January 2017's Game Haul

January was a rough month in terms building my collection, due to me overspending during December. It didn’t help much that I had to get plane tickets to go visit my parents in Brunei for Chinese New Year. But knowing that I would be heading back gave me a little bit of hope, an oasis in a desert. However, the truth might have been closer to a mirage.

In my mind, I had assumed that Brunei would have a surplus of older games still available for sale. “Older” meaning games from the PlayStation 3 era but it seems to me that game retailers have decided to focus more on current generation games and have cut down drastically on the previous generation of games. While this would be perfectly fine if prices were cut as much as the games, but those retailers still have to stay in business and make back some of their investments. However, even with the limited selection I still managed to find some games that were on my list of games to collect and even one that wasn’t.

I will give each game their own individual posts to flesh out why I decided to pick them up at a later date, so for now I will just talk about the struggles I had in general trying to get these games. First off, the cost. While these games weren't expensive, I couldn't help but to convert their cost from Brunei Dollar to Malaysian Ringgit. So on average I might have spent around BND 20 for each game but because I was converting in my mind back to ringgit and comparing the price to what I could find elsewhere. It probably didn't help that I didn't have data on my phone to check the prices online. In the end, I reasoned that with the addition of shipping cost and time, I didn't really lose much even if they were slightly more expensive.

Connected to not having any data on my phone was my second struggle, which was not having the ability to check and see if the covers matched a particular version of the game. The two in the picture above in particular. While it was easy enough to see that they were the Region 1 versions of the game, I had wrongly assumed like Shadows of the Damned that there would be a purely English cover. So I would leave the retailer only to come back later after checking to see if there were any versions.