Bargain hunting

We all know the costs involved in gaming, we try to ignore that the par for playing a new game is forty quid a go, indeed we try to justify our exuberant spending by making excuses as to how or why we bought the games.  It is getting easier, though to game on a budget and it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to wait for years to play the new games or afford the new peripherals. You just have to be:

A: Skint

or

B: Patient

Then you will eventually get a chance to play the games you want at a seriously reduced cost.  Of course the good old Internet is the prime place to look for these bargains and I’d like to illustrate some of the savings I’ve seen/bought in to over the past year or so.

Recently I was looking to pick up the drum set to go with Rock Band and had seen the first generation set going online for as little as £17.85, great reduction over the new cost.  A little investigation online though and I saw that they had poor reliability ratings and were actually not worth the money. Then I saw an alternative, a wired set that you place on any table top meaning they take up less space.  Once again I checked up on them and saw rave reviews about them and how durable they were, the only drawback was that they were priced at £35 and I didn’t want to spend that much.  A quick search on Google shopping and I was returned with a price of, ready for this?  £8.74 brand new with free delivery from the Amazon marketplace. I ordered up and they came within three days, free postage too and they are as good as the reviews say, too many wires for my liking but at that price it can be forgiven.

Next up a few games I managed to get my hands on for not a lot of money were obtained by checking daily with various online retailers, my current favourite is Zavvi.com.  They have a mega Monday sale every week with some genuinely brilliant savings and also have deals of the day, you just have to keep an eye out if you are looking for something specific.  I must confess to making a few impulse purchases on games I wasn’t necessarily looking to buy but saw them cheap and thought, “What the hell.”  First up I  managed to pick up Ghostbusters for the 360 in a deal of the day for the paltry £12.50 with free delivery, not bad for a six month old game.I also managed to get The Force Unleashed over Christmas for £10 great savings so far.  Of course you can still go to actual shops and browse around for bargains, they are not as easy to spot as the online ones as you may have to plough through shelves of games, but a little perseverance goes a long way.  I have managed to get some fantastic bargains in stores recently: Bionic Commando £4 from Tesco, Condemned 2 £5 from GAME and one I had been looking for for ages at a good price Rainbow Six Vegas 2 £7 pre owned from Games Centre, it was the steelbook limited edition too!  If you take my bargains here compared to how much it would have been to buy everything at full price you may see that I have saved the equivalent of  £187.76, the total price I payed out for five games and the drum set was £47.24, had they all been full price it would have set me back £235, you can’t argue with that.

Of course there are thousands of offers out there just now, some are better than others and you really have to filter out all the dross but the following are all the ones I didn’t pick up but may still be worth splashing not too much of your cash on, if the offers are still available, of course.  ASDA were recently doing the excellent DJ Hero for a minimal £45 or Super Street Fighter 4 for £19.71.  Zavvi were doing Dark Void for £12.95, the fantastic Batman Arkham Asylum for £15.95 and the mediocre Aliens vs Predator for £17.95.  A quick browse showed me Eyepet (game only) for £13.99 on Play.com. So there you go, it is more than possible to game on limited resources and it is also good to share these bargains with your fellow gamers so if you ever see any offers we should know about, head over to our dedicated Special Offers thread on our forums and spread the word.  Happy hunting.