Right now, I'm working on a page that enumerates all of the videogames I've ever owned. Every last one, even ones I've returned (well, there are a few Games That Must Not Be Named, if you catch my drift). I got it into my head recently to figure out how much of my and my mum's money I've spent on games since I started playing in 1996, and the first step to doing that seemed to be naming all of the games I've ever owned. Now, obviously, as I said, some of those games I returned to the store because they sucked, also some of those games came out of the discount bin and some were given to me as gifts by others. I remember I only spent $2 on Golf Resort Tycoon 2 at EB Games. I talked about CID the Dummy being a gift. The Windows XP game 007 NightFire was being sold at a steep discount in advance of a new generation of graphics cards, and I got 3 copies for $5 each: one for me, one for my friend, and one for my cousin so we could play online multiplayer. That never happened because we were aged 11 at the time and only pretending to understand advanced computer skills like setting up a game server.
This also gave me an opportunity to review all the game systems I've owned. Those weren't cheap, either; and there were a few dupes in there. My first "Flying Brick" Game Boy got stolen from the car when I was helping mum at the laundromat in the '90s, so Gran replaced it with a Game Boy Pocket. My cousins stole my translucent purple Game Boy Color and mum replaced it with a solid purple one. I sold my slate Game Boy Advance to J in middle school so I could get a Game Boy Advance SP. Stuff like that. All told, I've had 14 game systems and 7 computers (1 laptop sucked ass and I returned it to the store), and, with the exception of the family Windows Me computer that mum bought in 1999 for $2500, I bought all of my computers with my own money.
I don't remember what brought this on... it was either an existential crisis or having something to do with emulation. Either way, I wanted to figure out how much money I'd spent on games over the years and so I set about making this list in my composition notebook. As I was making the HTML version, I remembered a few games I'd forgotten, mostly Wii DLCs. Even without an accurate count, just going by the current numbers, that's $4.375 in games alone! Once I figure in the cost of the systems, I'm almost sure I'll break $10.000. Can you imagine that? Ten thousand dollars, a few dollars at a time, on games alone! And that's in old-style money, back when games never cost more than $55 and Nintendo never charged more than $200 for a console. How much does the standard Nintendo Switch cost? How much does The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom cost? I'm not going to call that a waste of money, because I know people who swear by their Nintendo Switches whose favourite game is TotK (despite the unnecessary voice-acting); I am going to call that a price-hike, however. The only reason Nintendo is charging so much for games is the modern-day ideal of Infinite Profits Immediately. Nothing about TotK is worth $75, I don't care how good the game is. It's like Guybrush Threepwood said: "Never spend more than $35 on a game." Secret of Monkey Island might be smaller and shorter than Tears of the Kingdom, but the storyline is twice as deep and the characters are more relateable. Gotta love how everytime Monkey Island gets re-released, though; they keep adjusting the "Never spend more than $n on a game" figure upwards. "Oh, inflation! Inflation!" No, greed! Greed!
Anyway, I'd best get back to it, then.