Much Ado About Everything

Well, this has been one crazy month (and a half). I ended up joining hordes of North Americans and contributed more than my fair share towards Christmas and Boxing Day sales. I’ll be paying interest for a few months to come, so that I can (could) enjoy new stuff during my time off in December (of which I had a fair amount of).

Now, almost all of the stuff I bought I got some kind of a deal on. It began with Xbox360 on the PS3 launch day. I couldn’t get PS3 (not then, at least) but Future Shop had a crazy deal where you could get $50 off (consoles are never on sale, except very rare special circumstances) – and get two games for free (bringing total of free games to 4). Now, this wasn’t a bad purchase for a hardcore gamer. As I found out, one year in the field yielded quite a few fairly good games, many of which I already completed.

Of course, it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t purchase another big thing – a 46″ large screen LCD TV by Sharp. A very good one. Now this is what I’ll be paying off till spring; compared to it, the rest are small potatoes, really. And I kind of took a gamble with it, which paid off. To a point, at least. This TV is known to have some nasty issues, but my luck was good and my set is ok for the most part (given that no sets are perfect and no brand is perfect at this time either, this was the best I could hope for).

Now, with those two together I did have a blast with many good Xbox360 games, and some of the best are still to come in these cold winter days. And as you might imagine, these would spark plenty of accessory purchases. Such as universal remote controls, rechargeable batteries, extra controllers when friends come over (which they never do, to play games that is, but did that stop me? No!). Oh, and games. Plenty of games.

Now, I negotiated the TV price down. And even during Boxing Day sales over a month later, the price is still better than in stores. I got a great deal on Xbox360. I didn’t pay full price on any of the games I got for it. Not a single one, including ones that just came out. But still, it all adds up.

Naturally, given the 1080p resolution, I needed a new movie source. A HD-DVD add-on from Microsoft, launched just in time, obliged. I did pay full price for it – but I still got a deal, since Future Shop gave away a copy of King Kong game with it (not to mention that the movie with the same name is included for the limited time with the add-on).

With so much electronics on the shelf, a new true universal remote was needed, and
so I got the Logitech 659, the cheapest of Logitech’s universal remotes. It works well, but you know what, there’s the little matter of Boxing Day, and the higher end model, which usually retails for $300 was now on sale for $100! That’s less than what I paid for my bottom of the line, discontinued model. So now I need to wait for it to get shipped to me so I can return the old one for refund. Or I could sell the new one on Ebay for profit. No kidding. Believe me, you had to spend an hour clicking on Christmas Even to get this one.

And, I got two more benchmark DVDs, since it’s pointless to shell out big bucks and then watch a TV which isn’t properly calibrated. No self-respecting enthusiast is going to ignore a proper set up of their new toy. In fact, that is half of the fun. I build my own PCs and tweak the hell out of everything because that’s what I love to do. And believe me, the amount of issues that you run into with any technology is not small. If you want to watch anime on this or any other TV, you will be running into some nasty picture quality issues unless you are prepared to deal with them. This is a story for another time, and more on that later.

But the craziest thing came on Christmas Day itself, while I was chatting with a friend. We were discussing of going to Future Shop on the Boxing Day to see what we can see. Then he told me to take a look at the website. And there, there was a sale of 1000 PlayStation 3′s. You can probably imagine the rest… Today I went to Wall-Mart to find the only game worth playing on that console, which I did find, for $10 off of course.

The fun never ends. Oh wait… it does. Because the money runs out. And even if it doesn’t, there just won’t be so much stuff to tempt me in the near future – because the last half of the year was very unusual in the gaming and electronics industry, with many new technologies being released.

CBC said that Canadians will spend 2.9 billion dollars on Boxing Day. Most of it on clothing (I did make company to a friend who spent over three thousand dollars on clothes on that day), and then the electronics (to which I contributed, well, you add – PlayStation 3, a Blu-Ray movie, a high end remote control and a wireless keyboard/mouse set (only $20 though)). Between two of us, we certainly managed to “fit in”.

I won’t go into reasons for the shopping spree. But if I were to guess, I’d say that I decided to spend and enjoy while the going is good, because experience tells me that times will change to bad again. And when that happens, even if I can afford to purchase new big shiny stuff, I won’t be able to fully enjoy them.