Shadow of bad consumerism
What follows ladies and gents is an epic tale. Gather round and I shall tell thee of a man, whom you all admire and wish you were more like...that's me by the way.
Anyways, a week or so ago I decided to try and pick up Shadow of the Colossus. Being the damn filthy student that I am I wanted to try and get it on the cheap from somewhere. My first port of call was to check the prices on Amazon, which showed up at about £27, including P&P. Not so hot, so I decided to shop around.
My first port of call was Virgin Megastore near Tottenham Court Road. Now this was at about fiveish. I'd just been in a draining production meeting and was crashing quite severely. So I was in a kind of daze. I managed to amble over to Virgin and drag myself upstairs. I found the box of the game, but not the game itself. It was sold out, but going for around thirty quid.
I decided to try this rather neat store where I usually pick up my games, namely CEX (Computer Games Exchange). I spent the better part of twenty minutes looking for it (they don't catagorise their games nor do they alphabetise them so well either). No copies to be found, so I ask at the front desk. They claim there's two copies. So another ten minutes of fruitless searching. I return to the desk and ask a different cashier. He theorises that the database is out of sync. So no love here.
The next day I decided to try down my local highstreet Finchley Road. The first place I tried was Sainsburys. Tescos back in Aycliffe was always surprisingly good and cheap for games, so why not Sainsburys? Well, it wasn't so great, because it wasn't there. Darn. So I tried a notoriously dodgy shop by the name of choices. The choice being you either pay through the nose for a game or get out of the shop. It was there, but for around £30. Ouchie. Distraught I plodded down the highstreet attempting to find places where it may be sold. I found my way to Woolworths, which was selling it for a staggering £35, the highest amount yet. A last ditch attempt at WHSmiths called up the regular price of £30.
So, with my pride dented and my patience broken, I decided to try eBay. However SotC is a pretty popular game, as I was outdone on my £20 self-imposed bidding limit on no less than five occasions. Without much else to hold onto I decided to swallow my pride and buy it off Amazon for £27.
Now that should be the end of it, except I accidentally put in the wrong billing address. So the game ended up at my address t'up north, about five hundred miles away. Thankfully our fine Postal Service doesn't take into account distance, but I did have to fork out two quid to my mum to send it back down. So now I was already up to the price I'd have paid in Choices et al.
But wait, there's more! Today I had to pick myself up a new power supply unit, so I decided to try in CEX. And guess what? Six, count 'em six, copies of SotC going for....£22. My spleen really hurts so bad.
So, what's been your worst cases of purchase ouchage, specifically about buying games.
