Super Sanctum TD

Splinter Cell Conviction

I keep buying point and click adventure games out of loyalty to my youth, but I hardly ever play them anymore.

Probably 90% of my purchases.

Ah, that's where they got the idea for this commercial. Or was it the other way around.

This. So much this. I'm sure it is just my machine, and I am sure it is some kind of settings conflict or such, but ye gods and little fishies is this atrocious. I think I clocked it at 5-10 fps on the lowest settings. Then there was the general Mac port troubles where it would dislike even opening. And then Steam decided to auto-update and fix all my corrections for me... repeatedly. Arrrrgh. Oh well, I'll fix it up one of these days. Or maybe not since instead I have all these lovely GOG games that just work and are actually fun and stay how I put them.

King's Bounty Armored Princess. I really didn't like KB: The Legend, I'm still not sure how conscious I was when I bought Armored Princess. I may have actually been asleep at the computer. Loaded it up, played maybe 90 minutes and went yep, still a King's Bounty game, still don't like it. Uninstalled. No great loss.

When I purchase a game if it has a good price (full priced or a little sale), and it appears on a big sale (bundled or not), I don't regret it. I never regret buying something good at a good price even though it could be discounted after. In that case, I am just happy for others who can give the game a try. I don't regret it because I was interested in that game, in the first place, after all. And if the game is good, I believe that my "overpriced" purchase (which is not, in my point of view) is some kind of reward for the developers.

If I purchase a game or a book that I can't play or read at the moment, if it worth it at the end, I don't regret that purchase. It isn't a matter of price (if it wasn't really overpriced, obviously). It isn't even a matter of time, if I am sure that someday I will read/play it.

So I consider that I had very few stupid/unneeded purchases. But when it happens, I am some kind of angry or the deception is really huge.

The first time, it was Powermonger on the MegaDrive when I was a child, twenty years ago. I had discovered strategy games with Dune II, and I thought I would love the genre. So when I saw a second-hand box of Powermonger mentioning "real-time strategy", I bought it, hoping it was similar to Dune II. The box hadn't its manual but I really thought I wouldn't need it, having spent many hours on Dune II. But it wasn't the same kind of game, much more similar to Populous. And I wasn't patient enough to try to understand the game without a manual. So I abandoned, and I tried to only purchase games with a proper manual or at least games that I know what to do in, and if critics were good. Yes, I wasn't so naive to trust video game journalists at the time, so if I was interested in a game, I read many reviews to be sure that it would fit to my tastes. And that's why I haven't purchase a lot of games since then, because I was very cautious.

The secund time, it was many years after the first, it was only three years ago. I loved the Total War series, having each game since Shogun Total War (I remember the first screens in video game magazines when EA was the publisher) to Medieval II Total War and its addon. I stopped having interest when I heard of Empire Total War which a buggy mess, and thanks to my cautious attitude, I avoided purchasing it. When Napoleon Total War released, it was just "meh", because I thought that game should have been a addon for Empire and not a real priced game, and the "collector's edition" was full of units DLCs, which was nonsense for me even then. So I skipped that game too. But I bought Alpha Protocol because I was an Obsidian fan, and an old Sega fan too, and I was pleased to know that the original DRM was removed with the latest patch.
And when I first heard about Shogun II Total War and its big collectors edition, I preordered the game. I really wanted to love the game, remembering old Shogun LAN parties. But when the box arrived, I saw that Steam was needed, I was surprised after the no-DRM stance on Alpha Protocol. I wasn't so anti-Steam back then, I just didn't like it. So I installed Steam and saw that even on release I was forced to download many files to "update" my installed game. It was Day-one! And after that I have heard on the Steam store that units DLC were planned. The deception was huge. The only thing I saw from the game was the options screen. I never launched a campaign or a battle. It was just distasteful. So I formatted my harddisk drive, to be sure that no file from Steam will remain on my PC, took the box back on the shelf, back to dust. And it never moved since then. I promised that I won't ever buy a Total War game again. Never again.

And the third time was... the last GOG big sale: Luck of the Irish. The pot "gave" me too many games that I don't want to play because they don't fit my tastes. It was my fault, I was naive to believe that I could "win" after all with games that wouldn't appeal me first but that I should try. So from now, never random purchases ever.

Maybe I should give Powermonger a try since my tastes and skills on strategy games have evolved in 20 years.

Music/Game bundles are up there, but usually if I buy a music/game bundle, I'm buying it for one or two games, so I wouldn't them "stupid" purchases, but they are unneeded. Beyond the world of gaming, my classical guitar is not being used at all lately. By lately I mean "any time period after the first two months I owned it".

My biggest regret purchase, like a few people on here, was impulse buying a classic Xbox. £16 for an immaculate console, three controllers and Total Overdose, which I guess is a good deal, but after buying the thing I really have no idea what to do with it. These days it's a comparatively crappy media player and the good games (KOTOR, Morrowind) are just flat out better on PC. The only exclusives it seem to have are FPS, which I really don't enjoy. So... Yeah, my fault for not doing enough background research I guess.

PC Game wise, my stupidest purchases were Halo: Combat Evolved and Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. Totally regret buying Halo because I ended up buying into the hype, something I normally don't do. "Best FPS to date" and "The reason to own an X-box" my ass. That game was either run of the mill at best and downright insipid at worst.

Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault was obviously a buggy product rushed out the door. Ever play and an MMOFPS were a ton of your opponents were using aimbot hacks? Playing MOH:PA was similar. I'll never forget the time were I was bayonet charged and after emptying a full 30 round Thompson magazine into his face, he still kept coming and I got killed. I WTFed so hard my neighbours probably heard me. That was one of the few games I never even tried to finish.

Non PC game wise, a while back, I got an electronic English - Chinese dictionary that cost about 70 GBP. After my Chinese started to improve, I noticed that a lot of the things in the dictionary were wrong (I swear half the dictionary was in Chinglish but never noticed at the time as back then, I didn't have the fluency in Chinese I do now. I still have the dictionary but I have no idea what to do with it.

Normally, I'm careful with what I buy but everyone has their slip ups.

I at least used to regret a bit purchasing ASUS Transformer TF101 tablet. I bought it to my wife as her "personal computer" that she can take with her, and I pondered a long time over either getting an Android tablet (preferably with a keyboard, like TF101)), or some small and cheapo Windows laptop for the same near 500€ I used for TF101.

In the end, a Windows laptop would have been more useful to my wife, and only now she is learning how to use Windows 7, Microsoft Office etc. properly, for her studies. Obviously she can't use her tablet for that. Also quite many times she needs to do things she can't really do with the tablet, so she has to borrow my laptop for those.

I've set up one ancient Dell laptop also for her computer needs, but it is running Linux Mint, not Windows. So that isn't that much of use for her Windows-based IT studies, even if it is kinda cool she is learning slightly about using Linux too.

She has used the tablet quite a lot during the time we've had it, but now as she got a high-end Samsung Android phone, most of her tablet actions have moved there instead (Facebook etc.). But she still uses the TF101 too, probably due to its bigger screen and physical keyboard.

On the bright side, I was also interested to learn about using Android tablets, and at least I've now had a place to install all those Android games from Humble Bundles and such, even if I personally still prefer playing mostly the PC versions of those games. So the TF101 has certainly had its fair share of use, but I still think I should have bought a laptop instead already back then (and maybe a cheap 100€ Android tablet later on).

Speaking of tablets, is there any reason to buy a tablet instead of a cheap laptop/netbook? I know a few people who've bought them and after the initial "I've got a tablet! Cool!" stage is over, they almost never use them because they have laptops.

Mostly involving music equipment. I used to play guitar, bass, keyboard and dabbled with other instruments (used to, because where I am living now, I just don't have the space to set up my equipment) but I've bought some effects boxes and processors that in the end were not really any better than what I already had, or went on sale a month later.

Made some of that money back selling some of that stuff to friends.

Wedding rings.




Seriously, though, wedding rings. At least we went cheap. And so much other crap over the last ~30 years being a periodically-dumb consumer.

An automatic milk frother... It made a lot of noise, was impossible to clean, took a lot of space and I barely used it.