Gamertell

Let’s face it, gaming is expensive. With the economy currently in its poor state, gamers have quite a bit to worry about.

There are, however, are some ways to appease the habit and get more bang for your buck. You can take everything that you’ll read to heart as advice from a fellow poor gamer along with some of the advice given to us by MSNBC. These tips should help ease some of your monetary burdens when it comes to gaming.

Old Does Not Equal Bad

People tend to be more obsessed with the newer,  potentially better product and either don’t know about or forgot about the beauty of older games. While we have Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, some forget that we also had Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. While Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is out now, we occasionally forget Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2 and Metal Gear Solid.

There’s nothing wrong with getting (or digging out) one of the older consoles and getting some of the better games from those systems. If you go to places like Disc Replay you could get older consoles for anywhere between $50-90, depending on what console you’re buying. Games, unless they are rare yet popular, range anywhere from $3-20. Stores like Half Price Books also sell used games at half or less than half of the retail price.

Time Management

A lot of people also forget about replayability. Since some games tend to be the same thing, only offering a different difficulty level doesn’t offer much in the way of replayability. If you want something that will really last you a while, especially if you happen to get one of the newer consoles, try to find something that is fairly open-ended in the way that you can play it. This means that you might end up going back to some older games (see the above point).

The Elder Scrolls (Oblivion for the newer consoles) series, Fallout (Fallout 3) series, the S.T.A.L.K.E.R games and Far Cry 2 allow for players to play through the game in many different ways. If you play through multiple times while following the different paths and story lines, there is only a small chance that you’ll play the game the same way more than two or three times. Even if you spend a lot of money on a game, length and replayability is always important.

Independent Pay Dirt

When you get around to it, independent games can be great games. Usually, due to simplicity, they’re easy to get into and can be quite engaging. They’re usually inexpensive, normally ranging from about $10 to $20, due to the fact that it’s a small staff with a small budget. It really doesn’t take that long to remake the money spent in development, so the low price really isn’t that bad. Here are the top 5 of independent games as compiled by MSNBC.

Group Help

Multiplayer is a great thing with a lot of the different games right now. No matter what you’re doing, the higher the multiplayer possibility the more fun it will be. The biggest reason why we game is because it’s fun and the more people there are the more fun it can be. Get a game that has the possibility of two or more people joining in. Multiplayer increases the replayability quite a bit, especially in terms of first-person shooter, action/adventure, real-time strategy, music and sports games.

There’s Still More (or Less)

A lot of games have downloadable content that will be available almost monthly or even mods of other games. Some things might end up costing some money (usually $1 to $10) but quite a few mods (if you already have the game it’s based on) are completely free. There is still much play in many games even after beating them.

In terms of space economy, if you’ve got an Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PSP or PC you can work with direct download services like Steam (for PC), Xbox Live, Playstation Network Store or the Wii Virtual Console. They usually have a good selection and, in the case of Steam, usually have good sales or packages that would save some money. These games only take up disc (or removable media) storage space instead of plastic boxes on a shelf.

If you want to get into MMOs, it can be a bit daunting to find an affordable one. Aeria Games has a host of good and beautiful MMOs that are free. Guild Wars is still evolving as a MMO and is also free2play so it works out. All you need to do is fork out the money for the initial buy, which is $20-40 depending on which standalone version you’re trying to get.

Read [MSNBC] Read [Gamertell Gift Guide]