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RPG Deals 8/19 – 8/25

By Russ | August 19, 2012 at 4:05 pm

I think there’s an anniversary here.

First, the deals:

Dragon’s Dogma is $40 on sale at BestBuy.com.

The 3DS XL released this week.  It looks like K-Mart is offering a $20 gift card with the system.

Has it been 4 years already?  Time passes quickly when you only “tune in” once a week.  When I first started this column, there were several places for deals to be found.  A lot of that has changed.

Amazon no longer offers a Daily Deal for video games.  Best Buy does in its place, but RPGs seem few and far in-between.

Circuit City is gone.  When this column moved to RPG Land, Circuit City was on its way out.  When RPG Deals started a year earlier, Circuit City had loads of deals on games.

K-Mart had a very good streak with promotions; often offering obscenely good coupons with games.  Then the guy in charge of video game promotions was let go and the promos just fell to the wayside.

Of course, what constitutes an RPG has changed.  When this column started, the Eastern RPG was beginning to bow to the Western way of role-playing.  Series like Mass Effect, Elder Scrolls and Fallout dominated consoles by offering choice, while titles such as Borderlands re-focused priority on gameplay.  Outside of the enduring – yet definitely waning – popularity of the Final Fantasy series, the JRPG seems to have retreated to the handheld system.  As someone who grew up on JRPGs, it is a strange time.

And then there’s the phone/tablet market…

I don’t know how long this column will continue.  The cost of gas has prohibited many weekly stops at game stores and other outlets.  The cross-pollination of genres has me questioning what exactly is an RPG.  And there is time; the lack of which pushes my gaming and gaming-related habits to smaller, one-hour  increments rather than the long marathons of even a few years ago.

But I do know there is a joy to seeing things evolve over time.  Like playing through the Final Fantasy series one after the other, or raising Pokemon, or playing an MMO since its release to its current update.  If I am still writing this column in four years, I hope and look forward to see another evolution in the games we play.

Thank you to those that have read thus far.  Happy Hunting.

Disclaimer: Deals may not be available in all stores. Deals may stop and any time. Prices in each store may differ. You can try different stores to mitigate this, and always ask if a store has the item before leaving the store. You might be able to get a raincheck. Many deals are in-store only, except where specified. This column brought to you by manly beers of joy.

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