Octopus Overlords

If you want to count a C64, I guess I can say I owned a VIC-20 for 24 hours.

Bought it in a garage sale Saturday. Got addicted to Omega Race. On Sunday, my grandpa was so mad I won't stop playing he picked up the VIC-20 and slamed it on the ground. Well, that's that.

Kasey Chang wrote: ↑Thu Oct 15, 2020 6:42 pm If you want to count a C64, I guess I can say I owned a VIC-20 for 24 hours.

Bought it in a garage sale Saturday. Got addicted to Omega Race. On Sunday, my grandpa was so mad I won't stop playing he picked up the VIC-20 and slamed it on the ground. Well, that's that.

Mean grandpa. Hope he had some other redeemable qualities, cause that sucks!

Lusted after ColecoVision for a while, since it supposedly contains an emulated AppleBASIC (did it?), played on a neighbor's Atari 400, until my dad finally bought me an Apple //e.

I always considered the Colecovision as a slightly better Intellivision.

it was actually significantly more advanced (and above the Atari 5200 as well). had events not transpired the way they did, the Atari 7800 would have been the next significant console in 1984... but that was delayed to 1986 and the NES came out in the US in 1985 instead, which was a preeeetty big jump. (the design principle behind the Famicom was to run a home version of Donkey Kong as close to the arcade version as Nintendo could do at the time)

Well, I'm filled with a combination of excitement and dread. My family got me a Switch for a late Christmas gift. I was not expecting a gift of this magnitude and already struggle to find the time and money to enjoy PC gaming. But as my first system since the Wii, it does have the most interesting list of exclusives.

Maybe one of you with photographic memories can remind me. About how long did it take after launch before you were able to get a PS3 or PS4 console?

I was hoping we might start to see some stock after Christmas, but they’re still nowhere to be found.

Holy hell, I was more right than I knew. New AAA Switch games, including many of the good launch titles almost four years later, are $80 CAD, even digital?! ($63 USD.) I know that's the going price for new release AAA games (and it's $89.99 for some PS5/XWTF ones) and the consistently crappy exchange rate likely plays a role, but for an in-print title that's 3+ years old? It's $60 just for cart-only used copies on Ebay before factoring in the $10+ shipping most sellers charge. How does Nintendo get away with it? Because people pay, obviously. There's always been this issue with their first-party titles, going back to at least the N64 era. But at least we got Player's Choice re-releases. And the advent of digital sales reduces the used pool even more. This literally isn't financially feasible for me... this $50 gift card gets like half a new game with tax factored in lol. I guess I won't be building my library at a quick pace. I feel like most AAA games I want to play on PC see routine (or even permanent) 40-60% discounts within about nine months of release.

I feel very behind the times. I remember when new SNES/Genesis games were sometimes $99 CAD in the Sears catalog when I was a kid. But I was more used to getting them for $20 USD used, or $29-39 for most older titles at Toys 'R' Us. (When I lived in the U.S.) Then, I feel like $60 CAD was the norm up through the Wii, and $69 seems normal now. But this feels ridiculous. Yes, I know what inflation is.

Nintendo games seem to hold their value more than all others from my experience. When I moved in 2019 and sold lots and lots of old games from NES up to XBox 360/PS3/Wii era, the Nintendo stuff consistently got much more per game than any of the Sony/MS stuff - new or old.

I felt a bit stupid for dumping all that shit for pennies on the dollar in value - but I just had too much shit to move and not a lot of room in my new place to store it.

Our family started with an Atarii 2600. We went without a console for a few years until we picked up a NES. After that, the SNES was a christmas gift the year after it came out. The Playstation was next, following by a home computer a year later. Recently I acquired the NES and SNES mini-consoles pre-loaded with games and easily updated (hacked) to add more that I had back in the day.

As a kid, we never bought anything "at launch" and it was all a good experience in terms of products and games. We never had many games, either. They tended to be expensive things and you'd get one or two for Christmas and one for your birthday.

I've never been big into consoles, though. As soon as I started gaming on the PC, I more or less stopped playing on the console.