I went in to GameStop today because I needed a sanity check. I recently saw the game Dragon Quest 5 for the Nintendo DS for sale at Half Price Books and it had a price tag of $170. That’s… a lot of money. That’s 4-5 times what I’d expect to pay for a used Nintendo DS game from a popular series. But I thought, maybe my expectations are wrong about this.

So I asked the guy working at GameStop for a consultation, to look up how much they would sell the game for if they had it. He looked it up and, if they had it, it would be $109. That’s less than the $170 from Half Price Books, but it’s still the same order of magnitude. I asked why this game was so costly. Was it a special edition? Game cartridge made out of titanium?

Basically, it’s just a popular series of games and there’s no remakes of the game so the only way to play it is on the Nintendo DS. And this is what the market value is for that.

That’s uncomfortable. And it doesn’t jibe with my experience of buying second-hand games. Since I bought my Nintendo 3DS last year, I’ve done really well on the price of games, especially compared to the $60-70 of new Switch/2 games. Honestly I’ve had a great run of getting cheaper games by playing 3-5 years behind the latest-and-greatest (I must have saved $1k buying used Wii U games).

A $100+ game feels antithetical to what I’m doing here. I might eventually break down, accept my fate, and spend big bucks on used games, but I’m not there yet.

I’m reading Jingo, my fourth Discworld book, and loving it. All the Discworld books I’ve read feature main characters that are lazy, barely competent, set in their ways, reluctant participants, who only have brief flashes of self-awareness. I find all that highly relatable.

Okay let’s try this whole having-a-personal-website thing one more time. I’m thinking a microblog that looks like old Twitter. This time I’ll really put the Jeff Meyerhoff back in jeffmeyerhoff.com.