Buy! Buy! Buy!
by UnderwareNinja

As gamers, we feel the burn of the constant push to buy the latest and greatest in everything we do. For instance, in the last 5 months, I have upgraded my video card, upgraded my CPU, upgraded my memory and purchased a $100 mouse! Seven months ago I was completely content playing Starcraft and Quake2. In fact, I had no problem having only these two games in my gaming closet. My internet connection wasn't the best, but it was adequate. My ram wasn't the most, but it was enough. My video had room for improvement, but I could see. Was it enough? For the time being it was. Then I wanted to play alien vs. predator. Well my Banshee worked ok on my 233 Pentium, but I soon felt inadequate around the computers around me. My computer seemed feeble. I had to have more.

So I bought the CPU I have now. PII 400 it is, and of course I needed a motherboard, and you can't upgrade just one thing, so I got my hands on a Diamond Viper 770 Ultra, and a little more RAM. Well it's about 2 months since I got the CPU, and of course I already want, no, I need, something better. Well, unfortunately, I'll be waiting on a paycheck, or 2, or 5 before I can afford it, but I'll be thinking of it until I get there.

Now, I know I am not the only one who experiences this phenomenon. Wrongforum over at badassmofo tells the story of my pain over a Macintosh (Article on Nov 11th, The things you own end up owning you -- wrongforum @ 12:10 pm). A Macintosh! You don't even have the gamer itch with a Mac (no offense to wrongforum!).

Constantly, buy, buy, buy. And they make it so easy! "NextCard Visa" ads are everywhere. They'll give credit to any monkey who can type. Then you can buy whatever you want online. You don't even need to leave home to do it. No more trips to Fry's electronics to be ignored by the sales staff because they know you have more knowledge than them, even though you look like a punk kid who will tell them, "just looking" until you want to find that item you saw in their Saturday ad, upon which they will tell you it was a limited time only, blah, blah, blah (no one here ever has a bad experience with Fry's, honest).

Don't even get me started about the mouse I bought. It's 4 times more sensitive than a normal mouse, and at least twice as sensitive as Logitech's best USB mouse. It rocks. I know it rocks and they haven't even shipped it to me yet. I paid 100 dollars for it and when my girlfriend found out... "Oh, you can't take me to dinner, but you can buy a 100 dollar mouse", "We can't go to the movies? Can't afford movies? But you can afford a mouse?" I'll let you guys know if it was all worth it. The first 1000 preorders of the mouse got a 30 day money back guarantee, although this may be an ongoing deal. You can check it out at here.

While you guys check that out, I'm going to pillage my piggy bank and see if I have enough money for the latest peltier system from Outlaw at Overclocker's Hideout.

Questions? Comments? Hatemail? Throw it at me.