Gaming on a Crippled Budget

Today’s economic environment can find many gamers short of money with which to purchase the primary ingredient of their beloved hobby: games themselves. This is a short guide designed to aid the frugal or penniless gamer to avail himself of software without draining his precious bank accounts. And afterwards we’ll look at methods not to employ. Here goes:

Hold your Horses: Don’t buy a game upon its release. Especially games published by big companies like THQ or Ubisoft. Wait three months and its bound to drop ten to twenty dollars in price. Wait six and the savings can get even better. A whole year can often see the price cut to half its original and if the game wasn’t that great a seller, chances are you will be paying around 5 bucks. This can take titanic willpower and I know that’s asking a lot from a group of people who demand instant satisfaction. Older gamers will be better equipped to deal with this, as those of us who grew up with crap graphics and text only adventure games have the imagination to pretend the game isn’t being released until a year after its actual release.

Use Steam: Sure it started as a DRM measure for Valve, but now Steam is a great online marketplace to find old, inexpensive games, and new games for far less than you pay at the store. And, in some cases, even less than you can buy it for from the producing company’s website. Case in point: Plants vs. Zombies debuted on PopCap at twenty bucks, while it did so on Steam for fifteen. Holy Crud. Granted you don’t get the pretty box or the long, gorgeous and uber detailed manual but wait, most companies don’t even use printed manuals anymore, and those that do, print them in black and white and leave most of the details for pdfs or in game tutorials. And as far as the pretty box goes; well you’re doing the world a favor by saving a tree or one of its branches rather.

Indie Game: Independent gaming has become an integral part of the hobby. With tools readily available to anyone with a PC, indie games are springing up all over the internet by the hundreds. Many of these games I wouldn’t let my dog play but there are still hundreds that are excellent and quite a few that are downright brilliant. And here’s the kicker: most of them are totally free. And the ones that aren’t are all under twenty bills. To help you wade through the crap, here is a link to a site that lists some of the best indie games out there: http://www.indiegames.com/. Big surprise on the URL, huh? Here’s another one: http://www.gametunnel.com/top-100-independent-games-article.php

Try Before you Buy: No game is ever released without a demo. Granted demos are usually poor representations of the full experience of the game they represent, but they are getting better and better as companies start to realize that one gamer alternative to demoing is pirating. Demoing a game is important because it really hurts when you shell out your grocery budget for a game that you bought just because it has a theme you love and then turns out to be awful and you end up starving for a week. Remember, even if you love World War 2, it doesn’t mean you’ll love every game about it. Try Pacific Heroes if you don’t believe me.

Research: There are so many free review sites out there, not checking out a few reviews of the game you are thinking of buying is sheer folly and completely inexcusable. And yeah, check out more than one. People often complain if a reviewer gives a game a good score and then they buy a game and hate it. Read several. There might be a bad review of a game that was considered good by another editor on a different site. Find reviewers who like games that you like by checking out what they’ve given good scores to. Read the WHOLE review. Even if the game got a huge score, the reviewer is still going to report the elements of the game and if there are mechanics or themes that you don’t care for, then think twice about buying the game.

NO NOs

Now we come to the second part of this article: things NOT to do in order to save a buck on games.

Pirate: With the advent of peer to peer sharing apps and remote file access with torrenting, pirating has become sinfully easy. But its bad news all the way around. With pirating has come DRM and SecuRom and with those have come a lot of angry, honest, paying gamers who have turned to piracy for being punished for something they never did. The thing is, in this economy, pirating is like pissing in the eye of your benefactor. You love gaming, right? Why pirate from companies that offer you opportunities to have hours of fun at reasonable prices? You are hurting the community by doing this by not letting the company profit from their financial endeavors and you are also creating a frightened marketing environment where big time companies don’t want to risk millions of dollars backing a game that is different and innovative because it may not sell. So fucking quit it already people. With free games and free reviews of games you have to pay for, there is no reason why you should have to resort to pirating.

Armed Robbery: While this is almost as fun as gaming itself, the pay off isn’t there. I mean haven’t you ever seen the show Masterminds? Even the best of the best end up busted and I assure you, no matter how many times you have thugged out all over Liberty City in GTA, you are no match for today’s law enforcement and really, the penalty is a great one. I mean, until prisons start giving us gaming rigs in our cells, it’s just not worth the risk.

Selling Your Body: If you are lucky enough to have a body worth selling, even after years of sitting around playing video games, that is still no reason to be a whore. AIDs is a killer, herpes is just gross and syphilis is all three. Beside’s you know Satan has only Xboxes in hell.

-jr

Note: All images on this page were taken off the internet after exhaustive }:] searching and are public domain.