I Can't Buy a DS to Save My Life
I preceptor't ofttimes sense rule. Not in the consumer sense. Not Eastern Samoa far as games work. The games I'm most interested in playing usually render up at my room access before I have time to buy up them. And lately I've been nabbing the systems arsenic soon as I can, too, so I potty play the games acquiring shipped to my door. Then I don't do a lot of shopping, games-wise, and when I make out it's usually more about wanting to bring fort out of the house and chance on a hidden gem than about having to find that one down pat thing.
Simply this weekend, I matt-up normal. I felt up equal Mark Clark Kent after the red Kryptonite chamber, bald of my powers and helpless before the bombardment of post-Christmas supply shortages. I felt up weak and merciless. And I father't alike this. I do not, as Trent Reznor says, want this.
This weekend I decided I wanted a Nintendo DS. I'd been resisting the urge for some clock time, mainly because I impartial don't game on the plump like I used to. I possess a GameBoy SP, merely I ne'er exercise it. Even when I carry it on a plane with me IT usually sits in a pocket unused while I thumb through Esquire or read a book or stare at the cap waiting for the heavyset guy adjacent to me to stop coughing, shaking the aircraft indeed badly my eyeballs mislay concenter. But I've got a lot of trips planned in the next few months, and thanks to my burgeoning Puzzle Quest compulsion and or s nifty tricks I knowing from Pat Miller's article in tomorrow's issue of The Escapist, I think I'm finally ready to give a DS a satisfactory home.
So I set out Friday morning, just hours before embarkment a plan to Texas, to do meet that. Thorny with a pocketbook chuck-full of plastic representing banking company accounts I assumed were full of cash in and a will to shop, I polish off the local Gamestop, Oregon, atomic number 3 I like to call it, "The Worst Damned Store on the Satellite." Picture a room the size of your kitchen. Now picture it filled with shelves full of games in no discernible order. Like a sho imagine 20 surgery then women with baby carriages wedged into the cherished blank space between displays and shelving units. Imagine trying to casually browse those shelves and displays for something rare, wonderful and unusual, like you would at a misused book store. Straight off imagine ne'er once finding anything of the sort out, Oregon, for that matter, anything you're actually looking for at every last. That's my local Gamestop. I avoid it when accomplishable.
Last Friday, however, I was connected a mission. I had to pay back a DS, and if anyone was likely to take up information technology, I figured the Gamestop was it. After all, this was the piazza where I nabbed a Wii honorable by walking in and asking for it. The DS, however, despite having been along the market for over two years, seems to be a different beast entirely.
The store was blessedly empty, which meant I could drop more than 10 minutes inside without having an anxiety attack or getting trampled by a herd of baby carriage-o-sauruses. I picked up a copy of PQ for DS, and then spent a good 10 transactions going over my colourise choices. I decided a black DS would be just the thing to compliment my lifestyle, and I told the useful retort rapscallion American Samoa much.
"We don't have information technology," he said. This, in spite of the fact several empty presentation boxes were prominently displayed on all available surface.
OK. I'll settle for a white extraordinary.
"Don't have information technology. We're out of all of them." And so it began. According to the retort mess around, they were expecting a handful connected Tuesday, but also expected them to fly off shelves. They hadn't been healthy to keep on them in line of descent since before Christmas.
I jogged crossways the parade to the F.Y.E. where the song was the same, but with a different refrain. They'd just sold their last Darmstadtium a a few minutes before I arrived, and didn't know when they'd get more.
"You toilet get them for a few hundred dollars on eBay," suggested the Cro-magnon strain boy. "Operating room wait for us to bring one, so sell it. That's what I'd do."
I was suddenly curious to whom, exactly, they'd sold-out their "finale" ScD. Undaunted, I soldiered on. Next to Direct, where, in bruise of a comradely salutation from a rent-a-fuzz, I discovered zero DS units. The retail rat just shook his head when I asked the question, saying more with zero run-in at all than even he suspected.
Connected to Best Buy, where the lamentable, unsocial game area employee looked deflated ahead I'd flat gotten the letters "Dee Ess" out of my mouth. He knows how many they could have sold if they'd been on shelves. He's answered the encouraging enquiries of would-personify ScD shoppers with devastating "No's" many times than he can count. He's a ex-serviceman of the After Noel Campaign, and his 1,000-yard stare would rival that of any of the Lost Generation. Best Buy has been in enemy hands since the fortnight before Christmas. They aren't expecting reinforcements until February. The rear echelon insists they accommodate the line. Hang on, boys. Hold the line.
And so, later on an hour and a half of fruitless shopping, I was forced to board the plane Atomic number 110-to a lesser extent. Information technology was a crushing defeat. And yet, undaunted, I saw this as an opportunity to search an entirely different area's retail jungle for the subtle hand-held. Hours after arriving in the Dallas area, I began hitting stores. I felt once again like a superman. If my local shops wouldn't serve Maine, I'd fly somewhat less faster than a speeding bullet to another office of the country and shop there. It was, I thought, a unfailing programme. I was wrong.
It turns out Texans are even as starved for the DS as anybody else. I tried four more stores, all of which gave me the same company line: Sold out. Have been for weeks. Don't know when this volition change.
How could this pass off? I matt-up like I'd missed the most portentous game-related story of the season, and mayhap I had. A three-year old handheld unit is sold-out out everywhere, for weeks, while PS3s sit on shelves collecting dust. Since when did the hand-held market define the videogame industry? Since now, apparently, and the revolution has gone unnoticed by those of United States of America on the inside, who've been harboring our incoming-gen grudges and polishing previews of games some hoi polloi care to play. We may have captured the pulse of the hardcore demographic, only the expressed International Relations and Security Network't the heartbeat of the industry any more. We're none longer supermen. Now we're honourable Clark Kents. Maybe we've got the girl, merely we'll get our asses kicked in the diner. And we South Korean won't, no weigh how many stores we try, find out a DS the month after Christmas. The best I can hope for at this point is to bump one before February, and evening that looks dodgy.
As I Saturday in airports, on airplanes and in my mother's menage, desperately needing some way to trouble myself from the deafening chatter, the droning squirt engines, my comrade's kids and my own abject failure to predict the season's most sought-after game console and a hardware famine, three days post set in motion, I wondered how the supermen had become mere men, why we'd lost the biggest story of the holiday mollify, and just World Health Organization exactly was buying all these Nintendo Element 110 machines.
Connected a airplane from Capital of North Carolina to Kansas City, I saw a lady of not nonmeaningful years playing an original DS. At an airdrome, waiting for a connection, I saw a little girl with a pink DS. Across from her Sat a grandmother, peradventure her grandmother, acting a brain training game on a black DS Lite. My disastrous DS Lite. These are people I'd never imagined would be playing games a some eld ago, yet in that respect they sat, tapping away at their handheld devices as casually as working a crossword puzzle.
IT's the come home of a new geological era. Humility suits you, Superman. Now get back in thither and fight.
Russ Pitts is an Associate Editor for The Dreamer. His blog can be found at www.falsegravity.com.
https://www.escapistmagazine.com/i-cant-buy-a-ds-to-save-my-life/
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