Saturday, February 02, 2008

Buying a Console

I've got a bit more disposable income these days. I'm living in the living room of my house, which has a huge television. Naturally, I have been toying with the idea of getting a game console. However, I know that I won't be playing it all the time. It's only going to be there for that irregular bout of gaming. So, if I were to get a console, it was going to be a pre-owned machine. Spending almost £300 for a machine that I was only going to use once in a while, does not make any sense.

There was a recent sale of a PSX at £12 but I missed the opportunity to get it. So, I looked at some other second generation consoles instead. After browsing the local game store, I've noticed that the cheapest one I could find was the GameCube. The standard cube is going for only £25. This seemed very affordable.

Alrite, some of you people will think that the PS2 is pants. It was the most popular second generation console. The GameCube was the second. I don't consider the original Xbox a console because it was essentially just a stripped down PC and recognising it as a console would mean having to recognise all PCs as consoles too.

Without going into the various details, let's just say that the Cube was not a bad machine. It was arguably a very different machine. As a prelude to the Wii, Nintendo focused on bringing out a good gaming console while Sony focused on splashy multi-media capabilities. The Cube had many exclusive hit games, which were mainly first party titles by Nintendo: Metroid Prime, Zelda, Mario, to name a few. Unfortunately, 3rd party development didn't really catch on and the game library was limited.

This in turn, is also the trouble with pre-owned Cubes. While the consoles were cheap, finding games for it was a different matter altogether. I checked out the pre-owned games section and only found a single shelf of games and most of the good games cost more than £10. Twilight Princess alone costs £35!!! So, building a decent library of games would quickly cost much more than the actual console itself.

But, if I only intend to play a few games on it, I might be able to get away with just four games:

  • Metroid Prime
  • Legend of Zelda
  • Mario
  • Animal Crossing
Well, it's just something to consider. Maybe I can consider it as a CNY present for myself. Alright, I just need an excuse.

What do you think?

1 comment:

Dan said...

i think zen is right :P