GBGames

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…

Like most people, I’m excited about Will Wright’s Spore, but Joystiq reported that Michael Chang created Manifest which allows users to create new creatures that make use of procedural animation and movement. Pretty sweet, especially for a three week project.

The Escapist’s Casual Friday for issue #4 featured the article Machinima by JR Sutich. It started out alright. It talked about how cool some video game movies, like Red vs Blue, can be. It also talks about how much poor quality work is out there that passes as Machinima but is really nothing more than some kid trying to show off how skillful he is at a game.

Sutich talks about how the issue of copyright infringement hasn’t come up very often for these videos. If not for the games themselves, why not for the popular music that gets featured? Especially since MTV has decided to play machinima music videos, it would make sense that the RIAA might decide that unauthorized machinima should be stopped to protect “creative artists”.

And then Sutich says that it would be a good development! While I understand the idea that there is copyrighted work that should be protected and I understand that strict enforcement of copyright would get rid of a lot of the crap out there, I also think that if the only people who can make machinima are the people who are given approval by the game companies, it would stifle creativity rather than promote it. He says, “often the best way to get something legitimized is to have it come under such intense scrutiny that it becomes regulated.” So now machinima isn’t legitimate? Microsoft has embraced Red vs Blue, and EA clearly must approve of Rooster Teeth’s Sims 2-based series The Strangerhood.

People make some pretty good quality machinima out there. It isn’t always easy to find, but it is one of those things that makes the Internet so cool. If people become afraid to make it for fear of copyright infringement lawsuits, there will only be that many less people making it. Maybe the RIAA, MPAA, and other organizations would prefer it to be as controlled as possible, but I know I don’t.