I don't really get much out of doing anything the average way. When I can afford to purchase something at the retail price, I often will attempt to find the "deal" regardless of the time of year. I have friends who inherited the bargain hunter gene, but will only indulge their gift the same days every year when everyone else is taken over by the deal-zombie within us all.
But when I was working regularly enough to get paid enough to have a couple twenties left from the last payday when the next one finally made it around...those times I might splurge, as grandma would say, and buy myself something "new." The few times I've done that, I usually end up feeling hustled. By corporate America, or capitalist Japan, Taiwan or China, regardless I regret buying something manufactured to be replaced within three years. I don't use my devices endlessly, leave them on everyday for dozens of hours, and let my toddlers feed them PB&J sammitches. So my stuff lasts longer than the warranty.
Game consoles are sold below cost, so the first and often yet the third iterations of their hardware are flawed and easily broken, overheat or malfunction at a high rate. Fony had the issues with their initial ps2s. The xbox360's first model became notorious for overheating and getting the "red ring of death" when a design flaw unseated the processor chip from the board at high temps.
Your toiling author here fetched himself a repairable unit for a fraction of the retail price of a new one, paid a competent local to repair said unit, and have a grand total of ONE title to play on the deck. It might have been tweeted that the 360 sounds like somebody left a hairdryer on. Hyperbole or not, it's louder than the ps2 with a hard drive in it. And that's without a hard drive in the 360.
All totaled the expenditure for the experience of playing Portal on something far less laggy than the Intel GMA 950 excuse for a video card, with a wee trade-in at the game store, a shave over $100 with a wired controller and more if I figure in the $11 I spent over 2 years ago on my 1GB memory stick, the only one of several I own that fits in the deep-seated 3rd usb port on the back of the 360 near the ethernet port.
It's noteworthy that the deck in question here for solo offline gaming whenever the whim takes me, has a broken 2nd USB port in the front, no doubt caused by someone knocking the thing over or yanking out a controller cord. I tried to press the usb stick in that port next to my controller and found there's only two prongs left of the port and the middle wafer of the usual female plug is entirely snapped off, absent. Ah the wonders of craigslist dumpster-diving and thrifty methods.
Then after being monumentally unimpressed with the corporate prices imposed and fixed, no doubt, for the wireless controller from macrohard for their console, a deal was nonetheless found for half the retail price and no shipping costs, so grudgingly we lemming'd up to fetch one. The prices they seem to think they're entitled to charge for the games are pretty absurdly high. No game is ever worth more than $20, kids. Anything more and you're just paying premium prices to beta-test it for them.
Onward to teach myself how to make this new piece of property sit, stay, roll over and beg, maybe even do some pretty neat tricks I've read about.
