“Life In The So-Called Space Age”
We have a christmas tree:
This year KLS’ parents will come and spend Christmas with us, so it’s only right we have our own tree for once. Up until now we have been using a 2 foot tall fibre optic tree, which would hardly be appropriate in this situation.
I have wrapped most of the gifts, but the ‘Yossi Factor’ prevents me from putting them under the tree. We’ll probably have to wait until Christmas Eve to do that 🙂
Speaking of Yasuda, here’s a photo of her spying on a squirrel:
The year is almost over, and the game-buying year is over. Although I know I will be getting some games for Christmas, I will not be buying myself any more games between now and the end of the year. So it seems perfect time to do my gaming year-in-review.
During 2006 I bought 91 video games, for the following systems:
Nintendo DS (31 games)
Gameboy Advance [GBA] (24 games)
Playstation 2 [PS2] (17 games)
Playstation Portable [PSP] (8 games)
Neo-Geo Pocket Colour (4 games)
Gamecube (2 games)
XBox (2 games)
Gameboy (2 games)
Bandai Wonderswan (1 game)
I also bought 2 systems (a white and a pink DS lite, one of which was for KLS). I also paid for 3 months of a World Of Warcraft subscription during the summer (total: $45).
The average price paid per game was a very low $21.67. That is a record for the 13 years I have been keeping records (I originally started records for tax purposes, now I keep them because it’s a pleasing way to keep track of my hobby). This is partially because I am trending towards playing more handhelds (compare the DS/GBA totals in the list above) and partially because the current crop of consoles are nearing the end of their lifespans and retail prices on older games are decreasing.
The least paid for any single game was Y100 (about 90 cents) for Uzumaki for Wonderswan. The most was $60 for the Final Fantasy 12 collectors edition.
16 games were purchased during my Japan trip.
To date, about a dozen of the games I bought this year are ‘unplayed’. Six of these are still sealed in their shrinkwrap. The principle reason for not playing a game is lack of time, but others include a language barrier (in the case of Napoleon and Magical Vacation, two Japanese GBA games), desire to keep the games ‘collectable’ (my sealed Japanese Wizardry GBA games) or because I am waiting to play them on better hardward (2 recent Gamecube games that I intend playing on Wii).
The game I played the most would be World Of Warcraft (over 1200 hours logged on my character, about 400 or so this year). Runners-up would be Monster Hunter Portable (for PSP) and Final Fantasy 12 (PS2), both with savefiles in excess of one hundred hours. I fully expect FF12 to exceed 150 hours when I am ‘done with it’ (ie. killed the god-dragon Yiazmat and the esper-king Zodiark).
The best game of the year…? A very tough question. I’ll answer this in a future post.
…OVER!
I went out today and finished the shopping. With the exception of some stocking stufferish items, I think we’re done for the year. By the end of this week (or early next) most items will be wrapped and the Australian packages will have been mailed.
It’s good to have it done, and I think we’ve gotten some good swag this year 🙂
What we don’t yet have is easily the #1 item this Christmas – a Nintendo Wii. Although I’m not going out of my way to find one (I still expect they will become common in a month or so) I am asking at the stores when I am there. I was about an hour too late at Toys’R’Us this morning (they put 53 out at 10am), which is about the closest I have been to finding them in stock. Maybe I’ll get lucky and find one before Christmas…who knows.
I rarely post youtube links, but here’s one for the upcoming Sims game for the Wii. Notable because it is being made by EA Japan and looks *nothing* like previous Sims games. In fact it looks quite fabulous: Wii Sims
My FF12 save file is just shy of 100 hours…and I barely played it this past week. I have to spend some ‘quality time’ with it after this final week of school is over…
