to get together with players. When you go to set out on a mission, it'll ask you if you want to have other people join you and if you want to do it locally via ad-hoc or connect to the Internet and play via Infrastructure. There's even a competitive mode that allows for four-on-four battles.
Yay, online play!
I've put a ton of time into Patapon over the years, and I'm prepared to do it all over again this fall with Patapon 3. This one has more than 80 missions that range from hunting to escort and more than 20 new bosses. It also has my full attention, so keep checking IGN for more news on it.
After Apple set company records for first day pre-orders, selling over 600,000 in the first 24 hours, the iPhone 4 is expected to be one highly sought after device. Though it launches this week, Apple is delaying shipment of new pre-orders into the second week of July and beyond.
For those who weren't fortunate enough to have secured a pre-order before shipments started getting delayed, but want to get their mitts on Apple's latest smartphone, IGN has you covered.
Below we've listed some of the most basic ways to track down an iPhone 4 on or soon after launch day.
Brave the Lines
If you've got the time, the stamina, and the sheer mental willpower to wake up at the crack of dawn and get in line, you could walk out of a retail store with an iPhone 4 on launch day.
In addition to Apple Store locations, Best Buy, Walmart, and Radioshack will all be carrying the iPhone 4 on June 24. Be forewarned, however; these stores are expected to be carrying only limited supplies, and customers who have reserved or pre-purchased the handset will be given priority. Your success using this method will vary largely by area and stock, and there are no guarantees.
Go Online
If you just can't live with the uncertainty of waiting in line, more enterprising shoppers will be happy to sell you their hard-won iPhone 4s, with a sizable markup of course.
As with any high-profile electronic, eBay, Craigslist, and other online resale websites will be flooded with listings for the iPhone 4. Depending on demand, asking prices of the device could easily double. Moreover, amongst the listings there are bound to be plenty of false claims and scammers, so shop wisely.
Pre-Orders, Round 2
If all else fails, you can always get an iPhone the patient way -- pre-order or reservation. Sure it'll take longer, but you're guaranteed to get one, and it won't cost you extra. Apple is already taking pre-orders for their second shipment of phones, due in stores July 14. Retail partners like Best Buy and Walmart are likely to see their stocks refilled around the same time.
Be sure to check out our Ultimate iPhone 4 Guide for the full details on the hardware and data plans, and stay tuned to IGN Gear for all the latest in tech.