How To Be a Frugal Gamer provides some tips on buying games on a budget.
It gives some basic tips, like preferring half.com to eBay and renting to buying. Yard sales, the Salvation Army, and I’d like to add flea markets can be places to shop for cheap games and systems. Also, waiting out newer games to take advantage of the inevitable price drop works quite well, although waiting too long for a game with an online component might be a problem. From my own experience, Homeworld: Cataclysm was way cooler when actual people were on the servers. Why wasn’t there a manual TCP/IP option?!?
When I went to college, I didn’t sell any of my books back. I figured that they would come in handy later. In fact, these days I even find myself reading some of my non-Computer Science textbooks. I would say rereading, but I can’t do so truthfully. Anyway, one of the tips is to sell back old games.
I can’t.
Each game has a special place in my heart. I bought Zelda II for over $50 after saving up my allowance for who knows how long, and it was my first video game purchase. Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord was the next one. I received Taito’s Dungeon Magic for a birthday. Dragon Warrior was my first flea market purchase. Ever. I can’t just sell off these games! For one, I haven’t even completed many of them. For two, you can’t buy the memories that these games made for me. So I can’t sell my used games. Years from now, even after the game systems stop working, I’ll probably still have them.
While I can’t say that all of these tips will be useful, I do think that some are great ideas. I never owned a non-Nintendo console, so buying a cheap Sega Genesis or Dreamcast or heck even a Playstation 2 would be a great investment in expanding my gaming knowledge. I never did play the original Tomb Raider or Toejam and Earl, and I didn’t get the opportunity to play Sonic the Hedgehog much. *sigh* The experiences I missed out on…