Selling Your Games

I have some experience of selling my video games. I thought PlayStation 1 was getting old and decided to sell it and all games I had. As you can imagine I am not satisfied of this move I made. I sold the console and games back in 2000 or 2001. Many game stores accept used games so you get a discount and some stores also even buy games and can pay you some money even if you aren’t buying anything.

How can you get an offer from your games that you would like to sell? Many game shops have instructions of how to achieve this. The shop is trying to get profit. You don’t get as much money out of your games as you would if you sell them directly to a collector or another gamer. It however doesn’t hurt to make a list of your games and in what condition they are in and send that list through email to the game shop.

When should you sell your game or games? That depends a lot about what kind of a gamer you are. Do you play or collect retro games? Do your games have a value for you? If you have a an old collection you have kept in a closet or in storage and you don’t display them there might be no reason for you to keep your games or consoles laying there unused and collecting dust.

You have to keep in mind that you might regret it if you sell all your old retro games. That’s what happened to me back in the days as I sold my PlayStation just like I told in the first paragraph of this blog post. It might be easier for a gamer to sell a recently published new game that you maybe have just completed than selling a game that you played as a young teen. We have this thing called nostalgia, right.

There has been a lot of discussion going on about digital games. You have to remember that physical copies of games are limited with the time they are usable and playable. Moving to emulators might be a good thing. There is just all this discussion and thinking involved when we are talking about piracy and what’s legal and what’s not. So we have to be a bit careful when the talk turns to piracy.

I am not going to link directly any specific game shops. If I would they would be in Finland any way. I can say that I know maybe four different places that accept used games. You can just email your question to the local game shop and have a word or two with them.

When the file sizes were smaller and graphics simpler there was a time when small games (I don’t know if there’s a good, English, term for these) had a place in a players hearth. Maybe they even had their place inside the computers operating system and more precisely the file system. That depended on how well the user of the computer had organized his or her hard drive space. You had to remove games sometimes to free some space. So you just couldn’t launch all of them. You had to make a choice.

Nowadays you rarely need to go through your hard drive trying to figure out what software to keep installed. You sometimes have to. I think it is stupid and slow. Did you nag about PS4s small hard drive? Do you think PS5 has too small amount of space included? Well, think about me trying to expand my hard drive, by updating my hardware, to be about 16 GB in the beginning of the 2000s. Do you get the picture..? We are super retro right here, you know.

If you have never played Space Invaders you might not get why I am writing about this clone of a classic. I actually didn’t play the original game but I did play a cloned game that was called Space Commander. The idea is to try to shoot some sort of “space bugs” that are moving slowly towards the player. Bugs are moving row after row. There are some good strategies for trying to beat this game but I think we are not going to go inside them so deeply. If these bugs reach the player the game is over. As a some sort of plot the game describes that these things you are shooting are aliens and you are a space soldier trying to block their way from destroying the whole planet Earth.

Cash Invaders saw the daylight in 2002. For me there is no nostalgia. I didn’t play it back then. It caught my attention as I was going through a library of DOS games found from the internet. It takes about 420 kilo Bytes of space. As I am crawling through internet to find more information about the game I arrive at a website that is dedicated solely to Cash Invaders. I feel happy. I didn’t find this through Google. I found it the way I have always found interesting homepages – through web pages that are linked to each other. On this website you can find the download of some versions of the game and there’s also a list of high scores. You can also find some pictures. The website is funny and I feel some nostalgic vibes when I read the contents and see the graphics.

This is the website

So there’s 100 levels. I reached level 16 on my first attempt. I read that the developers used some sampled sounds (from a movie “Independence Day”). Some sounds were taken from other smaller games. The graphics of the game are nice. A bit of 3D modelling also included. The game is nicely designed. I have only played a bit of this game so I didn’t get to the “cash system” but I think there is a way to upgrade your space ship as you collect coins from destroyed bugs. In overall it is a very nice and small DOS game that I can warmly recommend to any player that likes DOS content. See you on the next post. Have a nice day.

Intensive Gaming Diary

Tag: cash

Selling Your Games

Introducing Cash Invaders (MS-DOS) (2002)