The cost of games is something that is and has always has been a near-and-dear topic to me, as someone who grew up with games and never had a lot of them. Most of the games I ever owned as a kid were glomped on the cheap at garage sales or when the local rental store was clearing out inventory. It'd be a gross understatement to say I didn't get "my money's worth" out of those. On the occasions I did get new games, I'd cherish them even more. I fondly remember buying EarthBound brand new, and shelling out $79.99 plus tax for that black cartridge Killer Instinct with CD. But games were such a few-and-far-between thing that I played them to death. All I had was free time, I was a kid. The cost was high but the value was indescribable.
Suddenly, I have come to a conclusion: games should be more expensive.
Way more expensive, I'm serious! Well a little bit. A lot of times these days I find myself buying games I barely play just cause they're cheap, like it's activated some kind of mentality leftover from my childhood years. I get them cause I wanna try them out, and all I have now is money and no time, and there it is. I bought Jet Set Radio a couple weeks ago for ten bucks and have barely touched it, I got the Metal Gear Solid set cause I figured I'd want to play through them all oh and what a good deal these were so expensive when they came out, "played MGS 3 for an hour." Even just today I bought Nights HD off the PSN and a few days ago I bought Denpa Men. OH AND ALSO I am playing La Mulana still. Then instead of playing any of that crap, last night I seriously played Home Alone on the Super NES with my girlfriend for no reason for like thirty minutes, just to demonstrate what a shit game it is, and then it turned out she was some kind of expert on it, cause she had the damned game when she was a kid. She expertly destroyed the first level and got way more than the minimum amount of treasures. Her parents bought it for her. I shuddered when I thought what it must have cost. And here I am, a ruined man.
Part of my thinking about all this is that in a little way, I have a bit of a problem. I see some game that I think "sure I want to play that," and if it's cheap enough, I just buy it. But then I buy another game and there goes the older one, sitting in a line, buried by other ones in the way. Games today are huge, they take forever to beat, I don't sit down for two hours and check one off the list like I do with a Blu-ray or something. My biggest curse are the digital things now, adding to my digital library of PSN or Wii or 3DS games. I have over seventy PSN games. Seventy! And I am not the biggest offender. You ever see these Steam people? They are paying money for games they don't even want, never wanted, because they have sales where they cost almost nothing. iPhone games and Android games are fuckin' free! Or a dollar! BUY EM ALL!!
What if every single new game that came out was like buying a Neo-Geo game? Those things cost literally $299 a pop, for a single game, back when they came out. You bet your damned life you'd play your three hundred dollar game to pieces, really soak it up, if it cost that much. And you know, I bet you'd feel better about it too, really enjoying your purchase, really feelin' that you have made a commitment to a game. You'd probably discover its intricacies, have a real ball, push those gaming boundaries and really suck that game outta there.
You know, something I like to feel is "dedication" to A Game, not dedication to "gaming." I don't like telling people I like to play games, but if I am into a game right then I have no problem saying oh I've been playing Punch-Out!! lately. It's kinda like the same neat feeling you get when you have a record, or something, like an LP I am talking, and you put it on the player and just straight up listen to it? Like a couple times even, over a few days, really using up that record, your Thing. What happened when we all got computers and everything we ever wanted? It all just became a buncha crap in a list. Of course, the only person I have to blame is myself when I start buying shit I have neither the time nor a strong enough desire to really play. But it's sort of interesting to think about what things would be like if games really were the sort of expensive niche they once were, but in today's environment.
Part of the weirdness for people of "my generation" is that when we were growing up we paid money for a physical product, and the game was played with it. Now we pay money for "the playing of the game," but we don't actually get anything. It's a mentality I struggle to reconcile. We have a subscription to Hulu here in Japan, which is something I thought I'd never do cause I love movies too much to stream the barely-upscaled DVD rips they throw on there with no special features or whatever. But then the other night just to be a gomer I watched The Mighty Ducks. Then right after that I was like "hey, Emilio, let's watch Stakeout too." And I did it. It felt kinda nice, and when I was done I was glad I didn't own The Mighty Ducks on Blu-ray. Stakeout though was pretty great.
What am I getting at here?! $2.50, for a pack of three Mario levels, to me, right now, is a good deal. I've been playing NSMB 2 a lot on the train, a three-level Coin Rush pack is perfectly timed for my morning ride. How does one determine that a single Mario level is worth 83 cents? I will almost certainly play those packs more than 83 cents worth of times each. The Fuck of it all is just that. I paid $79.99 for Killer Instinct and played it to death, it was cheap after all that, cheap! I paid $40 for the Metal Gear collection, haven't really gotten much outta that spend there.
I bet if Metal Gear cost $300 I wouldn't have bought it. But if I did, hoo mama I'd be enjoying it.
I can't say what I really mean exactly. I know I feel a strange kind of internal strife, that pull that gets at you when you feel like your life's being bogged up. I have this urge, like I did before I moved to Japan, to shed myself of all my possessions, stick em in boxes and hide them in my parents' basement or sell them. But now, the games I have bogging me down, these "possessions," aren't even real. I can't get rid of them, they are on my PS3 account or tied to my username or whatever. It's a really bizarre feeling, that I "own" things that I essentially cannot rid myself of. I have even thought about making another folder on my PS3 and everything I have except my one newest game goes into the folder "old bullshit" and that will start me over small. What kind of insane psychopathic crap is that! All this stuff is just screwed up. We have too many goddamned games and they are too easy to get and we have not enough time to play 'em all. Maybe not we, maybe I mean me. It is me!!!
Is it me