NTSC-RePlay 007: Hey Big Spender

[Neon Ignition]

It was 18 March 2003 and optimusomega wanted you to share your worst money excesses...


This isn't NTSC-UK... it's NTSC-RePlay

The thread ran for quite a while detailing stories as sweet as paying £65 for a copy of Panzer Dragoon Saga. It's nearly twenty years of inflation later now though and our obsessive purchasing knows no bounds. A new PS5 game can cost £70, various special and collectors editions with accompanying tat can drive that initial purchase price upward also. That's not counting peripheral based games over the decades since the original discussion. We will also open this up to hardware to see how far each of us has been willing to go into our funds in pursuit of our hobby.

What is the most you've ever paid to buy a single game?

What is the most you've ever paid for a piece of gaming hardware?

[QualityChimp]

I like how gaming can be a relatively frugal hobby.
If you're playing on a previous gen console you can get some bargains both physically or digitally.

There's also space for those who like buying something a bit less common, like limited edition versions.

I can't remember being particularly extravagant, but I know the likes of Guitar Hero cost more with its peripherals.

[wakka]

My answers to this are totally boring. Basically, PS5. PS5 is my answer. At £450 for the machine and £70 for a single game, it's the most expensive individual outlays I've had in gaming.

I've got stuff that's worth more than that, but it's all things that have accumulated in value rather than being particularly expensive when I bought them.

I know some on here have got some drool worthy stuff that's cost big bucks though, so let's hear those stories

[QualityChimp]

Gonna be somebody with a R-360 or summat.

[wakka]

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the Ridge Racer Full Scale in my garage. That was fairly expensive actually.

[Atticus]

Metal Slug on Jp AES … just over a grand iirc. Probably worth a little bit more now

[Asura]

What is the most you've ever paid to buy a single game?

In terms of expensive games, I don't think I have a stand-out. I'm quite frugal, and never really went in for special editions and such.

However... If I'm to mention my most expensive game, I often bring this up when talking about freemium games.

In Japan, I got really into Gundam Cardbuilder 0079/0083. This was a massive arcade machine where it was 500y for two goes (back then, that was about £2.50), but it wasn't like normal arcade games - you'd be there for quite a while. Like if you went in and spent £15 you were there the whole evening, which is cheaper than a night at the pub.



It was a strategy game, top-down, a mixture of RTS and Advance Wars.

At the start of each match, you placed your cards on the flat surface, and the game used NFC tech to read them. Your mobile suits used these concertinas of cards which would unfold into a strip, with a pocket in the strip for the pilot, suit, two weapons and special equipment. You then folded that into a stack and that was the unit in-game. You'd move it around the surface to tell the pilot where to move, and you could rotate the card to tell them which direction to face (this was important as it affected their targeting).

The game was real-time, and you had to wipe out the enemy team (you could have up to 5 mobile suits), but it was very skillful. You had to control all your team-members at the same time, which had a "spinning plates" kinda design, and in order to fire, you had to rotate your unit - weapons had a pie-slice shape, and you had to get your opponent in the pie slice and hit the button when the lock-on happened. It's kinda hard to explain, but the point is it was chaotic and extremely fast.

When you hit the button, if you (or they) were locked on, you'd do combat, which played out like SRW or Advance Wars:



The clever part of it was that there were hundreds of cards - pilots, weapons, all sorts of things you could do. Did you take 5 weaker mobile suits, or 1 single very powerful one? There were so many strategies. My team evolved into taking "Precogniscent Amuro Rey" as my pilot, in the GP-03 MS, using a long rifle and a shield, with an i-field to defend from beam weapons, while I had the "Solar System" heavy strike weapon as my backup, which will be meaningless to most people but that's the point.

Oh, and last thing - the game was multiplayer; once you'd finished the early stages you were playing against other players, all of whom had their own favourite units and (at-times) devious strategies.

And I was good at this game. Like I've been good at a few games over the years, but I was very good at this. You know sometimes you play a videogame, and it just seems made for everything at which you, personally, excel? This was mine. I didn't even speak that much Japanese at the time, but other players at the arcade would crowd to watch me play. I figured they did this for everyone until one of my students saw me one day, and told me at school the next week that I was a "known person" at that arcade and the players were surprised, seeing a foreigner who was so good. I would play ~8 matches a night and fully expect to win them all, even as I got up to the high rankings.

To a Gundam fan who likes strategy, fast-action and the sorts of games where you could do a lot of theorycrafting, this was like digital crack. I got hopelessly addicted. I honestly found myself thinking about it at work, and rushing to the arcades on weeknights just to play more of it.

But one of the game's main features was its undoing.

To start out, you bought a starter deck of cards from a vending machine. Thereafter, the only way to get more cards was that every time you played, the game gave you a card, picked at random from a stack inside the machine. 2 games for 500y meant 2 cards. The stack was totally random and was, effectively, a form of gacha, no different to a lootbox in a mobile game, just with real cards.

Worked out OK once. I got a Christina Mackenzie foil card that I sold at a gaming shop in Maebashi for >£100, as it was surplus to my needs and it was extremely rare.

After months, one day, I came back from the arcade, but my cards on a shelf (I had a deck-box) and realised I had no food in the house, and it was a week until payday and I was really low on money. And then it happened.

I counted the cards.

Then realised each of them effectively cost £1.

I won't say how many there were, because it's too embarrassing. Suffice to say, there were many. More than I've ever spent on any individual game or piece of gaming hardware.

And in that moment I realised that I'd been ensnared, and years after, I guess I'd understand how people drop £100 on cards for FIFA Ultimate Team.

I ended up going onto Yahoo!Auctions and selling all my rarer cards, before taking the rest to that same gaming shop. I got a decent wedge of the money back, and on the whole, I had fun and I learned a valuable lesson; to always be careful about game experiences that were "endless" with no limit to the amount of cash you can put in.

Doesn't mean I avoid those. Just means I'm cautious.

What is the most you've ever paid for a piece of gaming hardware?

I have two which spring to mind.

I owned a Mad Catz Tournament Edition fightstick for Xbox 360, during the heyday of Super Street Fighter IV. But I got it from CEX for £100 instead of the £150 RRP, and I traded in the mid-tier stick to get it - and, when I eventually sold it, I sold it for £80... So altogether I didn't actually spend very much.

I also owned a Steel Batallion set; similarly though, I bought that from a friend for £250, played it for a few months until I'd got the run of it, and sold it on for pretty much what I'd paid. Same story with my original Oculus Quest; I suspected that FB were about to announce a follow-up and CEX'd mine the day before their big conference, getting back what I paid less something like £30, which I was fine with after a year of intensive use.

[Dogg Thang]

Probably my Star Wars pachinko machine, if that counts as a game. A ridiculous purchase. Utterly ridiculous. Even that probably didn't come to the cost of that Metal Slug AES game... although maybe with shipping.

I used to spend stupid amounts on import games back in the day, when I was young enough to have no real sense of the value of money and didn't quite realise I might want to use it to actually live. Not sure what the most expensive things were but I have a lot of stuff buried away that cost me a fortune and, if I'm honest, probably were never worth what I paid for them and were just impulse purchases.

In the last decade or so, I'd say I have been a lot more restrained. I haven't even bought a PS4 or PS5, never mind games for them. I'm more aware of cost versus what I actually get from them. Although I will still allow myself the odd dumbass purchase on very rare occasions.

[wakka]

@Asura Great story. Although you spent a lot of money, it sounds like you had a seriously frickin awesome time doing it. I wish I had a cool anecdote about how I became the Legendary Gaijin at a Japanese arcade.

EDIT:

Densetsu no Gaijin - The Asura Story

This could be an anime. We should make this.

[Asura]

I used to spend stupid amounts on import games back in the day, when I was young enough to have no real sense of the value of money and didn't quite realise I might want to use it to actually live.

I remember CVG doing an article around the Japanese N64 release where they worked out for the price of the machine, 2 pads and 2 games at an importer in London, they could fly to Japan, stay in Tokyo for 4 days, see the sights, buy the stuff there then come back to the UK and still have change left over

[QualityChimp]

We need to know the amount, Asura.

[Asura]

@Asura Great story. Although you spent a lot of money, it sounds like you had a seriously frickin awesome time doing it. I wish I had a cool anecdote about how I became the Legendary Gaijin at a Japanese arcade.

EDIT:

Densetsu no Gaijin - The Asura Story

This could be an anime. We should make this.

To be clear, I think my student was pulling my leg a bit. But this was a big city, with a huge arcade (like aircraft hangar sized with 3 floors) and yet people used to say hello etc. when I turned up for various things, like Virtua Fighter 5. In Japan, at least around that time, outside of tourist cities, if you went to the bank of VF5 machines in an arcade on a night, you tended to run into the same group of people. I guess it's no different to if you go to the gym every Tuesday evening, eventually you find yourself familiar - Steve comes in because his kids have swimming, Sarah's job finishes early on Tuesday nights, etc.

As a caucasian, I never ran into another caucasian in that arcade that I didn't bring with me. So that just means I probably stuck out.

[Dogg Thang]

I remember CVG doing an article around the Japanese N64 release where they worked out for the price of the machine, 2 pads and 2 games at an importer in London, they could fly to Japan, stay in Tokyo for 4 days, see the sights, buy the stuff there then come back to the UK and still have change left over

Why didn't you tell me this back in the day?!

[Asura]

This is all making me nostalgic. Sadly the arcade I used to frequent has closed now, judging from Google, but this is another one nearby I used to go to:

[wakka]

We need to know the amount, Asura.

Seconding this. I really think we need to know this.

As a caucasian, I never ran into another caucasian in that arcade that I didn't bring with me. So that just means I probably stuck out.

Yeah I can easily imagine that. The gaijin rolling through with the fat stack of rare Gundam Cardbuilders, glasses flashing opaque in the light (you push them back up your nose in a cool way before you deal a card dramatically).

I'm still thinking about the anime I'm going make about you