November 2004, Volume 1

Issue 2: Buy Them Cheap, Stock Them Deep

What I am about to write may seem like a bit of a silly complaint to some of you. But has anyone noticed how much sooner the price of games have dropped this generation than in past generations? Now, don't get me wrong, it's a great thing. Sure, it may suck for the companies who aren't moving quite as much stock as they'd like, or it's a self-congratulations of sorts when a company sells many units. The point is, we're seeing many cheap games in this generation than we have in the past. So what's the problem? Well, for many people like me who search for bargains, it's a bit of a vice. A game that goes for $20 or less is hard to pass up, and the newer it is, it's all the more difficult to pass on a deal. A lot of times when I shop for games, I won't just buy one game, I may walk out of the store with 2 or 3, for less than the price of one new one. It's how I've quickly built up my library of Xbox games within such a short period of time.

But as great as it is having a good deal of games in my collection, it's hard to find the time to play through them all. I have quite a few games I've only played once, and some that have had only a few plays. I mean, yeah, I could wait until I finish one game to buy another, but there are limited time sales, bargain bins, markdowns and special prices on the internet that are really hard to pass up, so I end up buying those, start playing those and end up neglecting the ones I've bought prior. Now, not all my games have only been played a few times, I have a good number that I've spent quite a bit of time with. Coincidentally, most of those games I paid full price for. It's funny how paying more is a motivating factor for playing the game more often, but usually when I pay full price for a new game, it's one I really want, so I would play it often no matter what.

So, is my major complaint that I am forced to buy cheap games and that there should be fewer of them? Hell no. I'm not forced, I choose to do so, and it's great that there are a great number of games to choose from if you're on a budget. No, I'm just complaing about the fact that I just don't have the time to play everything I have right now. But this is not only a complaint, either. It's an observation on how much quicker games become cheaper, and perhaps a part of this is due to oversatruation. In the Super NES/Genesis days, cheap games weren't so common. One, was because they were costlier to produce. Another is that the amount of games being released was not as heavy as it is now. Sure, there were million seller budget priced titles then, but not nearly as much as we see now. That's the other thing, gaming is much more popular now than it was then. It was a little tougher building a big game library when the games took so long for the price to drop, unless you found them used. Now, there are so many games, plus three well supported systems, that there may be no choice but to drop the price of some titles.

So, it really doesn't suck that they're cheap, but it's hard to pass up on those deals, and so I end up with a lot of games in my collection, some of which get neglected. There's a con for every pro, I suppose.

Issue 1: Welcome Back

It's been awhile since I've written anything for this section, but I wanted to tweak the format a bit to make it a little easier to update. Right now, this is a rather pathetic update, as I'm just telling you that all I've done is fix this section. Hopefully you won't have to wait long for the next issue this month. I do have quite a few things I would like to talk about, and hopefully I'll have the time to do it. Also, this section isn't just going to be editorials or commentaries anymore, pretty much anything I want to talk about within the world of gaming will fit in here. That way, I won't feel so limited on what I want to write here.