'Tis the Season of Capitalism- what's your haul?

Let me begin by saying this is a judgement-free zone, and a thread of healing; your backlog is nobody's business but your own.

That said what's your damage? ; )

I think I've tapped out with (all prices USD):

SWITCH

-Gorgoa for $4.49

-Donut County for $3.79

-Portal: Companion Collection for $6.79

STEAM

-Desperados 3 for $9.99

-Outer Wilds Echoes of the Eye for $9.89

-We Love Katamari REROLL for $14.99

PLAYSTATION

-1 year of Extra for $100

and then in terms of other MISCELLANY: i got a cheap hoodie from St. Vitus (IYKYK); one of them electronics tool kits from iFixit (i have ambitions of converting an OG iPod to flash storage); and a scanner because who doesn't love home office equipment.

anyone score anything good?

I only bought stuff on Steam so far nothing too crazy though:

Persona 4 Golden

Scarlet Maiden (Thanks Grubb)

Dave the Diver

No games, but I did pick up a 1 TB drive for my PS3. Hoping that I can finally fit everything on one drive there.

EDIT: Oh wait. Totally forgot I picked up Bayonetta 3 through a combination of an eShop sale, discounted eShop gift cards and Nintendo Gold Coins that brought my total to a little under $30.

Gaming-wise, I bought an extra PS5 controller for $50, and the Dead Space remake for half off. But it seems unlikely that I'll actually get around to playing the latter before the end of the year.

I bought a ps5. I was so surprised to see one in stock.

three years after launch. what a world. i had gotten so used to the idea of just never having one after the initial zeitgeist/difficulties of finding one wore off years ago. I think we're even a year removed from all those 'hey its kind of easy to find a next gen console now...' articles.

and the first thing I'm probably going to play on it is warframe.

@demigodraven: Oh boy. I did actually get deep into Warframe and it was on the PS ecosystem (all on PS4, as I recall). I got all the frames that had been released at the time, maybe missing some of the prime ones, and got back into it slightly when they added the flyable spaceship stuff. But after 600+ hours I tapped out. I think I ended up at mastery rank 21 or 22 at the end, not sure. In contrast, my brother ended being one of those crazies who actually hit rank 30 (the max). I think he must have logged double the hours I did, at least.

It's a fantastic game, and has what feels like one of the better F2P models out there--it clearly makes them money, but doesn't feel overly exploitative. But at some point I was just tired of leveling weapons and frames, and worn out on the core combat.

I picked up a couple things on digital sales, I don't even remember what exactly (nothing pricey) but man...there were some good sales on consoles and controllers and even storage this year but the digital sales on the console stores and even steam to some extent were really really bad.

Mostly deals that we've all seen 1,000,000 times before or small drops on newer releases.

I think this shows something that needs more discussion, which is that as more and more sales go digital the discounts on digital stuff is getting much worse. Physical sales have competition, which makes them better and at this point physical games are cheaper than digital versions even though physical is more expensive to make and can be resold.

This Black Friday really cemented to me that as physical games become specialty items we are going to enter into a dark age of game discounts. Maybe not on Steam because there is SOME PC competition, but certainly on console.

Gone are the days of amazing PSN sales when you could pick up PS1 classics for $0.99 and full, great, games for like $6. Now even a mid tier flop like Evil West is still half price even a full year after release, and a lot of games that released early in the year are only 25% off when in the past they would have been more like 50-70.

Didn't pick up any games but I did grab a cheaper PS Extra sub. Also, I got these bad boys and I'm pretty stoked on em :)

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Edit: Wait, wait, I did pick up the Burning Shores DLC for Horizon 2 lol. I like it.

I didn't buy any games though I may buy a couple more states for American Truck Simulator. All I bought for Black Friday was an SD card. It's related to the following.

I'm doing this right now but I'm just waiting on the flash drive thingy and replacement battery. I have a 5th generation iPod (the iPod Video 30GB) that I'm working on and if I like it I'm going to do it to a 6th generation one that has the signs that it has an expanding battery. For the 5th generation one, it's not nearly as hard as some people say. I got it opened in about 5 minutes just using a steel feeler gauge and got the battery removed fairly easily using a plastic spudger with a bit of heat to loosen the battery adhesive. The 6th gen one seems like a much trickier thing to open.

In my case I'm not really worried if it goes wrong because the 5th gen iPod's battery was so shot that it lasted like 20 minutes and had a really noisy failing hard drive anyway so it wasn't useable in the current state. My 6th generation one is also unusable because of the battery so I have nothing to lose trying to fix that. I also have a 7th generation one I bought as soon as they announced they were discontinuing iPods that is from 2012 and still has a great battery and quiet hard drive so if I screw up the other two I have that one to use.

If you mean you're doing a upgrading a first gen then that's pretty neat. I saw that the parts for those early ones with the weird hard drive connectors are available now.

edit: I'd like to say that all of the eBay listings for iPod stuff referring to them as "retro tech" makes me feel so old. Are the zoomers getting into iPods like they're getting into shitty old digital cameras? That seems like something they'd like. I'm not on social media anymore so I have no idea.

I only got Final Fantasy XVI which was on sale. And so far, I'm liking it a lot. It's a nice tribute to the Devil May Cry series and Asura's Wrath.

well confession time- i said 'OG iPod' which implies 1st gen; to clarify- i'm working on a 5.5 gen iPod (i think my original phrasing was meant to invoke the general form factor rather than the specific SKU). thankfully it seems like one of the more forgiving models to work on- but i'm stoked to hear someone else on these boards doing much the same.

Haha yup that's about the same one I'm working on too. Everything I've read suggested it's one of the easiest to work on and there's tons of old and aftermarket parts for it available.

It's funny because I just randomly saw my stack of old iPods a shelf and decided I wanted to use one again so I charged them all then discovered my older two were not good anymore. Then I decided to see if I could fix them and ended up going down the modding rabbit hole. They were both useless (or a fire hazard) otherwise anyway so no harm in trying to fix them.

I had looked into fixing a 4th gen iPod nano I bought at a garage sale but those things are a completely different level of difficulty to fix. Like proper nightmare stuff with tiny screws, a bunch of adhesive, and way more paper thin ribbon cables.

Just a couple from Steam.

• The Half-Life Anniversary Bundle
• SNK 40th Anniversary Collection

'cos SNK (outside of Metal Slug and Ikari Warriors) is something of a black hole for me. As for the Half-Life stuff, I have 2 and the Episodes on PS3. I want it better. And I want Half-Life Source. Just because.

oh man- my mother asked me to replace her 3rd gen ipod nano battery- turns out:

thanks, Apple.

Yup. The 4th generation one has that warning too and has the added bonus that the tiny little battery soldering pads are on a really thin bit of the PCB that you can easily wreck, which also destroys your your iPod irreparably, if you put slightly too much heat into it. The 4th gen nano's probably the worst iPod overall to work on because the 4th generation model is literally a closed metal tube and you have to remove the entire guts of it out the ends to get at the battery. If the battery is even slightly swollen it's almost impossible to fix because it will not fit properly out the ends of the chassis and puts pressure on several other parts, making them hard to remove too. The nano models in general seemed like they were not built to be worked on at all.

Anyhow, Black Friday.

Picked up Redfall, the basic Pinball FX tables, and a couple Fanatical bundles.

I bought too many and need to be stopped.

Video games: Laika, Tiny Thor, Evil West, Terminator: Resistance , Alan Wake II, and discounted eShop cards.

Other stuff: TUMI accessories and some super cheap Ultra Boosts.

Sad things: a washing machine because my old one started leaking a bunch.

I was a good consumer aka an idiot...

October actually had better sales than Nov/BF so I'm including those.

Nov:

• DualSense ($40)
• DualShock 4 ($40)
• Xenoblade 2 + Torna ($63)
• Alan Wake 2 ($33)
• Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze ($25)
• Like a Dragon Ishin ($20) (Xbox)
• Horizon Forbidden West ($20) (PS4/5)
• Theatrhythm Final Bar Line ($19) (PS4)
• Midnight Suns ($10) (Xbox)

• Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania ($5) (PS4/5)

Oct:

• Octopath Travelers 2 ($15) (PS4/5)
• Fire Emblem Three Hopes ($15) (Switch)
• Star Ocean Divine Force ($10) (PS5)
• Vlkyrie Elysium ($10) (PS5)
• Callisto Protocol ($5) (PS5)
• Saints Row ($5) (Xbox)

I waited until the day after the PSN Black Friday sale and then finally bought Resident Evil 4 at full price instead of $20 off. I also kept putting off taking my tips to the bank so I could cover my annual January trip to New Orleans and missed the hotel I like's 40% sale so I won't be going this year.

I did put in a Go Puff order for some Lagunitas All Day IPA last night and bit on the 50% off offer for a year of Peacock Premium for just $30 (I'd canceled Netflix, Hulu and Apple+ just last month) so I guess I have that going for me.

I killed it this Black Friday.