What's your best ever video game-related purchase?

So I made a thread about what people's worst ever video game-related purchase was, but I'm always a fan of being positive, so: What's your best ever video game-related purchase? It can be value for money or just your favourite video game ever, a piece of hardware or a game. The only limit is your fantasy!

For me it's probably the PS2. Even though I bought it early and it was expensive as hell, that era was probably my peak in terms of how much I played games (being a young teen and all), and it's hands down the console I've spent the most time with and gotten the most enjoyment out of.

Realistically I guess it's my PC, but man, that 100 pack of 1C games I bought from Gamersgate was pretty fuckin' great. 20p a game for a tonne of not very good Russian games with some pretty damn good Russian games sprinkled in. Definitely worth.

My PC

Both my PS2 and the Orange Box are up there.

PS2 because I bought it when I was about 8-10 years old. My parents didn't give out gifts worth like $300+ for Christmas or birthdays, instead I got pocket money, about $5 a week. Combine that with at least a half year of saving (lots of time to a kid) with some money from birthdays or Christmas, and I finally got the $400 (I think) for the PS2.

Orange Box because it was my introduction to really high quality PC titles. 13-15 years old, I think.

This one time the supermarket near where I lived was selling bundles of DJ Hero 2 for £5. That was pretty great.

PS2 definitely, what an amazing system. Shadow of the Colossus and MGS3 are the only 2 reasons I need to say it's the best console ever.

@mrblobby64: Yeah grabbed a bundle with both games for Wii for 1.50 less than a bottle of coke...

Not sure I have any singular best purchase hardware wise, when it comes to PC I've pretty much had frankenstein machines since the late 90's - keeping stuff from the old machines when moving over to a new case, and replacing parts one by one. I still have some really old parts in use, a keyboard from 1988, DVD-ROM drive from 2003 etc.

So my best purchases would have to be games, and I think picking up the Descent Definite Collection back in 1998 or The Ultimate Doom & Quake collection would have to be two of them, since they are all games I keep playing to this day. Hell, I've had the Descent II CD soundtrack on all my MP3 players for the past 15 years.

I'd say this too. At least for this point in my life. At the time, my Ps2 was one of the best investments I made gaming related.

My very first game purchase. The game of choice back then was Civilization II. When I read a preview for Alpha Centauri in an magazine I was stoked! The screenshots looked amazing (they were stills from the wonder videos).

I saved up and on the day of release I bought the game at my local store. The box was heavy. A really beefy manual, tech tree poster etc.

Sadly the graphics couldn't live up to the preview but the gameplay was above and beyond. Its my favourite game of all time and I still boot it up at least once a year.

Hardware wise: My first SSD.

Biggest single component upgrade Ive ever done. Now I have two SSD's but I want more!

I honestly don't think I have an answer to that. I kind of want to say Final Fantasy XIV. Ive put like easily 500-600 hours into it already and I've only been a subscriber coming up on 3 months.

Vagrant Story, random ass game I picked randomly in 2000 for like 15 bucks (the Babbages had a shelf full of them/Legend of Mana copies), turns out it's the best game ever made. Another good one was Final Fantasy XII and Valkyrie Profile 2 on the same day, XII was the intended purchase and turned out to be excellent, but VP2 turned out to be the second best JRPG ever. I don't believe I've spent more money than that in a gamestore since but I was completely satisfied, game prices went to shit shortly after the last generation started.

My best random purchase this gen was Bulletstorm, fantastic game.

In terms of money per hour, definitely Binding of Isaac - I can't remember how much I paid for it, but I have literally spent a billion* hours in that game.

*400

• My SNES because that's what started it all
• My Playstation because of so many amazing games
• My Playstation 2 because it's like the playstation but better
• My PC because it's a PC...

and games wise:

• Resident Evil 4 - that was the only game that I player for almost a year - my friend and I played it 8 times in a row.
• Fallout 2 - so many countless hours lost to Fallout 2. It's amazing
• Deus Ex because I love that game
• Skyrim because I payed $12 for it and spent 200+ hours in it
• Grand Theft Auto Vice City

In late 2011, the housemaid threw away a box that contained pretty much every 360 video game disc I had. At that point, I had never purchased any game digitally, and I didn't own another console. My first purchase after this was Skyrim, and it didn't leave my Xbox for four months. It was the first Bethesda RPG I've played, and I enjoyed the hell out of it.

Well shit, that'd probably be it for me too.

If we're talkin games though, I think it's gotta be Alan Wake. I didn't know much about it when it came to PC. Saw the quick look ways back and like what I saw there, plus it's from Remedy, so I dropped the $30 the day it came out and lo and behold, everything in that game spoke to me, so to speak.

After that it'd be Remember Me. After seeing no marketing for it and reading reviews that insisted there was little more than mediocrity to be found in it, I didn't expect to like any of it. That expectation might've had something to do with how much I ended up thoroughly enjoying it, but all the same I loved it.

My Xbox 360 probably. I bought it 2006 and it still works. It was half of what the PS3 cost and I had basically the same selection of games. The accessories were a complete ripoff and it wasn't really thought out properly, but man did I get a lot of running time with that piece of kit.

My Giant Bomb Subscription. :)

(and my PC)

I don't think it's fair to say PC. While the bulk of its use is gaming, I've also made my career around it.

So, focusing on console gaming, I'd have to say the Dreamcast followed by the Super Nintendo. Both platforms actually wow'ed me, exceeded expectations. They were huge leaps over anything that was available on both console and PC. Super Mario World and Soul Caliber were just miles ahead of everything at the time.

My PC. Unless my bearded dragon named Yoshi is video game related, then i pick her.

Probably a ticket to the Game On exhibition. Played a lot of games that day for the first time such as Rez, which went on to become one of my all time favourites.

Also, backing the Double Fine Adventure was a great investment. I've been following the development of Broken Age via the making of documentary and it's been really inspiring.

Probably the PS2 or Xbox 360.

If we want to talk about games in a pure "this influenced my tastes" context, it's probably Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic.

I love the hell out of my Meat Boy figure. It came with a little scribble by Edmund McMillen too which was ace.

I guess you could easily consider a GB subscription gaming "related", so that's up there for me too. I think I've watched/listened to at least 95% of the content on the site, and that's...a lot of hours for $50 a year!

My first game purchase was actually a really great deal. It was a bundle called the blue box collection I believe. It was 10 EA PC games for $15. It had

• Red Alert
• NFS Hot Pursuit
• Dune 2000
• Madden 2000
• Tiger Woods 1999
• Sim Copter
• Sid Meier's Gettysburg
• Theme Hospital
• US Navy Fighters (never got it working though)
• NASCAR 2000

This was in summer of 2002 and most of these are from 1999 or 2000 so it was a great deal. There was also a similar red box collection and an EA Sports collection but this one seemed like the best option.

I'd have to agree with this, I may have actually watched more Giant Bomb videos than actually playing any video games back when I finished my engineering degree.

There was also this one time I stumbled upon an unopened copy of Persona 2: Eternal Punishment.

My PC.

Journey also kinda stands out to me, because it was a super impulsive buy when I was going through this really shitty vulnerable and depressive episode, and that experience really affected me.

When I was a kid, I realized that my brother and I had saved up enough that together, we could buy an SNES.

That is the best use of basic addition that I have ever performed.

Boy that's tough, so any purchases I've enjoyed. Hard to quantify what is "best"

I suppose since i have to pick it was the first quarter my mom gave me to spend at the airport arcade while waiting for a flight , I put it into the Super Mario Bros. machine.

I knew immediately that I loved Video Games.

Man... from a games perspective, I'd say picking up Counter Strike: Source when I was like 8 has led to me playing tons of that game.

Super Meat Boy and FTL are up there too, along with Civ 5.

Picked up MGS4 and Uncharted 2 for ten bucks. That was pretty fantastic.

I enjoyed the first inFamous so much that I preordered the inFamous 2 special edition. I usually scoff at such things but the game is great, and I got a neat figurine and handy backpack with it.

Buying the Fallout New Vegas Collectors Edition is up there considering it's one of my all time favourite games, same with Final Fantasy 9. Getting a PS2 for my birthday was also great because of all the great series that I got to enjoy with it, to this day it's still one of my favourite consoles and I still go back to play games on it on a regular basis. When it comes to just downright cool stuff though I'd say my copy of that .Hack fighting game that was only released in Japan is pretty awesome.

I'd be ok with calling any of the following three purchases my favorite:

Persona 3: I bought because I thought it was cool that there existed an RPG with life sim elements. It turned out to be much more than that though, and to this day remains my undisputed favorite game of all time.

Deus Ex: Got this for about $5 in 2008, not really knowing what it was. I was expecting a run-of-the-mill FPS, but holy shit did my mind get blown when I realized just how expansive a game it truly is.

The Legend of Heroes Trails in the Sky: I'm not even sure why I wanted this game so much. Like Deus Ex, it looked like a rather generic game at first. But it turned out to be so much more than that.

I asked my dad for chore money early to get KOToR not really knowing much about it other than it was a star wars game. Boy was I surprised. Finished it 5 separate times

My best video game related purchase has also to be Alan Wake. I've got the Collector's Edition, finished the game up to 20 times and read the book and the comics. I got very invested in the game and its world. While it isn't the most creative I've seen (Planescape Torment, Nier and Bioshock Infinite were better in that in my opinion, for example) it is the best realized, believable and coherent videogame I've played.

My PC. It's opened my eye to the entire spectrum of video games and what they can be.

I recently bought a copy of R:Racing Evolution for a penny so i like to think I'm living the high life right now.

Tone is kinda hard to convey over the internet. Also shipping was $3.99.

Probably "Game Empire Vol. 1". It introduced me to the world of shareware compilations and all the obscure and wonderful games within. It may be hard to find people with which to reminisce about, say, Xerix or the varied works of Soleau Software, but it's always awesome when the opportunity arises.

I JUST BOUGHT SHADOW MAN 2ECOND COMING FOR NINE DOLLARS

I REALLY LIKE SHADOW MAN

My Virtual Boy.

My Dreamcast.

Every game for that system was such a big jump over what you could get on Playstation or N64. I played the crap out of every game I got for that system. My favorite hands was Skies of Arcadia.

SR3 made me truly love video games again.

A boxed copy of Chrono Trigger was my favorite purchase ever for sure. Best values were probably Civ 4, FTL, the Original Mount & Blade or Crusdaer Kings 2.

:D Yes, I had that, and I believe I also had #2. I don't remember Xerix, but there are some pretty good Soleau games - particularly Balloon Challenge, which is actually a genuinely good game.

The Orange Box comes to mind for me, although Steam sales and Xbox Games for Gold has since diminished the value for $ I experienced at the time. Everything in that package was great and as I kept playing I became progressively more impressed with how much I was getting out of my purchase.

My Xbox 360 that I got on launch day is probably my biggest. My brother and I saved up, I took the day off school, and we had one before anybody else. My brother also worked at Blockbuster so I played pretty much everything that came out on it for free, and it was during that time that a bunch of people came over to play local COD 2 multiplayer for months. Screen watching encouraged of course!

Rocksmith for me, spent soo much time and or monies on that.

A charging stand for my Dualshock 4 or the PS Gold wireless headset for the PS4 or PS3.