Video games are an expensive hobby, and expensive hobbies are sensible budget cuts during these trying economic times. Where are the best places to search for a cheap gaming fix if you’re watching your wallet and holding off on purchasing the expensive major game releases of the season? tableau is here to help.
The easiest and most obvious place to find free video games is the Internet. If you’re determined to play PC games that are both free and legal, your best options are to peruse Web sites that host free games made with Adobe Flash. Newgrounds.com, Kongregate.com and Armorgames.com are three excellent resources of Flash games that require no sign up, downloads or fees and rely on user ratings for quality control. Freetetris.org is another personal Web favorite, which is exactly what it sounds like: a free game of Tetris.
If you’re willing to spend some extra money and hard drive space, the best place to search for cheap PC games is steampowered.com. Steam is an online paid-downloads service run by Valve, the makers of the Half-Life series. By setting up a free Steam account, you can buy licenses for any game in the Web site’s impressive library and choose to install, uninstall and reinstall games at will. Much of Steam’s selection is priced at or less than $10, with special weekly deals for the particularly thrifty. Two PC strategy classics, Civilization III and X-COM: UFO Defense, are each available for only $4.99.
If you do most of your gaming on a console, your best place to check for cheap games is your local Gamestop. Gamestop typically prices games at 10 percent off their full cost for the first few months following release, but has hundreds of older games (no earlier than the PS2 or GameCube) at or less than $15, with additional discounts granted to Gamestop card holders. The store does enormous business at these lowered prices, earning about $2 billion in used game sales last year alone. With three locations within a 10-minute drive of Grounds, that’s a lot of bargain bins to sift through.
If you own one of the big three recent consoles, your best bet for budget quality is again to use downloading services; Xbox Live Arcade, the PSN Store and WiiWare all contain some fantastic software. Xbox 360 owners owe it to themselves to put up 400 points ($5) toward pure fun like Marble Blast Ultra, possibly the best 3-D puzzle/racing/action game about marbles ever made, and Geometry Wars, the psychedelic shape-blasting shooter that was one of XBLA’s first major hits. Also, no 360 owner should be without Uno. Yes, that Uno, which is completely awesome and only 400 points.
Spending those $5 on the PS3’s PSN Store can net you Noby Noby Boy, the bizarre community-eating game from the makers of Katamari Damacy, or Super Rub a Dub, an entertaining bathtub rubber ducky simulator, among hundreds of other downloads. Still, in terms of volume, the Nintendo Wii has both Sony and Microsoft beat in downloads of classic games, with more than 280 NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, Neo-Geo, Sega Master System and TurboGrafx games available on their Virtual Console service, priced between $5 and $12 apiece.
I won’t waste your valuable time listing all of my favorite bargain-bin games and cheap downloads, but I encourage you to shop around. Gaming is only an expensive hobby if you buy the most recent major releases as soon as they come out. Gamers can save money without sacrificing quantity or quality simply by knowing where to look.
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