Tag Archives: gamestop

Vital signs

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My tax refund came in yesterday, allowing me to go out to GameStop to get that PlayStation Vita I’d been waiting for, now that there are enough games on it for me to fully enjoy the system. I didn’t buy any extra games when I first bought the system, because a few of the game I bought on the PlayStation Network have compatible Vita versions (Zen Pinball 2, Jetpack Joyride, and Big Sky Infinity), allowing me to download them right away. Gravity Rush comes free to PlayStation Plus members, so of course I went as soon as I was able.

Street Fighter X Tekken came at almost half off with the PS Plus discount. Annoyances with DLC aside (which are mostly with the PS3 and Xbox versions, which is why I waited for the game to come out on Vita in the first place), it’s not that bad a game. Unlike the new SimCity, you can at least play this game offline…so I guess it has that going in its favor.

willyfoureyes

August 11, 2012

Blood Bowl, Infinite Undiscovery, Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror and Monster Hunter Freedom Unite traded to GameStop for Pokemon Conquest, Persona 4 Arena, Akai Katana and a player to be named later.

Also got to see the inside of my brother’s apartment for the first time, which is niiiiice. :)

Sent up the river

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A while back, I bought River King: A Wonderful Journey and Metropolismania 2 at Five Below as “impulse buys” clearly bought because they were there and hard to find in regular stores, on account of them both being six-year-old PlayStation 2 games. Neither of them are very good, but I held onto Metropolismania because it’s on-the-ground city building was unlike any other game on the market (at the time). I ended up trading in River King to GameStop because I was close to buying the much-better Fishing Resort on Wii, and because River King’s actual fishing mechanic – the core of its gameplay – sucked. There was no real feel of a struggle between player and fish – all you did was watch the fish sway back and forth and hold the X button to reel it in, and it was impossible to tell how close you were to catching the fish, or how close you were to losing it (either due to line tension or the fish just plain slipping away).

Typically, GameStop only gives out pennies on the dollar for most trade-ins, and I only got about 30 cents for this one (somewhat understandable, as River King isn’t that well-known, and the last “new” PlayStation 2 game was released about a year ago). The funny thing about this is that the last time I went into that GameStop, I swear I saw the very same copy of River King I gave them, being resold for just $3. Now, I’m not sure whether the joke’s more on me for overpaying for a crappy fishing sim from a store that doesn’t specialize in video games, or GameStop when they decided they had to resell a game they determined wasn’t even worth the $5 I wasted “renting” it.

…And some other stuff

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After beating Kid Icarus: Uprising on Wednesday before school (a totally awesome game that you should pick up if you have a Nintendo 3DS) and spending the next two days trying to figure out what I needed to do to fill up the Treasure Hunt cards for more loot, I went out to GameStop today to pick up Xenoblade Chronicles and fulfill the last preorder I’ll need for a good while. I also got myself used copies of Lock’s Quest, Rhythm Heaven, and Star Ocean: Second Evolution, and got rid of some old games I had no use for in some sort of weird Yu-Gi-Oh-esque summoning ritual.

Xenoblade, as you may or may not recall, is the first of the three “Operation Rainfall” games (a fan campaign to get Nintendo to publish/distribute more Eastern-developed RPGs on the Wii), having been released in Japan and parts of Europe several months ago and finally making its way to the U.S. today. I don’t expect this to sell that many copies here since GameStop and the Nintendo shop are the only places stocking it, but I’m glad that it got here at all. I’ll probably play this one a lot between Warriors Orochi 3 (also surprisingly good; shame about the lack of English dub, though).

Star Ocean: Second Evolution is the PSP remake of Star Ocean: The Second Story, which came out on the original PlayStation almost a decade earlier. This one is supposed to have much better voice acting than the original (which, while not on a level of badness as the first Grandia, made so many battles painful to listen to), but probably isn’t all that different from the first game. I may give that one to my brother if he still cares to play with his PlayStation once in a while.

P.S. Don’t bother trading in your PS2 games toward store credit; you’ll get almost nothing for them. You’ll be better off selling them at a flea market. PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, Nintendo DS/3DS, and PSP/PlayStation Vita games are where it’s at nowadays.

‘Tis best to give AND receive

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2011 was a pretty good Christmas, though not a completely fun one…I decided to go to work today in order to earn some extra post-holiday money. Luckily, there wasn’t a whole lot of work to do, so I got through the day pretty stress-free. Here’s a quick breakdown:

Stuff I gave out:

  • two albums for Dad: Thin Lizzy’s “Shades of a Blue Orphanage” and Grace Jones’ “Inside Story”
  • The Help on DVD for Mom
  • Pokémon Ranger: Guardian Signs for Sara
  • a $25 iTunes gift card for my sister
  • Batman: Arkham City on PS3 for my brother

Stuff I got:

  • an LG Optimus V phone from Mom and Dad
  • a $10 GameStop gift card from my aunt
  • Kirby: Mass Attack on Nintendo DS from Sara
  • the Ico/Shadow of the Colossus collection from my brother
  • some money and clothes (including a shaving kit)

Gift I’m most excited about: the phone, since I can use it to get stuff from the “official” Android App Market, which I can’t do with the tablet I bought a few weeks ago. That, and I can also upload pics properly again (Virgin discontinued the picture uploading service I used on my own phone).

Gift I’m the most surprised about: Kirby: Mass Attack. I’d told Sara about in passing in an e-mail one day, but I wasn’t sure if she would actually be able to get it. I hope she enjoys what I got for her, too.