Gaming can be a very expensive hobby, but only if you stay on the bleeding edge. A typical gamer might own more than one current-gen console at $400 a piece, and even more for a great gaming PC. New games start at $60 USD but DLC and premium-editions featuring unique underwear skins (you can’t see them it feels great knowing you’re special) can easily double the price.

And the whole time that you’re keeping up with the hottest games, your backlog continues to grow with digital sales too good to pass up.

But if you stayed one generation behind you could buy every must-play-bucket-list-10/10 classic for a ridiculous fraction of the price.

I’ve been on a working vacation in Quebec and although I stubbornly packed my PS4 (for Overwatch) and PS3 (Mass Effect and Deus Ex) I left both in the box and played the shit out of Final Fantasy IX on my Vita. That’s just one of the games-before-I-die and it’s kept me going for weeks. It also cost just $10. It got me thinking of all the incredible PS1 classics I always meant to play but never made time for. I could easily keep myself busy until PS5 with just JRPGs alone, and by then I could move on to the Witchers and Fallout 4s of today (but in the future).

If you’ve got tons of disposable income and/or a hankering to play the latest and greatest then this idea will probably seem disgusting to you. But the more I look at a backlog full of affordable classics, the more it makes sense. Would you rather pay very little to catch up on every Hitchcock/Kubrick/whoever film or pay top dollar to see the the latest Transformers in the theatre? That’s a totally unfair example, but it’s my article, so I can do that.

Bye for now, I’m off to see what the hell is going on in Black Mage Village.