The Penny Pinching Gamer: Keep playing, for cheap

You’ve seen it all over the news: times are getting tougher out there. We need to squeeze every cent in order to get by, but that doesn’t mean you have to go on gameless! Play your cards right, with a little patience, and you can keep your gaming habit going without missing a single bill payment. Here are some handy tips on how you can get the most frag for your buck!

Start A Penny Jar

The first thing you have to set for yourself is a budget. Poor spending choices have made ramen the staple in a gamer’s diet that it has been for generations. Ration a certain set amount of money per month that you’ll allocate toward your gaming fix. You can either get one epic $50 game that will last you the entire month or you can buy five $10 games that you can get you through week-by-week. As much as I don’t care for downloadable services like Steam or the Virtual Console, they’re great for small, semi-disposable titles at just a few dollars each.

Be Patient

Very few games are worth buying at launch. How often have you taken a game home that you’ve had on reserve for months only to cry out, “Curse you hype, machine! You’ve duped me again!” Most of the buzz shoveled out there by publications is practically written for them by their sponsors, so if you want a better sense of whether a game is as good as it sounds, it’s best to wait for word-of-mouth to start spreading. Ask your hasty friends who bought the game early on whether the game’s worth any coin at all.

Bargain Bins

I am totally a bargain bin gamer. I’m usually about 3-5 years behind my friends when buying titles. But patience has proven to be a virtue, since by the time I finally get my hands on a game or hardware, it’s usually the latest, most stable build and less than half the price that most of my peers paid.

The only draw-back to this are “sleeper” titles—games with low print runs that don’t get the attention they deserve until months (even years) after they’ve ceased publication. If you wait too long, you may end up battling against collectors willing to pay a dealer’s inflated price mark-up for a game that you may have only had to pay $40, had you grabbed it sooner. I almost missed out on Disgaea; thank goodness for “Greatest Hits”!

Pre-Pwned

There’s nothing like the second-hand market to affordably purchase your favorite games. Places like eBay, Craigslist, flea markets…even GameStop on occasion will have decent deals on used games. Often times you’ll find the games in like-new condition, originally bought by people who may play them once and then stick them on a shelf to collect dust. A word of caution: there’s usually no return policy. Test the discs and hardware if you can!

Cheap As Free

You can also pirate games. Just kidding! There are so many games legally available for free online, most of them developed by fellow gamers that are fans of challenging, addictive gameplay. There are loads of flash portals on the web, the most popular being Newgrounds. There are also executable games , like those found on The Independent Gaming Source. And of course, MMOs such as Maple Story and The Kingdom of Loathing are still currently free to play. Check out our coverage of the Indiecade exhibit from E For All 2008 for more details!

Continue?

With MvC2 still going on strong, why do we need a MvC3?

Here’s an alien concept: Enjoy the games that you have! If Monkeys With Guns 2 is the best game ever, why do you keep asking for Monkeys With Guns 3? Given the current trend in sequel quality, why are you in such a hurry to be disappointed? And even if it’s good, you’re still going to end up just yearning for Monkeys With Guns 4. Where did the love go for Monkeys With Guns 2?

The current plague of “sequelitis” that is a cancer on today’s gaming industry is the symptom of a far greater problem: gamers have become fickle. If a game has worthy replay value, then game on!

The moral is that managing your gaming money doesn’t just help yourself, but the industry as a whole. If you spend your money only on games that earn it, rather than falling victim to corporate-generated hype, video game publishers will likely produce less shovelware. Quality beats quantity and in that, everybody wins!