Gaming can be a low budget hobby

Do you think gaming is expensive? My goal in this article is to convince you that you really can have a hobby like this and not have so large budget. In my opinion buying games and concoles isn’t as expensive as you would first think. We go through here some points how you can significantly save money while still having a nice relationship with your dear gaming hobby.

You can save a decent sum of money by going to flee markets. I bought my PSOne, for example, for fifteen euros. Before this self-containment caused by korona-virus I regularly visited some large flee markets here in Finland. I usually went through every single table and it took me about half an hour. There was hundreds of self-service tables. I felt excited every time I went through these. You never know what you will find. It is a blessing but I think that’s also a bit of a problem since you don’t know beforehand how much you will spend and what you will find. I recommend to prepare financially. Sometimes you don’t find anything but next time you might find PS1, some big box PC games and some other stuff that you only dreamed about when you were just making your way to local flee market. Typical products you can find almost every time is some PS3 or Xbox 360 game for five euros.

Flee markets provide a cheap way to purchase games and consoles.
You just don’t know for sure what you’ll find. If you are searching for a specific game or console and you know just what you are looking for there is an option. You can check your favourite small-time gaming store. I prefer online shopping but you can always (if there wouldn’t be this korona situation) visit the strore. You can also make your order and just pay and pick it up from the store. You can find many old games and you can also trade your old games, duplicates or the ones you don’t play so much.

The latest is always the most expensive. If you can’t afford PS4 Pro or newest Xbox you can always buy PS3 if you just want a console. PS3 has good quality. I know this because I’ve had this console for over ten years. You can also use your PC or buy a used one. Doing this reduces your gaming expenses greatly. Also remember to keep up with any discounts that you can find. One example that comes to mind was PlaStation Classic. It’s price tag was 130 euros. Since it flopped badly you could buy one for 40 euros. That’s the actual point of keeping up with the lowest prices.

Some advice about roms and emulators. It isn’t right to copy games and not pay for them. But I also think that if you have some game as hard copy you can confidently play it also on emulator. Same advice I have for consoles. If you don’t own the console don’t play it. If you have broken console? Then you can play it. These are just my own opinions and the law might say something different. To play safe don’t copy games at all especially if you don’t have a hard copy.

Golden Axe series

My experience with Golden Axe series begins as I find this series second game for Sega Mega Drive. Mega Drive was already very popular as it had more power under its hood than NES. These memories bring me back to the beginning of 90s. As a kid I didn’t understand so much about ongoing console wars between mainly SEGA and Nintendo. Their gaming consoles got released one after another. First NES was released in 1983. Then there appeared Master System. Then Mega Drive got released. After that SNES was released. This war got started some years after the crisis of video games occurred. In 1978 everything looked fine. Atari 2600 made its way to many homes. There were so many bad games released and it eventually left game developers with empty hands. But this crisis that lasted some years was over as Nintendo released its Entertainment System.

So Mega Drive was the console to have back in my childhood. Golden Axe 2 was the sequel to the game that had been released already on Master System with also Mega Drive version being produced. The game caught my attention and I think it strongly influenced me to buy this console a moment later. Even today I think Golden Axe II is one of the best games ever released on Mega Drive. When I now play it I think it’s still worth playing for some hours. If I could modify it, I’m not sure if it is even possible, maybe it is, I would add some roleplaying features and theability to develop the character that you choose to play as. It already has many moves and characters have different qualities. It was good so see a female character also.

Soundtrack of this game was very inspiring. It brought tension to the game and along with amazing graphical effects affected and appealled to me as a kid growing up. My little brother also loved this game. I don’t know what’s up with him playing all these violent games. It sure was only fantasy for us and all players that ever got involved in virtual axe swinging. Back in the day there weren’t so many limitations as there is now. You didn’t have this large sticker on every damn piece of video game that tells for every human being that “this game is so and so violent, so brutal…” and so on. It left the decision to parents solely. We played these games as the graphics were poor. Only limitations were that we had to study and go to school and to practise some sports. And back then gaming went after those. I don’t know how this relationship with gaming is doing right now in my life. I think it’s not a thing to worry.

So the first Golden Axe game was released on Master System, Mega Drive and also on Commodore 64. Many gamers had also an opportunity to play it in an arcade. It was also released on PC. So there were many gaming systems that it made its impact on. There was second and third game released on Mega Drive. There was a game released on Sega Saturn, but I really didn’t get into that so much. There was also newer game released on PS3 called Golden Axe: Beast Rider in 2008. After that we haven’t seen any new game in the series. This game is all about action in fantasy world. It brings the player to this world that is a mixture of fantasy and medieval. You swing your axe, ride with a dragon, fight against evil enemies and release spells as you collect your mana and health. I recommend this game when you are getting to know Sega Mega Drive keeping in mind that this game and system are both retro stuff. If you hate retro this game is not for you.

First games I remember playing

I remember how I got started with gaming. It was 1980s. Playing video games was already popular. There had already been some consoles like Atari 2600 and Commodore 64. PC was also popular. First gaming system that I got to play must have been PC. And it was somebody elses. Our family got our first computer and I think it was 1987 if I remember correctly. So I was three or four years old and I had already begun drawing with pencils. I could recognise some letters but I was too young to start writing or reading. I got to learn those skills later in school.

Games that we had on this PC were interesting to me. We had some Sierras classics like Police Quest, Space Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and Kings Quest. I was fiddling around with some QBasic games. I even wrote a small game with QBasic later as I was a bit older. I didn’t clearly understand the full potential this machine had. So I didn’t get into coding so much. I was also drawing something with early Paint this PC had.

I learned to write my first words playing Larry. I didn’t understand this games sexism. My parents allowed me to play it. Sexy parts of the game weren’t so clear and we understood them later when we grew more. It is a soft game on this matter. At least I think so. I once asked my father what was a “prophylactic” and he answered to me “Gee. I really don’t know. Can you figure it out from the picture? It looks like a gem or something.” So I was allowed to play this Larry and it was only seventh game in this series that got my parents a little bit worried because I was young. I played seventh Larry maybe in 1996 or something like that.

There were so many interesting games. Some of them were Sopwith, Space Commanders (Space Invanders Clone), Bubble Bobble, Test Drive and so on. Too many to list here. I don’t remember so much of the techical side of our computer. Our dad upgraded its processor to 286 so before that the processor was much slower than that. One day we tried to play Wolfenstein 3D on the computer but we failed to run the game. We also installed newer diskette drive. So it had drives for 8-inch and 3½-inch diskettes. It’s funny to think how bad the first mouse was so we got a new mouse also. The standars then was the classic mouse with a ball in it. Monitor of this device was heavy and our computer was able to run EGA graphics. There weren’t any VGA or Super VGA available.

I would have liked to add a picture about this machine but I could only find this picture of floppy disk and its disk drive. I took this picture some years ago as my parents were getting this old computers all parts to recycling center. I’m not so into retro computers. This old computer we had was replaced by Mega Drive and later by PlayStation as number one gaming console. This PC was not functioning so nicely. It used to get stuck and I would have to press “reset”. Back then all computers had this function. The personal comnputer we had served properly and because of that I can still remembert it and it really launched my gaming activitites and layed the foundation for it.