Last week's Panther Statue in GTAV:Online  pushed me over the brink and I hit Level 300 and now have over $100 million in cash.

Am I going to stop playing now? No, of course not, don't be ridiculous.


Favourite systems when I was a kid? Brace yourself, CSB incoming.


When I was in high school the Panasonic 3DO launched amidst unparalleled levels of hype. It's graphic capabilities were truly eye-popping (for the time, of course) but equally eye-popping was its exorbitant price. I don't recall what it was at launch, but I do know that it was several magnitudes beyond what a high school student with no job could reasonably afford, and not only that, it would be preposterous to even ask my parents to buy it. The price was that ridiculous.

A few months later, some friends and I find out that one of the local video rental places, a little mom and pop shop called 'Flicks', has a 3DO system for rent. A weekend rental, from Friday at 4pm to Sunday at noon is $40 and also requires a $300 credit card deposit. Games are $5 each or so per day. So for a weekend rental and a few games, we're looking at around $60. The credit card deposit was a problem since all of our parents didn't like the idea, but eventually someone's parents did it and we rented it.

It was pretty incredible. We rented a system for a weekend several times over the next year and played a lot of Road Rash, Myst, Pit Figher, Need for Speed, Killing Time, Doom and others. Funny story about Myst, because the "ending" of the original is the biggest non-ending in a game, possibly ever, we wasted TWO weekend rentals on that f*ckin' game because we didn't realize we had actually finished it.

Fast forward many years later and 'Flicks' is closing its doors permanently and liquidating all the inventory.

My friend stops in and what do they have for sale? The very same 3DO we played so many times, years earlier.

So my friend bought it for $80, along with all the 3DO games they had left.

And that system is still at his house and still works to this day.


The hilarious part, of course, is that if you add up all those weekend rentals and the $80 my friend paid to buy the console, we probably could have bought two of those bastards.