Burning A Hole In Your Pocket: Impulse Buys

Larka

Buying unopened Digital Devil Saga 1 and 2 for an ungodly sum.
but have a pretty sweet case that holds both of them now

greeble

acidlacedpenguin wrote: »

my last impulse buy was a PS3 with LittleBigPlanet. It was a brand new in box 60gb model and I told myself I'd never see another one in the wild.

Now I'm in the hole $600 with no current income.

Spoiler:

I regret nothing!

Where the hell did you find a 60Gb ps3 this late in the game?

Speed Racer

The only thing I really buy on impulse is Rock Band songs. If I have MS Points, and I go into the music store, I'm not going to have MS Points anymore.

Guibs

I would consider myself an impulse buyer even though I'm more "controlling" myself than I used to. This is espicially true if I walk in an electronics store (futureshop, Bestbuy, etc) or browsing the interet.

My impulse buying game thing is directly responsible for me having lots of games I've barely touch and far from done. It also works on "thrend" I could be on a "JRPG" thrend and start buying a few games in that category but I don't even have time to finish one of them that I crave for something else and change my focus to something else.

So my resolution for this year is to finish the games I have before buying new ones. It's only january and I've already looked into 1 or 2 games mostly because I wonder if those will be hard to find later.

Elementalor

This thread has to stop. It makes me feel like my impulse buying is ok. WHEN IT ONLY MIGHT BE...

I usually have a researched list in my head of stuff I deem buyable and then impulse if I see a decent price on them. Impulse in the 'I just know the prices and stuff' without ever actually planning to buy a lot of it.

I impulsed my 360 and PS3 back shortly after each came out.

Dangerous

I am terrible for impulse buying. I had it in my head that I wasn't going to spend any more until RE5 hits. Then I watched some previews for SF4 and the fight stick, went in and pre-ordered them the same day.

I just played the demos of skate 2 and FEAR 2 last night, fighting the urge to spend so bad. I just know next time I head to the mall my wallet will be at least $60 lighter.

NailbunnyPD

I've been holding myself back from buying a PS3 simply for LBP and download games like Noby Noby Boy or Fat Princess. The Dell deal is quite tempting.

kdrudy

I usually will get an idea in my head of something I want, so then I go about buying it, not exactly impulse buying but pretty close. The latest one was an Eee PC which I got for 200 dollars at Best Buy, before that it was a gaming laptop to replace my then current laptop, 1500 at Microcenter. There are also plenty of smaller purchases online when I decide I want to buy 4 books on Go or decide that I need to play Gitaroo Man or want to buy all of Ganketsuou or want to plug my guitar into my computer.

Luckily I have a job that allows me to afford these indulgences.

Kris

I impulse bought WWF Attitude for the Gameboy Color (my first self-purchased system) on my way home from school one time. Hadn't read any reviews or articles about it. I played like a half hour and realized my grim, horrible mistake. I tried to return it but the dude wasn't having any of it.

Some good came out of it though. From that point forward, I have been researching pretty much everything before I buy it.

h8b1llg8ts

Impulse buys are not really games but cars. If its was a '64 or under and within 200 miles I would tell the wife it's time for a field trip. Gas up the truck and trailer and make a weekend out of it. After about the 7th or 8th car I just ran out of room and widdled it down to just three cars now. Not bad since I never paid more then $2000 for a running classic.

Yellow Ranger

greeble wrote: »

acidlacedpenguin wrote: »

my last impulse buy was a PS3 with LittleBigPlanet. It was a brand new in box 60gb model and I told myself I'd never see another one in the wild.

Now I'm in the hole $600 with no current income.

Spoiler:

I regret nothing!

Where the hell did you find a 60Gb ps3 this late in the game?

Ha, come to Iowa sometime if you want a new 60 gig. There is a mom & pop store a few blocks from me that still has four launch 60 gigs for sale. I've actually seen them at a few different stores in the past week.

TheRoadVirus

My biggest impulse buys now are on XBL arcade. I've got a bit of a tradition with my friends where once or twice a month, we'll all meet at my apartment and play games and be tards until 2 or 3 am. As such, I'm always looking for some fun XBLA games to play multiplayer on.

Games that I have impulse purchased on XBL:
--Alien Homonid (eh)
--Castle Crashers (so good)
--N+ (this plus booze equals jesus)
--Worms (not as good as some other versions, but still fun)
--Heavy Weapon (fun in short-ish bursts)

I used to feel like I HAD TO buy something whenever I went into gamestop, which used to hurt my wallet. Now that I've got a job making a little bit more money, I actually use Goozex a lot. If I see a game I'm interested in, I'll throw it on my requests list. It takes a while sometimes, but I get to play games that are pretty fun that I otherwise would have overlooked.

--Infinite Undiscovery
--The Darkness
--Simpson's Game (surprisingly, pretty good/funny)
--Lego Indiana Jones

Saves me money, and if I ever get a game that I dislike, i can always send it back!

UreshiiAkuma

I rarely if ever make impulse buys with no information. My impulse buys are only an impulse on when I actually buy a game. That is, I keep a running list in my head of games I'd like to own. Sometimes I'll be out and feel like buying something, and grab one of those games. Steam (such as this last end-of-year sale) tends to lead to a lot of these impulse purchases.
So, I end up impulse buying more games than I need, but rarely get burned on these purchases.

BlueDestiny

I have pretty good control over purchasing impulses. Occasionally I'll go insane for a few minutes and buy another month for an MMORPG that I stopped playing though.

greeble

Yellow Ranger wrote: »

greeble wrote: »

acidlacedpenguin wrote: »

my last impulse buy was a PS3 with LittleBigPlanet. It was a brand new in box 60gb model and I told myself I'd never see another one in the wild.

Now I'm in the hole $600 with no current income.

Spoiler:

I regret nothing!

Where the hell did you find a 60Gb ps3 this late in the game?

Ha, come to Iowa sometime if you want a new 60 gig. There is a mom & pop store a few blocks from me that still has four launch 60 gigs for sale. I've actually seen them at a few different stores in the past week.

I would totally buy at least one and sell it on ebay. They go for a couple hundred over list if you have a new one with the receipt.

Ganluan

I've never been one to impulse buy - in fact, I usually missed out on many titles because I couldn't justify buying them, even at a lower price point.

Renting through GameFly has really helped because I get to play a lot of different games but don't have any buyer's remorse. I buy everything through debit so I know anything I buy is coming right out of our bank account, and that makes it easier to be stingy

The only game I bought for full price on the 360 were Mass Effect and Lost Odyssey, and both were definitely worth it. Normally, I watch CAG or other deal sites to pick games up on the cheap or I won't play them at all.

Evangir

Getting a credit card has been an impulse buy curse for me. For years beforehand I would look online at games I really really really wished would come to a retail location where I live. None of them did, naturally, because they're so bloody rare. As soon as I get a credit card, BAM, my PS2 backlog grows to 30ish games (almost exclusively 50+ hour JRPGs). I'm just lucky I'm so averse to going into debt; I only purchased stuff on the CC that I had money to pay it off with. I know people who aren't so restrained with their CC purchases.

I've only now stopped (mostly) now that I have enough unplayed video games to keep me entertained for a decade or so.

Djiem

I'm an impulse buyer, but only when I have spare money that I can afford to throw away for entertainment. When I'm saving up or lacking money, I become very conservative. When things go well and I find that I have a little 50 or 100 I can afford to spend, I blow it all on the first cool things that catch my eye.

Ganluan

This thread makes me feel boring... I'll be getting a couple grand back on a tax return and just putting in a high-yield account. Woooooo!

Kris

I'm feeling a very strong urge to impulsively buy Mount & Blade while it's on sale this weekend through steam. D:

Shorn Scrotum Man

Steam has been my main source of impulse buys.

That fucking after Christmas sale >.<

ChewyWaffles

Shut up, all of you! I can't stand the guilt!!!

Kaseius

This was my recent impulse buy.. I was walking to the checkout of Best Buy (with God Hand and Killer7 for PS2, 9.99 each fuck YES), and in my way was a cart of stuff that was being put away. I saw the face, picked it up, sighed, and continued to the counter.

Now I can't buy the 10+ used PS2 games I have hold on work. So many.. so cheap..

Elementalor

Oh no, now I wanna run to best buy.

Jimpy

I manage to not do any impulse buys because I stay away from any place that sells games... but I swear if I ever go around to one I'm going to be buying Red Alert 3, Dead Space, or some other game since I haven't bought one in about 6 months. I don't have a source of income, is the only problem.

Cantido

Ace Combat 6. The franchise has hit rock bottom IMO. They need to turn it up a notch next time, and killing the story's writer wouldn't hurt either.

And I got Sins of a Solar Empire, and I have no time for it, no matter how much I want to learn it.

mystic_knight

I just impulse bought Mount & Blade because it was 7.50.

SirUltimos

I am the worst person on Earth when it comes to impulse buys. You see, I work in the electronics department of a department store so anytime we get in cheap games of things get discounted I'm always the first to find out. I also have disgustingly little self-control, so you can probably see why I buy so many game son impulse.

kdrudy

mystic_knight wrote: »

I just impulse bought Mount & Blade because it was 7.50.

Ack, I bought it last night, curse my luck!

Kaseius

Elementalor wrote: »

Oh no, now I wanna run to best buy.

Don't do it man; you'll end up looking through all the games for that one last copy of something you had a hard time finding before.. although, God Hand and K7 for 9.99 each was a steal in my opinion. So awesome.

Shadowfire

The wife and I just got Tokobot Plus ($5), Raiden 3 ($5), Blastworks - Build, Trade & Destroy ($5), and Rhapsody DS ($10) when we went up to Burlington for the Video Games Live concert.

We didn't intend to buy anything.

Kaseius

Shadowfire wrote: »

The wife and I just got Tokobot Plus ($5), Raiden 3 ($5), Blastworks - Build, Trade & Destroy ($5), and Rhapsody DS ($10) when we went up to Burlington for the Video Games Live concert.

We didn't intend to buy anything.

For those prices, it's hard to say no..

ph blake

I got into the PS2 kind of late in the game (I was a cube guy for most of that console generation), so now whenever I wander into a gamestore I almost always end up walking out with at least a couple of cheap PS2 games that catch my eye. Just yesterday I went into the local Gamestop with a friend to pick up a new PS3 Dual Shock (he says his old one fell into a toilet, how I have no idea) and ended up snagging Virtua Fighter 4: EVO and Street Fighter Alpha Anthology for $6 each, as well as Yakuza 1 and 2 for $25 together.

Kaseius

ph blake wrote: »

I got into the PS2 kind of late in the game (I was a cube guy for most of that console generation), so now whenever I wander into a gamestore I almost always end up walking out with at least a couple of cheap PS2 games that catch my eye. Just yesterday I went into the local Gamestop with a friend to pick up a new PS3 Dual Shock (he says his old one fell into a toilet, how I have no idea) and ended up snagging Virtua Fighter 4: EVO and Street Fighter Alpha Anthology for $6 each, as well as Yakuza 1 and 2 for $25 together.

I'm the same, but I work in a Gamecrazy, so whenever someone brings in a big stack of PS2 trades, I end up going through them, finding ones that look cool and putting them on hold. They're almost always only like 8 bucks so I find there's no real reason not to put them on hold.. I have like 15 waiting for me, haha.

Bartholamue

I bought Dark Sector when it dropped to $10, and it's an awesome game. Probably my pick for top 5 360 games (that are under $25).

TeeMan

I saw Stuntman Ignition for $15 the other weekend for the PS2, snapped up that bad boy without a second thought because it had such an explodey cover.

Game itself is pretty damn enjoyable, I'm one of those guys who'll sit down and be perfectly happy repeating the same steps in a 2 minute window trying to absolutely nail the run, because the replay camera is pretty great.

Just gets annoying having to listen to the director commentary over and over and over and overrrr again. Especially that first bike advertisement mission.

*start*... "Here comes the jump"... "ERRROPEE!!!"

Seriously, he doesn't even say a word, just screams out something unintelligible.


Other than that, I'm satisfied with this impulse buy.

Fireflash

There was a time when I was living with my girlfriend in a pretty cheap apartment. I think my share of the rent+ utilities was no more than 300$ a month so I regularly had some disposable income burning in my pockets.

I would at the minimum buy a new full priced videogame every paycheck. A lot of games were suddenly tempting to me which lead me to a bunch of very unwise purchases of OXBOX games: One of the Mortal Kombats, Sudeki and Star Wars Battlefront amongst them. Not entirely bad games per se, but I barely played them for lack of interest. I was just addicted to getting new games. What a waste of money that was.

At least now I try ponder a while before I decide to buy a game. For games like Gears of War which I don't care that much for but still want to play through the single player I'll just borrow it from work or from a friend for a few days instead of buying it.

Emerlmaster999

Bought The Maw on a whim earlier, and I regret nothing despite it being a 3-4 hour game. Already beat it, but well worth it. And I still have Fallout, Ar tonelico 2, Valkyria Chronicles, and Chrono Trigger to finish up.

It kinda sucks that my birthday is just a few weeks before the spring semester starts up, I always have too many games left undone going into the school year thanks to it and Christmas.

Ultimanecat

Almost bought a PS3 at Circuit City's going-out-of-business sale today, since I could get an 80 GB one for $360. But then I thought:

-What the hell am I going to do with this?
-I'm leaving the country in a month, and already have enough shit to worry about taking with me.

So, I'm not as impulsive as I could be. Although I easily have 50+ games that I have bought in the past decade that I haven't played past the first level or have not even played at all.

Jean

I'll impulse buy games that are below $30 or movies below $10. To buy anything over those price points I have to really want it.