Tunnels of Doom

Welcome to the final installment of $60 a Month! It has been one year of budgeting and cataloging my gaming purchase habits. Rather than expand on the budget for July and continue the exercise for another year, I thought I would recap the experiment, try to catalog some of the lessons I learned and draw some conclusions about what it means to be a gamer with a budget. As enjoyable as I’ve found the project, I think it is time for it to come to a close before it wears out its welcome.

Before we go further, let’s examine some statistics from the last twelve budget-conscious months:

• I acquired 95 games in the first year, for an average of just under eight games per month.
• I traded away 54 games over the course of the year, averaging four and a half trades per month.
• I earned $43.47 in money by recycling, earned $118.47 in gaming-related cash to add to the budget and used $40 worth of gift cards.
• My total budget, including $60 per month and the additional funds listed above, came to $921.94.
• I spent $876.70 on games in twelve months.
• My average monthly expenditures was $73.06. My average budget was $76.83.
• My total amount carried from one month to the next was $241.93, for an average of $20.16.
• The 12-month difference between available budget and amount spent was $45.24… in the black.

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Last month I wondered what would happen with the release of a bunch of interesting new titles, but what I failed to mention when listing them all was that while all of them held some appeal, none were games I felt belonged on my “must buy on day one” list. The only game that really came close was Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition, but frankly the rumors of 90-minute cutscenes in Metal Gear Solid 4 and the huge question mark that was Alone in the Dark, I could have easily said that June looked like a completely unknown quantity.

There is a curious difference between months that have a few must-haves and months that have a lot higher number of could-be-cools. The must-have months end up feeling like they really test the limitations of a budget-conscious gamer while months like June actually end up being pretty breezy because with a lot of competition but no real demands on the budget, it’s fairly effortless to take a wait and see approach to the entire month’s offerings.

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his month I’m starting something new. It’s not drastically different but it will have an effect on the budget each month. So far I’ve been counting Goozex trades as being essentially free. At first I counted the shipping costs toward the budget each month but I felt that didn’t really apply because it opened the door to factoring in things like gas for a trip to GameStop or something that felt too anal retentive. So I started marking each Goozex trade as Method: Goozex, Cost: Trade.

But the truth is that Goozex charges a flat $1.00 fee for each game you trade in. For light-traffic traders it barely makes a dent; Goozex themselves often run “free trade” promotions and I’d guess an average Goozex user sends out only a game or two each month. But I’ve been sending a lot more than that out and receiving a significant amount in return. Since I’ve refilled my Goozex trade credits several times in the last few months I thought it was only fair that I start counting that toward the budget. So now each Goozex game will be listed as a $1.00 purchase regardless of points value just to keep things even.

Will the new rule change my budget-keeping abilities? Click on to find out.

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I spent the whole month anticipating the release of Grand Theft Auto IV. But that still left 28 days in between for me to fill up with… what? I had some extra funds from last month’s lean times, but was it enough to carry me through almost a whole month and still have the cash for my anticipated full-priced retail purchase?

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I suppose you could say that the $60 a Month experiment has been successful. Using only $60 of my monthly income I’ve managed to accumulate a pile of games so vast that I can’t finish them all. I barely even have time to play them, which means a certain meritocracy has formed in my game library where only the games that command my attention are given it and those which may even have plenty of merit but aren’t forceful with their insistence to be played sit idle.

Meanwhile, March was a sad month for games. Very little worth noting came out and nothing was released that I couldn’t live without. As a result I did some light trading and rented a couple of titles which filled up about a week apiece. None of this is necessarily a bad thing; somewhere down the road there will be a month with a number of releases that I can’t afford on my base budget alone. Perhaps the carryover here will come in handy.

Sometimes the worst part about having a budget is feeling like the money is already earmarked. It becomes a strange circumstance where you almost feel like you need to spend the money or else you’re not doing something right. Toward the end of the month I started feeling that way which prompted a second rental. The more I thought about it, the less I felt like I needed to spend all or a significant portion of the budget.

I did find myself occasionally staring at the shelves lined with games I intended to play or was halfway finished with and felt stuck either with overwhelming options or a lack of true desire to play anything specific which led me to my biggest feat of the month which was offloading a number of games I’d been clinging to without really having just cause. I tell myself often that I’m not a collector of games and yet titles that I really enjoy I often find hard to part with for sentimental reasons. Since there wasn’t anything I was dying to buy and I didn’t have a lot of Goozex credit to look for additional trades I instead began listing games that I didn’t have plans to play any further or games that I had intended to play more but found myself frequently passing over in favor of other options. The clearing house that occurred was rather cathartic and the money remaining will go a long way next month as I anticipate the GTA IV launch.

Budget

Last month’s antics left me with a mere $3.58 to work with so after adding the usual sixty bucks, I had $63.58. I did no recycling this month which means I have recyclables that have been collecting since January’s run; I may earn as much as $20-25 next time I need to take them in.

The Game List

1. Army of Two
   Platform: Xbox 360
   Method: Rental
   Cost: $6.50
   A mediocre game at best, surely a rental only title. I can’t complain too much about the price for completing a new title but the game itself is so flawed and derivative that I might have appreciated the cost savings more had I not mostly wished I just skipped it altogether.
2. MLB 08 The Show
   Platform: PlayStation 3
   Method: Rental
   Cost: $6.50
   Sports games are tricky acquisitions: Rentals seem like too short to fully invest in them but purchases feel like a ripoff since they tend to be annual releases that don’t retain their value at all. I went with a rental here but I have requested the game from Goozex on the strength of the time I’ve spent with it. Parts of the game not showcased in the demo are important enough to warrant a bit of up-front cost before commitment and I don’t mind the sacrifice here.
3. Ninja Gaiden Sigma
   Platform: PlayStation 3
   Method: Goozex
   Cost: Trade
   Essentially I traded up from Ninja Gaiden Black which, while nearly identical, was also run only in backwards compatibility mode on the 360 and that experience isn’t the best. It plays nicely on the PS3, looks great and is still a fun game despite being unapologetically difficult.
4. EA Replay
   Platform: PSP
   Method: Goozex
   Cost: Trade
   A miserable compilation of games that haven’t retained their appeal for the most part. I picked it up for Syndicate which is interesting but not strong enough on its own to hold onto the game. I re-listed it on Goozex almost immediately and if I don’t get back to it before someone requests it, I won’t be upset.

List Breakdown

A short list this month and not all good news. Still I came up with a better version of Ninja Gaiden and a week with The Show so a fifty-fifty split good and bad.

Sacrifices

As part of my library clearance trades I parted with Assassin’s Creed, Ninja Gaiden Black, Resistance: Fall of Man, Burnout Paradise and Meteos. I was probably most sad to see Assassin’s Creed go because while I was getting tired of searching for flags just to have an excuse to step back into the game, I really enjoyed the heck out of it while I was playing. Resistance was forgettable and not as good as I’d hoped, Ninja Gaiden Black went as part of my effort to replace it with the newer Sigma for PS3. Burnout Paradise was a tough call because I really wanted to like the game but despite its promise and general enjoyment I think I needed a close friend to get hooked on it to make it worth my while.

I also listed a slew of other games on Goozex which had not been snapped up as of this writing but watch this space next month for more surprise trade-ins.

Results

Budget-wise there was no better month for coming out on top. Of my available $63.58 I spent only $13.00 leaving me with $50.58 for next month. That means that starting off I’ll have $110.58! I didn’t choose all that wisely this month though even with my few new game selections, but with a lack of new game fodder out there, pickin’s were slim to begin with. Hopefully the late-month trade-fest will result in some better titles early next month to tide me over until GTA and in the meantime the bounty from previous $60 a Month efforts continues to pay off with plenty of great titles clamoring for my attention.

For a short month and one coming off a gargantuan post-holiday game bonanza, you might think I’d take it a little bit easy, maybe fixate some on a few of January’s bounty. Instead, find out what happens when my budget widens just a little and the activity on Goozex picks up significantly.

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January had a massive budget. Between the recent holidays, my birthday, a big carryover from December and an upgrade on the home theater system, I may have been single-handedly keeping the flagging US economy afloat. But despite all the crazy budget gymnastics, I still had a set dollar amount to work within. Did I pull it off?

Also, early in the month I signed up for a Gamerscore Challenge to try and win a $100 Best Buy gift card by earning the most achievement points through January 31st. Could I keep the flow of points coming and still spend less than my budgeted amount? Read on to find out.

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Christmas time can be curious for someone like me who is accustomed to buying his own toys. I figure that I work long hours to earn this money so while I certainly have financial obligations to meet, I also sort of owe it to myself to buy some fun stuff every once in a while. The purpose of $60 a Month is to maintain a steady stream of enjoyment without busting the bank but what do you do when you anticipate getting a pile of gifts in a few weeks?

In this case you’re about to see that without spending any more of my budget than is strictly necessary, I end up not really having much to report. A letdown from Gameznflix doesn’t help and ultimately the most exciting stuff happens outside the scope of $60 a Month with the gifts I received. Still, it’s not a big deal: It just means January will be epic.

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It seems like a tough mission: Two highly anticipated AAA titles in the same month and only my usual $60 budget to acquire them both. I planned ahead a bit last month by putting down a pre-order for Mass Effect and having a decent carry-over, but that meant that I was going to have to be crafty if I wanted to pick up the month’s other must-have, Call of Duty 4, and not bust my budget.

Read on to see if I pulled it off.

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The third month of my budgetary experiment saw a huge boost in retail purchases due to some “found” funds, but I’m beginning to wonder about Gameznflix and I’m getting concerned about next month’s double-threat of Call of Duty 4 and Mass Effect already. I match last month’s total in new acquisitions but this month I spend less time playing the new games than I have previously. All this and more after the hop.

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