As regular readers of my posts may know, I’m one cheap-ass gamer. I won’t buy a console until it hits the $150 mark and I wait until games fall to $20 before I can purchase them and not feel guilty about it. While I have both a PlayStation 2 and a Gamecube, most of my non-WoW gaming this summer has revolved around playing PlayStation (One) RPG titles.

On the PC, things are pretty much the same. I refused to purchase Starcraft for several years after it came out, only to snatch it up in 2004. When I’m skimming the games at CompUSA, I generally gloss over anything that has come out in the last eighteen months and head directly toward the $5.00 game displays that are placed near the cash registers to spur impulse purchasing. On the PC, this approach has served me well - I don’t spend a lot of cash on games and since they’re so old, I can run them at full “hi-quality” settings, regardless of the state of my cheap-ass PC.

Thinking back, the best purchase that I made of this type had to be Descent Freespace. I picked up the original game and add-on missions at a Target for five bucks. I got home, installed it, ran through the training missions, and it completely destroyed any impressions I had of what a good space sim was. Descent Freespace was to games like X-Wing and TIE Fighter what Half-Life was to Doom. In spite of its age, Freespace still retains one of the top spots among my favorite PC games.

“Yes, Virginia. There is space-based capital ship combat.”

So, this summer, when drafting my Summer Games 2005 list, it only made sense to conquer the sequel. Unfortunately, simply acquiring Descent Freespace 2 was a Herculean task by itself and made me go against some of my more *ahem* frugal principles.

One of the nice thing about the cheap game bin is that by the time games have fallen to five bucks, the filter of time has sifted out the really poor games and generally only the best games remain. While there are still plenty of piss-poor games represented on the shelf, any gamer that isn’t living in a hole knows through second-hand knowledge which games rocked and which games blew.

Armed with a shiny new ten-dollar bill, I searched for months for Freespace 2. It was nowhere to be found. It was not available in computer stores, Walmart, or specialty gaming boutiques. I ran across the original Freespace many times, but never the sequel. Broadening my search to the more expensive games didn’t help either. Despite being a “Game of the Year” in 1999, there were no old copies for sale and no publisher was repackaging the game as part of a larger bundle. For several months, I searched, but I never found anything.

After many fruitless searches, I turned to eBay. Since everything is for sale on eBay, it made sense that if I’d find this game anywhere, it’d be on eBay. And fortunately, I did find a handful of copies for sale.

The downside was that the games were selling for double their original purchase price. To my cheap-ass instincts, this made no sense. Games that are over half a decade old should be dirt cheap, dammit! However, in this case, the laws of supply and demand overruled any cheap-ass considerations. The fundamental problem was that the global supply of Freespace 2 is as small as the supply of free prophylactics at a Promise Keeper’s conference.

For one, Interplay treated the game as an afterthought at its release and failed to get sufficient copies out to vendors. As a result, the sales for Freespace 2 were quite disappointing. Unfortunately, it was also around this time that Interplay’s executives revealed themselves as completely incompetent businessmen. When Interplay was on the verge of bankruptcy, Freespace 2’s developers, Volition Inc., left the Interplay circle and began writing games for THQ. Unfortunately, it seems that the Descent and Freespace francises were left to rot under Interplay’s management.

As a result, during the game’s heyday, despite extremely positive reviews and a warm reception by the gaming community, few copies of the game were sold. It was about this time I started scouring eBay for copies. Since the supply was low and the game was acknowledged as being one of the best space sims ever written, sellers could demand and receive a steep markup on top of the original fifty-dollar purchase price.

Since I was going through the process of wading through eBay and competing with other buyers, I decided from the beginning that I was going whole hog. I eschewed the original release and decided to go after the limited Game of the Year release that included twenty additional missions. If I was going to subject myself to the eBay gauntlet, I was going to get most complete version I could. There would be no going back and asking myself whether I should have gotten the extra missions after completing the core game.

I bid for months on the game. I would start low, around fifty dollars, hoping that I could sneak in and get a cheap copy. More often than not, the auction would be minutes away from completion - with me as the top bidder - and my e-mail would ping that I had new mail. The new mail would announce that some bastard swept in at the last minute and outbid me by a buck or two. After playing this game for a few months, I decided to screw the whole auction process and exercise the “buy outright” option. I could spend many more nights haggling for a game that would ultimately cost seventy-five to a hundred dollars. Or I could just buy it outright and deny some sick schmoe the pleasure of stealing the auction from me yet again. When a copy popped up with a $99.99 buyout price, I swooped in and never looked back.

After a week of wondering whether I’d been ripped off, I finally received the game in the mail. It was in its box which had obviously been opened before. I opened the box and verified that I had all three discs, the keyboard map, and the manual. All the pieces were present and accounted for - great. I then sat down and installed the game. I was a bit nervous as the game required “Windows 95/98″ and I’ve had spotty luck with getting older games running on NT-based systems such as XP or Windows 2000. The system requirements were a 200 MHz Pentium processor, 32 MB of RAM, and a 4 MB 3-D graphics accelerator. Upon starting the game for the first time, my Pentium IV, a gig and half of RAM, and a 256 MB video card seemed to suit the game just fine. It’s nice to know that some game developers aren’t complete twits and their games will run on systems years later, unlike some other developers. *ahem*LucasArts*ahem*

So, in celebration of the completion of the serious and grave task of finally acquiring Freespace 2, I’ve decided to tackle this game head-on at the exclusion of other games, including World of Warcrack. A cheap-ass gamer doesn’t spend $100 on a game very often - it’s his solemn duty to verify that the money wasn’t spent in vain. If the sequel is anything like the original game, this should be a joyous duty indeed.

Stay tuned.