any of the times i have bought full bundles for one game.
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I also have an Analogue Pocket, just an absurd expense that took almost a year to actually get to me after I bought it. I have gotten some use out of it, mainly playing Game Gear games with the adapter (I was playing Halley Wars like five minutes ago), but hardly enough to justify the expense. I also bought an NGPC adapter though at least for that I bought it off someone who bought the three adapter set for the pc engine adapter so I didn’t have to pay their international shipping rates again.
My main foolish game purchases are just all the ones I haven’t played, which is a lot. When I started working full-time during the PS2 era I bought every game I was vaguely interested in because I had money, but I played less than before because I was working full-time. I’ve slowed down the purchases but I still haven’t caught up. Also foolish: buying newer versions of games I have the originals of. I have Xenoblade Chronicles for Wii, 3DS, and switch, and I haven’t played any of them.
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Yesterday I looked at this thread, scoffed and said: “Getting doubles? Couldn’t possibly happen to me!”
Then I went to the post office to collect my Christmas gift for Alicia, came home, opened the package, felt a strange sense of familiarity, turned over to the game shelf and saw another copy of the very same game looking back at me.
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reminds me of when i asked for halo 2 for christmas on PC and the PC we had couldn’t even start it haha. same with TF2. just did not work at all.
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I’ve got enough foolish game purchase story to completely sink this thread! Especially if you count the ‘sold or traded game and then repurchased it at a much higher price’ stories in addition to the double purchase stories. I basically had a giant import Saturn collection in the late 90’s that I (what else?) sold or traded for other games! Then, in the mid-2000’s, my saint of a partner gifted me a skeleton Saturn that I then had to repurchase a bunch of games for. And of course, by then Saturn stuff had gone through the roof, so my original copy of Radiant Silvergun, that I had bought on clearance at a Babbage’s for something like $20, was replaced with a copy that I had to buy for… let’s just say more than $20!
Oh, and my other favourite genre of foolish game purchase is ‘assume a weird JP game will never get a US release, go to the trouble to buy it, and then immediately see the news that it’s getting localized’. This isn’t as big of a deal now that there’s easy eShop purchasing across regions, but it’s still annoying!
But in terms of double purchasing, I have two copies of Final Fantasy VI Advance, complete with boxes, and both have saves that are clearly mine, but I have no recollection whatsoever of buying the second one! Mysterious!
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Maybe doesn’t totally fit, but last year I bought a xbox series s specifically for emulating ps2 and saturn games. This was about 3 months before the emulators got shut down by Microsoft. For some reason i was surprised when this happened??
So now i have a brand new xbox with a handful of 360 games on it. Perhaps even more foolishly, i STILL haven’t played lost odyssey.
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I’ve considered buying one of the last-gen ones just for 4k BC, but they’re still kind of stupidly expensive for a console that I have basically no interest in outside of the backwards compatibility. It’s moderately annoying that Microsoft has this reasonably-solid Xbox/360 emulator sitting around that’s arbitrarily locked to hardware that I don’t really want. At least package up your back catalog and put it on Steam!!!
That said though I think you can do emulators on Xbox again. You gotta spend like $20 to get the option to put the console into developer mode and you can’t just do it from retail anymore, but that’s not a terrible price to pay.
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Yes! The computer I got for college was like this. That year, I learned how important a standalone graphics card is, when I tried to play the then-cutting-edge 2004 game Sid Meier’s Pirates and every movement was slow. Dances were slow. Fencing was slow. The game was ridiculously easy at about half-time. Then next year, in Civilization IV, leaders would appear without faces, wide eyeballs in gruesome glory. The last game I tried on that computer was Morrowind. It would work okay, but it would crash in spaces like a propylon chamber.
All of that was probably good for my studies, as I could not get that into the most addicting games of the period. Since then, I’ve always built my PCs and always included graphics cards.
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When Sonic Generations was first coming out (I think 2011?), it was set to release on PC a week or so before consoles. I had a laptop that I knew couldn’t run it, and an Xbox 360 that definitely could but I was too excited and couldn’t wait. I bought the game on Steam on PC release day and instantly regretted it. It ran at like 5fps and was just unplayable. I was pretty disappointed. I forget the circumstances but I couldn’t/wouldn’t return it and I felt I had wasted my money when I shelled out again for the 360 version a week later.
Well, over a decade later that purchase finally paid off. I got myself a Steam Deck as a gift last year and used that Steam version of Sonic Generations that I couldn’t return all those years ago and got it all modded and running on the Deck and had an absolute blast with it. Made me wanna go back and tell my frustrated self, “hey, it’ll be okay in the end”.
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i did this too!
my wonderswan has seen near-zero use coz it turns out most games are for the colour version and the flash carts are basically near-impossible to get your hands on.
mostly all i can think of for this thread is the times i’ve bought games at full price and hated them. like Other M and GTAV.
edit: i used two sloppy “near-” phrases and while i regret that i don’t regret it enough to make the post better
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Every big-box collector’s edition of a game I’ve ever purchased has ended up being a regret. I’m not sure exactly why this happens (perhaps some subconscious expectation set by the amount of money I spent), but I rarely end up even liking games I splurge on in this way
The one that prompted this was the White Snow Edition of Nier Replicant, though. I was still high on the impact Automata had on me when it was announced and very curious about the prior game which had long been on my list of games to play. The thing that sold me most on this edition, though, were the script books, which I thought would be neat for reference purposes
Once the game got here, however, I fell off of it after ten hours or so because I wasn’t enjoying the sidequests and learned I was going to have to push through them in order to unlock the complete suite of endings. I don’t exactly dislike the game and may come back to it in this case, but it certainly wasn’t worth paying four to five times the purchase price of the game alone
Other examples of this personal phenomenon happened with Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker
I’m generally far happier with deluxe editions with small additions like a soundtrack and a steelbook case and avoid full on collector’s editions now. At least with these, if I end up disliking a game, the financial hit doesn’t sting quite so sharply
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Yeah, I actually have this problem too now that I think about it. I have completely stopped buying special editions, but sometimes things are only available in special editions, or the price winds up being similar due to a sale, or whatever, and then I get one. special editions represent my least-played style of game, bar none. I get the thing, and then I’m like wait… where do I put it? I also get intimidated to open them! So I wind up with these big useless boxes. Sometimes I even buy the game again digitally because I don’t know what to do when I get this big package! At this point I only do it for old games in compact packages with weird stuff in them. but then I look at that stuff for 5 minutes and I think… why did I get this? I’m never going to paint the figurines that came with the special edition of the saber marionette J fighting game.
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it’s pretty funny that games with new IPs come out with these big box special editions filled with goodies and no one has any idea if it’s any good lol why commit to these items without knowing if you’re a fan in the first place? or maybe i’m the silly one 
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I once had five unopened copies of Mazes of Fate for gba.
Bought a new copy on amazon and the seller just sent me five.
Now i think i only have one and it’s still unopened.
Maybe not very foolish, but silly.
When i was a kid i went to rent a game with my dad and I picked out Knuckles Chaotix, except i only had a genesis, no 32X.
My dad kept telling me that it wasn’t a genesis game, but i didn’t believe him and threw a fit until he got it for me.
Turns out he was right!
And honestly, I may have grown into a better person for it.
I bought a digital copy of Persona 5 Strikers very shortly (like a week or something) after buying a physical copy.
Both ps4 versions.
Never played the game!
Did a similar thing with Re4make and Elden Ring except on different platforms.
What can I say?
I’m dumb!
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This whole post played out like a Steam commercial in my head.
Valve won’t let you get in your own way when it comes to gaming.
Well, I mean, they will…but you kind of get a do-over! For free! Kind of.
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oh lordy! don’t look up how much those go for now
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Wow I certainly wasn’t expecting that!
Oh well.
I spent $8 or something crazy like that and the ones I sold a few years ago went for like $50 so I still made out alright.
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Think of a place you’ve always wanted to visit, then look up airfare and hotel prices. Then take a look at your steam library. Not a fun experience for me…
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I have a new contender for my most foolish game purchase:
Not the pocket or the game, but the master system to game gear converter in between (which was not only ten cents).
I’m a sucker for absurd constructs. To get lucky dime caper to boot I had to make and break the connections between the pocket, the game gear adaptor, the sms to gg converter, and the cart repeatedly, but I got there. The pocket can of course play SMS ROMs, and I have a retrode with sms adapter (another foolish purchase) so I can even use ROMs I dumped myself, and I will probably not actually play anything this way for fear of all that stuff hanging off the cart socket breaking the pocket.
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