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Do you miss the experience of going into game stores to browse and buy games?

sn0man

Member
I still browse stores to buy games 🤷‍♂️
Same honestly. I watch sites like limitedgamenews but I’m busy and I don’t catch everything. Going to the local retro stores is a fun trip and the other enthusiasts usually provide some knowledge that I might not know.
 

ZehDon

Member
Waiting inline while a neck-beard in an unclean Pokemon hoodie tries to awkwardly chat up the girl behind the counter who made the unfortunate life-choice of coming to work that day is not something that I'll ever miss.

I wasn't old enough, and didn't have enough money, to shop at game stores when I was a kid. I have zero nostalgia for that. Today, at worst, I click a button on a website and a game magically appears in my mailbox in 1-2 business days. This is a superior experience in every quantifiable way.
 
I'm amazed how the SONY fans were able to but their games over the Pandemic what with the shops being closed in most area's Since we all know SONY gamers don't go online :messenger_tears_of_joy: :messenger_winking:
 
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German Hops

GAF's Nicest Lunch Thief
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Tschumi

Member
I don't, because those stores were able to offer FAR fewer sales than things like steam can. I usually just had to stare at $90 games for years.. within months of getting stream I'd for two or three at 80% off.. never looked back
 

sn0man

Member
My older brother has tales of these halcyon days. He said Toys R Us used to have all of the consoles behind glass with numerous displays running demos of games. It sounded like Disney World for gamers. I wish I could have seen it.
There is a corporate cluster of buildings for a healthcare software company standing where I first saw Mario 64 at a toys r us. I still drive by it on the highway and it makes me wish I could go back in time and watch my younger self experience rounding the corner.
 

haxan7

Volunteered as Tribute
Asking young gamers if they miss buying games in stores is like asking a fish if it misses air.
 

Porcile

Member
I used to enjoy finding second hand gems in places like GAME and Gamestation, especially Gamestation as that's where da real gamerz shopped. About 15 years I picked up so many rare games that were just sitting on their shelves for months like Skies of Arcadia Legends and F-Zero GX, and all sorts of now legendary PS2 JRPGs. Gamestation turned to shit after GAME bought them out. Fucking terrible garbage shops now.
 
For me it was a magical period going into stores and checking out the various PC game boxes laid out, their backs full of screenshots and text that stirred my imagination.

Then there's also the fact that PC games weren't homogenized in their contents; some had five floppy disks (3.5 inch), some had two (same story for CD-ROMS). The manuals would be light or heavy, sometimes due to the genre or just multiple languages. It made picking up every box in my hands a delightful mystery and if you were un/lucky, the box wouldn't have its shrinkwrap on and you could feel the glorious matte/glossy finishes.
 

EDMIX

Member
Well...no not really, cause I still do that and I'm a very nostalgic guy (like my ass is literally stuck in the 80s/90s lol). I enjoy games coming to my home from Amazon, I'll never not enjoy that, but that doesn't mean I don't stroll by Wal Marts used game section from time to time to see what goodies I can pick up.

I bought Doom for PS4 that way, Call Of Duty WWII etc, many times in between semesters I'd buy a game I can complete in about a few sittings. I still look online to see if its cheaper else where while I'm at the store and only a few times will I disregard a price difference if I'm really pressed for time and want to start it that night or its a minimal difference. So I do my best to lessen how much digital games I buy and primarily focus on just getting physical titles if it can be helped.
 

nush

Gold Member
I used to enjoy finding second hand gems in places like GAME and Gamestation, especially Gamestation as that's where da real gamerz shopped. About 15 years I picked up so many rare games that were just sitting on their shelves for months like Skies of Arcadia Legends and F-Zero GX, and all sorts of now legendary PS2 JRPGs. Gamestation turned to shit after GAME bought them out. Fucking terrible garbage shops now.

You know where you used to be the real rare games that had been sitting there for months? Blockbusters. Gamers would rinse through the preowned racks in a videogame store but would not think to go and do the same at Blockbuster. Especially the really tiny stores Blockbusters had tucked away in villages and housing estates. Blockbusters website was shit and didn't list all the stores so I did postcode searches to find them. Minty fresh but used Chibi Robo £9.99, yes please.
 

april6e

Member
No, as a boomer, buying games digitally is so much better in every way. The only reason I hated digital was because the "digital tax" where digital console titles are much more expensive than physical versions of the same game and consoles having very limited space. Now however, both of those issues are gone (extra space is easy to attach to modern consoles and digital gaming is the norm now so pricing is normalized) so I never want to go back.

The only thing I miss were the insane launches of big games like Halo 3, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, etc where 300 people would show up 6 hours early and it was a block party chatting and eating with fellow degenerates until midnight.
 
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Animagic

Banned
There was a store, dont recall the name, but it was huge and is of course OOB. It was broken out into 4 separate areas for music, movies, games and books. I would go there every few months and would spend close to 2 hrs looking for deals. Those were good days.
Media Play was like that, if you were in the states

 
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Kuranghi

Member
Last time I went into a game shop they were so rude and weird I just left the shop and went somewhere else to buy it. It was one of the weirdest interactions I ever had she was refusing to get the game from the drawer for some reason, I can't even remember the details because I was so dumbfounded by it. She started acting like a literal child and I wasn't even mad because I was so confused by the whole situation, I thought I was on a hidden camera show :messenger_tears_of_joy:

I asked for the game I had preordered and she wouldn't get it and started like repeating what I was saying back to me in a stupid voice and I was like "are you having a mental breakdown?" and then laughed, but she didnt laugh :messenger_tears_of_joy: Luckily I'm in a big city where there was another game shop like 50m away but to this day I still think about that bizarre encounter.

So I don't miss THAT lol, but I do miss chatting with proper nerds that worked there and hearing their opinion on the latest E3 trailers or the like, sharing in the passion of the hobby for a rare moment before returning to play games alone as I mostly did.
 
Somewhat. There was a charm about trekking into the shopping centre and wanting to pick up the latest release. Hoping that they had not sold out yet. Or just visiting the game shop to browse the different titles to pass time away while you wait for an appointment elsewhere.
 

SaucyJack

Member
Yes, I miss it.

When I moved to my current town (in South East England) we had the following shops selling new and/or used games: GAME (x2), Gamestation, HMV, Virgin (later Zavvi), Woolworths, Toys R Us, Blockbuster and CEX. And that's not counting the limited selection that was Argos or at electrical retailers (like Curry's) or Supermarkets. You could wander around all day seeing who had the best deals, etc. or just killing time whilst the Mrs was shopping.

Now we just have CEX.
 
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DGrayson

Mod Team and Bat Team
Staff Member
I dont really miss it, it was of a certain time. I miss my childhood and all that was involved in it of course.

Even if I walked into a game store full of great games I still wouldnt have the time to sink into them like i did when I was younger.

But ya that was a great experience.
 

HeisenbergFX4

Gold Member
Even at 50+ years old I still go into my local Gamestop to look at used games as I have found many gems for a few bucks I would have never tried before
 

Zeroing

Banned
Mmm 🤔 nah I don’t miss it.
what I miss is that time where we weren’t bombarded by “opinions” that formed our prejudices about any game…

going and buying a game without knowing anything… that is what I miss. It’s impossible to stay “blind to anything nowadays”

for example: Game A sucks, if you had no knowledge of that, would you had noticed it?
 

UnNamed

Banned
No, clerks were usually shit.
Two type of shit:
-those with a very high gaming culture but absolutely annoying and assholes, those who see you customer as a waste of their time until you give them money so they can pretend to be your friend. Until next time of course.
-Gamestop employees.
 

fart town usa

Gold Member
Hell yes I miss it.

Going into Funcoland and having like 8 different TV's set up with random games on there, ranging from NES to Sega Saturn. It was so awesome. Retro shops remind me of Funcoland but those places are few and far between where I live.
 

fart town usa

Gold Member
No, clerks were usually shit.
Two type of shit:
-those with a very high gaming culture but absolutely annoying and assholes, those who see you customer as a waste of their time until you give them money so they can pretend to be your friend. Until next time of course.
-Gamestop employees.
I remember being 10 or so and I said to my brother in Funcoland, "I don't really like Tomb Raider, the controls feel clunky..."

One of the clerks stepped out from behind the counter and proceeded to tell me why I was wrong, lol. Normally when an adult "scolds" you as a kid, you feel bad/nervous. In this case I remember thinking, "wtf is wrong with this guy??" lol
 

user1337

Member
Naah, I was never really into going to the store to buy games. Since the PS3 days, I have been ordering discs from online retailers. From PS4 onwards, it was 99% digital purchase as well.
 

TheMan

Member
No, clerks were usually shit.
Two type of shit:
-those with a very high gaming culture but absolutely annoying and assholes, those who see you customer as a waste of their time until you give them money so they can pretend to be your friend. Until next time of course.
-Gamestop employees.
You know it’s funny, in the 90s, at least where I lived, there seemed to be different kinds of people working in game stores (we only had babbages in our mall for many years). Nowadays they all seem nerdy to a degree, but back then there was more of a mix with non nerds, even grandmas working there

as for OPs question, when I think about it I only miss the feeling I’d get visiting game stores as a kid. And part of that feeling came from not knowing much about the games in the first place, spending a ton of time comparing game boxes lol. Also buying games used to be special since I’d only get a few per year. Nowadays I can pretty much buy anything I want and can learn as much about a game as I want before making a purchase, so going to the store (which I almost never do anymore in favor of buying digital) almost feels like a necessary evil.
 
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Arun1910

Member
As a Kid I think you can get away with window shopping for games. You just base it on what has a cool cover and looks fun when you're young.

Now that I'm older I want to see the game beforehand whether that's in demos/reviews. I like to get a good feel for what I'm In for before I slap down £60 on a game.
 
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Mexen

Member
Yeah, as a kid, it was kinda fun walking into a store and admiring all the games my mother was never going to buy for me.
 
Yes for the most part, the exception being asked about season passes , collectors editions and the odd customer walking past smelling of belly button gunk:
 

emivita

Member
For me it's mostly childhood nostalgia. There was this big superstore I used to get PS1 and PC games, my two main gaming platforms towards the end of the 1990s. I remember thoroughly looking at those colorful shelves full of games for multiple platforms and chatting with peers who asked me for advices because for them I looked like an expert lol, and there was no department clerk. Oh, and I loved reading manuals aloud during the car ride home, it was like a ritual.

pop tv memories GIF by Schitt's Creek
 

DonkeyPunchJr

World’s Biggest Weeb
No, clerks were usually shit.
Two type of shit:
-those with a very high gaming culture but absolutely annoying and assholes, those who see you customer as a waste of their time until you give them money so they can pretend to be your friend. Until next time of course.
-Gamestop employees.
If you go into GameStop and buy a new game with no preorder, and you don’t buy an extended warranty or a membership or preorder anything else, they act like you are some big inconvenience and they’re grudgingly doing you a favor at personal expense by selling the game to you.

Fuck that store. What I want is to go to a store, I tell them what I want, and they fucking happily sell it to me and say thanks. The opposite of the GameStop experience. They are like the EA of gaming retail.
 
Gamestop was good until their sales people became too aggressive, like those hand cream creatures. It was too annoying an experience to walk into the store. When you went to pay for the game, you had to deal with all the checkout questions and pushes. Nah, fuck that.
 

Chastten

Banned
Absolutely. I mean, even pre-covid I didn't go much anymore but I used to love going into town and browsing multimedia and gaming stores for nice surprise sales on games and DVD's and stuff, or just to find something that looked interesting from the cover and pick it up for cheap.

Not much use doing that these days, even it wasn't for covid. Most of the stores that sold physical media are long gone and the ones that are still around pricecheck with eachother.
 

KiteGr

Member
I still do it...
Religiously!

The only difference is that now I do tons of research before getting something at half the price, while then it was all about the box and grandma's money.
 

Shai-Tan

Banned
Waiting inline while a neck-beard in an unclean Pokemon hoodie tries to awkwardly chat up the girl behind the counter who made the unfortunate life-choice of coming to work that day is not something that I'll ever miss.

I wasn't old enough, and didn't have enough money, to shop at game stores when I was a kid. I have zero nostalgia for that. Today, at worst, I click a button on a website and a game magically appears in my mailbox in 1-2 business days. This is a superior experience in every quantifiable way.
lol. the other thing I would get is the 22 year old manager talking on the phone with his friends not giving a fuck that there are people in the store
 
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