Robot Claw

Year-in-review time again, with respect to my game buying, and 2008 saw a notable change in habits.

During the past year I bought a total of 73 games for 7 different systems, spending just slightly over $2000 in total.

This is a fairly significant decrease in spending across the board. The total number of purchases is the lowest since 2000 and the total dollars spent is the lowest since 2002 (but you have to go back 1997 to see a meaningful difference). Here’s some charts breaking down the distribution:

^ Games Purchased, %

^ Dollars Spent, %

You’ll notice the % amount spent on the Mac, PS3 and Wii are higher than the game totals. This is due, in order, to additional costs associated with certain games. Mac expenses for instance include WoW subscription costs; PS3 expenses include monies spent on Eye of Judgement cards, and the Wii had a couple of much more expensive than average purchases (notably Wii Fit).

I’m not sure if I actually played less games in 2008 – I think more likely I spent my game-playing time on fewer and less-expensive games. World Of Warcraft of course is to blame (thank?) here, because I play it a lot and it’s actually fairly inexpensive as far as a gamers hobby is concerned. Most of my other time is spent with portable games, especially for the DS.

Another explanation for the drop is I’m perfectly happy these days to not get a game immediately upon release, and instead wait for it to drop in price (or never get it at all actually). This is why the number of games for traditional consoles is so low.

One notable statistic to come out of the year is that my DS collection became the largest amongst all my games. I now keep 967 games in my collection (plus or minus) for 24 different systems. 154 of them are for the DS, and given the continuing strength of the system it’s hard to imagine anything surpassing it any time soon. (The closest competitor is the GBA, with 138 games, but that’s a dead system and there are only a tiny handful of games for it I don’t have that I’m still interested in aquiring).

I usually end these posts with my best-of thoughts. Hrmmm… if I set my mind back to December 31 I would have named the Warcraft expansion Wrath Of The Lich King as the year’s best, but now I’d probably call it deeply flawed. Which leaves…

The World Ends With You, for Nintendo DS, as my pick for the best game of 2008! A brilliant action-RPG with a compelling story, truly unique battle system, great challenge and amazing replayability makes this a must-have for any true DS games 🙂