So far the Switch 2 launch has gone pretty well, and there’s a decent first-party lineup that’s driving most of that. Mainly the new Donkey Kong looks great, plus there’s another Pokémon Legends thing happening involving more dynamic battles, and also Kirby Air Riders is looking like what I’d probably want from a long-awaited sequel to one of my favorite GameCube games. I would like to play these games eventually. However, the impending societal collapse I’ll call it just to save time is increasingly a thing, so I’m wondering how much I want to push forward in doing what I want to do before it’s unattainably expensive or just unattainable in general, without blowing my budget in case things somehow turn out fine.
If I wanted to go out to a store and buy a system now, I could, except it’s a bit late while I’m writing this so it’d be more likely tomorrow at the absolute earliest. However I also have work during the weekdays so probably not then either. The thing is they don’t have the system alone in stock, it’s all the Mario Kart bundle. I don’t really want the Mario Kart game though with Kirby Air Riders on the horizon, plus I already have a couple other Mario Karts to mess with. I’m not the biggest fan of that series but I’ve played a bit here and there, and picked up some that were cheap enough. However, going back to that new Pokémon game, that’s apparently getting a bundle soon that might be up for pre-order at some places, provided nobody uses a stapler. If I have to get a bundle, it might as well include a game I’m at least more interested in.
However, I could just wait like I usually do. Though I’m not the most confident on where that would get me a few years out, provided we generally survive that long and so on. If everything does keep getting jacked up in price, that’s not going to do any favors for the secondhand market either. I did manage to get a decent deal on a PS5 secondhand a while back, so with a window of about 5 years-ish maybe, I might spot a bargain some day and hopefully get a system that’s not banned so I don’t have to hack it right away and borrow/pirate all my games anyway. I’ll have to wait a bit anyway for that one bundle to arrive so I have some time to consider it.
But of course the big fat bloated elephant that barely fits in the room is my backlog of everything before this fancy new system. In addition to the aforementioned PS5 and its handful of games, I’ve got things for the classic Switch, as well as the “Switch Pro” that is the Steam Deck overlapping with everything I’ve got on PC in general, and so many consoles prior. I really don’t need any more games, I’m pretty much set. I just want to make time to play through more of them, but I keep getting sidetracked by all kinds of things, such as the next potential disaster that might threaten my general livelihood if not the overall existence of my friends and so I do things like work on archiving whatever I think of at the moment or whatnot. I should hug that proverbial elephant more to unwind before I tackle the next thing.
If I just decide to not even bother with the Switch 2, and consider that I already have the classic Kirby Air Ride and the previous Pokémon Legends game, though not sure what’s closest to the new Donkey Kong, then yeah, I’d be just fine. On top of that there’s also the usual Nintendo bastarding around thing they tend to do with their lawyers. On that note, if I got curious about the games later though and couldn’t get a system, perhaps the highly illegal route would be appealing once the emulators are much more than proof-of-concept or fake video players with viruses. Though if I want to stay above board and do get a system, yet don’t want to pay $70 USD for games like how I usually don’t, I could borrow them from the library if those are still around lending games. Or maybe get lucky at a secondhand store like with that hypothetical system.
Of course what has my attention most are weird indie games still coming out here and there on PC and sometimes other systems, provided the storefronts or the ability to sell these things online in general aren’t all killed off by fascist banking. Otherwise just hope we have enough flash drives to trade around by data couriers or that people still have optical drives and plenty of blank CDs and DVDs. Or just go full cyberpunk style with Keanu Reeves becoming Johnny Mnemonic with a brain drive but also channeling Johnny Silverhand going something like, “Wake the fuck up D: drive, we have a CD to burn.”