Cleaning House

Since I finish the long, joyful shock treament of academia in May (or June... whenever the hell they hand you a degree and tell you to fuck off) I've been gradually selling off games and systems that I won't be playing. When I was younger I'd have never considered selling a game I owned or even trading it in. Many people still feel that way, and it can make sense if you consider the various products you've purchased to be a "collection." My father still has every vinyl record he's purchased since the days of bands that actually played music. Maybe it is because I can be classified as having grown up during the advent of the "digital age," but I really don't care about the physical storage that entertainment is delivered on, and I don't have a sentimental connection to any of it. A lot of people remarked about how they didn't like the idea of not having a physical copy of Half-Life 2 when it was sold over steam. I liked it that way. It's on the hard drive. You click an icon to play it. No disc to chase after or wipe because it's been scratched. There is definately a practical use of having a backup on disc, but the DVD-R/W drive takes care of that. I just don't care about discs, boxes, manuals, or any of that crap. I haven't bought a CD since 2000, since the discs to me are nothing but a metallic frisbee used to store the data. Keeping it all centralized on a hard drive keeps things easy, with CD-R or DVD-R backups that hold hundreds (or thousands) of MP3's instead of just twelve lousy songs. Efficiency is a great thing.

Realizing that much of what sits on the shelf has to be ditched or jammed into a UHAUL, I've been considering whether or not it would be easier to just get a device like HDLoader and keep the games (not the coasters they currently reside on) in one place. The lack of a selling point is that I'd still need to keep the discs as backups anyway, and not being into video game piracy, much of the enthusiam for modding a console is lost for me.

So the bottom line comes down to keeping what seems to be worth keeping, and chucking the rest of it on eBay. I already sold my Gamecube and half the games for it last year since I hardly used it. I'm not sure about selling my Xbox yet. I stll play games like ESPN NFL 2005 and Rallisport Challenge once in a while, but the software lineup is starting to thin out with the console's successor coming out this year. The new system being backwards compatible would probably keep me from selling many of the games since I could play them later on, but it doesn't look like that is going to happen. The two year warranty I have on it ends in about two weeks, so maybe the best option is to continue using it until it hits me with a DRE and then sell whatever games I have left for it.

I've got enough unopened PS2 games to open a small retail chain, but considering how little I paid for many of them ($5 circuit city sales damage shelf space) I'm not sure it would be worth getting rid of them since they cost less than a rental. But at some point I'll definately have to stop buying cheap RPG's that I have no intention of playing. Bigger dorks than I would shudder if they saw Dark Cloud 2, Wild Arms 3, and BoF V still in cellophane. I guess the best approach here would be to pack everything into boxes in case some day hell freezes over and I actually have time to play them.

You just don't realize how much junk you've bought until you have to move all of it.