Cripes, I’m not that old
So I went through all the used game places in Madison a couple days ago. While at the new location for Video Game Xchange, there was a kid there with his dad who was probably my age and his kid about 7-9 or so. His dad is looking through the old Genesis and Master System titles and I hear the kid say, “Yeah, I know about Sega games, but what’s a Sega? You played it?”
Le sigh…
And on that related note, when the hell did all the old original prints of just about any RPG game pre PS2-era suddenly become worth its weight in gold? I’m wishing I had never gotten rid of anything I used to own as it appears the only semi valuable game I have left is the original Final Fantasy Tactics.
And also on that note, over the weekend I picked up an on sale 8 gig Memory Stick Pro Duo ($35 at Office Max or $39 at Best Buy) and proceeded to realize how cool a hacked PSP can be. I ripped all my PSP games to the memory card and played them from there. Talk about friggin’ sweet! Practically zero load time. Wipeout is truly a pick up and play game now, Crisis Core is no longer the bore of load screens and I still have over a gig left on the card. And then of course there’s the longer battery life as a result. Way too cool. So then I looked into emulators….
Filed in Gaming,Observation 3 Comments so far
Brent on 28 Apr 2009 at 5:19 pm #
The RPG’s have been staggeringly pricy for a while now and it’s all due to ebay. Well, ebay and idiot fanboys of RPGs. FFVII was like $80-$100 at my local game shop. Two things hit me on that one. One, there are millions of copies of the thing, it should not be so expensive, it’s nowhere near rare. Two, nobody in my little suburb is going to plop the money down for that, it’s too much.
ebay has ruined the used game market. Stuff you would actually buy at even a slightly inflated price locally is never at that price because the store could just sell it to some idiot on ebay and make a killing. So they price it slightly above ebay, and hope they have some local idiot willing to pony up the astronomical funds (plus it looks “cool” in their glass case). It’s really really lame.
Ryan on 28 Apr 2009 at 6:06 pm #
That’s basically what I thought. They had it all but FFVII and I had heard about the $100 ebays of it so I had just assumed it was limited to that game. They also had original looking PS2 versions of Rez and I asked him if they were real or if they were the reprints that one company is creating for out of print games. He had no clue, but apparently it deserved the $50 price. And yeah, the glass case used to be japanese imports of stuff you could never buy here and it seems now it’s for what you say; separating idiots from their money. I mean Wild Arms and Parasite Eve for $50? You can get Wild Arms on the PS3 PSN for $5 as a downloadable. Maybe $10, I forget, but it’s not worth $50.
Brent on 28 Apr 2009 at 8:31 pm #
WRT: Wild Arms et al, I think the same about Castlevania Symphony of the Night. It’s beeen released on other platforms as as a download, yet it still commands $60 at my local shop. It’s not about the game anymore, but perceived “value” of the item. This is why the “greatest hits” covers are worth less than the original, even though it’s the same game. They’ve gone from being a form of entertainment to collectables that people have just to have. Sad really, but why I’m glad emulation is around.