Robot Claw

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.

So the Playstation3 comes out tomorrow in America, and if last week’s Japanese launch is any indication it will be a fiasco.

If you’ve been following the interwebs, especially on a site like Kotaku, you may have read that although ~84,000 PS3’s sold in Japan, only about 65,000 games did. That means about a quarter of those who bought the PS3 did not buy a single game. So why did they buy it? To resell it for profits on an online auction site of course!

Yahoo auctions (Japan’s ebay equivalent) quickly filled up with thousands of PS3 auctions, asking for ridiculously inflated prices (2 and 3 times retail). Apparently supply so exceeded demand that now – only a week later – you can pick one up for about retail. Busting the dreams of the sorts of people who paid homeless people to line up for 2 days to get a PS3! (<- true story) Anyway the same thing is happening here. Kotaku has links to stories and youtube videos of journalists going and interviewing people lined up outside American Best Buys and other stores, and an alarmingly large amount are up-front in saying they don't want the PS3 for themselves, they just want to resell it on ebay. I hope the auction prices crash like they did in Japan, and I hope in future companies like Sony come up with a scheme (such as not disallowing bundles) to limit this sort of greedy opportunism.

Incidentally the Wii is released Sunday. I have yet to hear about a single line anywhere in the country; or perhaps people are just waiting until after the PS3 (so the lines may begin Friday)? But Nintendo says they are shipping a lot, and the low price dissuades ebay profiteering as well.

While I don’t have a burning desire to have a Wii on launch (as I still have a bunch of great games in my queue), we’re still planning on hitting the stores (very) early Sunday to try for one. Expect it blogged if we succeed.