What to you makes a good game purchase?

[Tanooki]

I've been thinking about this one a bit looking at how things have morphed over the years. Long ago most games really weren't too terribly long, they just took time because they required a higher more precise level of skill in a flat environment more often than not. You look at stuff now, it costs more for sure, but you find aside from a few select genres stuff seems relatively short.

Are you someone who weighs it upon the hours you get out of it? Is it not about time but all the added junk that's put in there to keep going back for or hunting some corner or sequence to get it? Maybe you're just good as long as the ride is fun whether short of long if you get enough hours out of it to be happy and if that means finishing the game all the better?



Personally I don't know 100%, but once upon a time pre-game industry I was all about finishing the game, not in totality unless it was something fairly straight forward like a Mario game or FF2 SNES which had minimal side crap to derail the experience. That caused me to have some level of permanent burn out over the last 13 years since that exit that unless something really compels me I find it hard to focus enough to finish a game, even far less to really dig into the extra fluff. I find for me if I can make a certain milestone I set in my mind I'm fairly happy, not totally pleased but it works and if it's good enough I can go back. Yet when I do finish something like the first 3DS Adventure Time game last night before bed I was thrilled I took it down as it has been a long time since I knocked a game out like that. So what does it for you to make a game a good purchase?

[celerystalker]

For me it's always been about (how much fun I have×hours enjoyed)÷how much I spent>5, with a personal rating of 1-10 for the enjoyment coefficient. If the result is less than 5, it's a bad purchase. I rate Magic Darts on NES as a 6 for fun, I've enjoyed it for a total of about 4 hours. I paid $3, so it comes out to an 8, so I'm happy.

There may be satire in the specifics, but there's some truth to my thought process. I pay 5 bucks for something I don't enjoy for more than half an hour and probably won't come back to, I'd rather have my money back. On the other hand, I spent $3 on Mary Kate and Ashley's Sweet 16 on Gamecube, as it looked like a goofy Mario Party clone for tween girls with the intent to play it with some guy friends for a laugh. We've had 2 great afternoons finding out who will be queen of tge party and calling one another bitches after stealing friends and boys from each others cars while our wives shake their heads in amused bewilderment, so great buy. It's all about did the game live up to what you bought it for. If you're a collector who paid $500 for a sealed VGA graded NES game and it gave your friends the jealousy boner you were craving, then good deal. If you paid $5 for a copy of Air Fortress on a whim and had a great afternoon playing through it, you did all right. If you paid $60 for this year's Madden, played it for 2 hours, then re-sold it just to buy it again next year, you probably could have done better.

I paid $6 for a copy of Macross on Saturn, and it showed up today. I'm gonna go find out how I did.

[Tanooki]

That's an interesting formula but I can see where it could fall flat.

Adventure Time 3DS with 6~hours invested, I'd rate it an 8 and I think I paid $15 for it. (3.2 is the total) and that's less than 5 but it's a really fun game. You're right it makes good satire but you're also right in your funny bit there about the Olson Twins and Madden as it's very true.

[goldenband]

I like that formula! I applied it to a few games and it seemed to hold water well. But then I applied it my copy of the Japanese (Tengen) version of Marble Madness for Mega Drive, which is pretty much the most I've ever spent on a vintage game:

Money spent = $63 shipped
Time spent = 7 hours, 20 minutes (until I beat it on Very Hard)
Fun = 10/10

So (7.33 hrs * 10) ÷ $63 = only 1.164. But I have no regrets whatsoever about the purchase so, eh.

OTOH you're very right that extracting a good portion of fun from a cheap, goofy game is somehow incredibly satisfying. I put hours into a shovelware Flintstones bowling game for PlayStation, and managed to have a good time with it, playing it until I had a perfect run on every course on the hardest difficulty.

I'd plug it into the formula but since I got it for free -- it snuck into the case of another game I bought in a lot, unbeknownst to me or the seller -- I'd cause a divide by zero error!

Or, wait, later I bought the manual from BRE Software for $1.79. So let's do the math:

(8.5 hrs * 7) ÷ $1.79 = 33.24

Worth every penny, then. Wish I could say the same for some of my Intellivision repros and homebrews...

[retroman]

For me it would be if I liked it or not, and would I go back and play it again. Then other times it comes down to a collector thing like trying to complete a collection of games for a certain system. Some of the games you may have to pay high dollar for, but are horrible to play in every way.

[Trebuken]

For modern games it's all about play time for me. Civilization Beyond Earth or Dragon Age origins were easy purchases...Witcher 3 will be as well. Many of the games coming out early this year...the Order, Evolve, etc. will have to wait for a price drop. That said, I don't trade my games in. If bought them played and trade them quick it might have value, but I'm a collector, trading to later re-buy does not work for me. The last game I traded in was Knack about a week after the PS4 launch.

Classic games have a 'Collector's Value' and are driven by the used games market. There are so many details regarding condition and such that the value is whatever is in my budget.

[SpaceHarrier]

One dollar per hour of entertainment.