I love life’s little ironies. The PC gaming market is in its slow period this time of year. I’ve been playing a lot of Neverwinter Nights, and I am anticipating Battlefield 1942 (the demo is awesome), but not much else has come along now in about 3 months. So I started picking up Playstation 2 games to feed my jones. They’re in a great spot now; similar to when I got my original playstation, the system has been out long enough that games have started dropping into the $20 range. I picked up….

…quite a few excellent games, including The Mark of Kri, Tekken Tag Team and several other A-list games. Most of them for under $20. So what do I end up playing? A copy of Final Fantasy Tactics that I picked up for $7.50 on ebay. I had it for my original playstation but managed to get very far into the game and then realize I had made some mistakes in the beginning that had screwed me. I didn’t have the heart to start over again so I gave up on it. Now like 4 years later I’m hooked. The graphics look like ass but it’s all in the gameplay I guess.

What’s also amusing about this is that about 2 years ago, the game had turned into a cult classic and was going for as much as $80 on ebay. I had loaned my original copy to Mike Lord, so I asked him to send it back to me so I could sell it. He went looking for it and discovered that his kids had reduced it to fragments, so he sent me a check for $60. Fair enough. Except Square (the original publisher) noticed that it was commanding high prices and released a ‘bargain price’ re-release for $20. Just as the Playstation 2 came out and the bottom fell out of the original PSX game market. So I am able to get it on ebay for $7.50 now. Poor mike got the worst end of the deal I suppose, but I don’t feel guilty about it. I would have sold the copy he would have sent me for my $80, so he did owe me the cash so to speak.

Damn, that was a pointless story. If you made it this far, I salute you 😉