Bye Bye Skylanders, Hello Plants vs Zombies
Duncan has wanted Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 for a while now, since watching stampylongnose play the original a few months ago. I wanted to just get it for him, but it’s a hundred bucks at any of the retailers even remotely close to us, and they never seem to have preowned copies.
On Friday we gave him an option that he might want to do: He literally hasn’t touched his Skylanders in months - we basically played Superchargers for about a month after release and we never even finished it. The recent cancellation of Disney Infinity had me thinking that perhaps the “Toys to Life” fad is ending, much like the plastic instruments rhythm game fad before it (though we did buy Rockband 4, only to be disappointed there’s no online multiplayer yet) and that now might actually be a great time to get rid of them.
So we asked if he wanted to trade them all in - a while back I inquired just out of sheer curiosity, and Mav, the manager of our local EB, reckoned that a buck per figure was a good ballpark estimate. He’s got about 80 figures, so if that’s a good ballpark it’d get him most of the way there. He hummed and ahhed a bit, because I realise this is a huge and possibly traumatic decision for a six year old. Giving up toys is never easy, and I suppose it speaks to the fact of my privileged childhood that giving up or losing toys are among some of my worst memories.
In the end he decided to do it. We took photos of them, because his cousin is into them, and my sister might want to buy some of them, and then on Monday we went in to see what EB would give us for them. I had meticulously organized all the software back into it’s original boxes, all for naught apparently because that gains you nothing and EB policy is to trade them all in seperately and sell pre-owned stuff without boxes. Damn it.
My sister ended up offering a fair price for the ones she didn’t have, about $40, and Di in EB tallied up all the remaining trade-ins. He ended up getting $56 for the remaining figures, four pieces of software and bases and a few traps. That puts him at a total of $96, just shy of the extortinate $99 for a brand new AAA videogame in Australia.
In the days to come, he’ll prove to thoroughly enjoy the game and have forgotten all about his Skylanders, so I think it’s a good move. The only downside thus far is that he hasn’t played Team Fortress 2 with us since.
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