Can you really game on your student budget? Rosie Howard shares her tips
Gaming during your first year can be, unfortunately, limited. Unless you are lucky enough to own your own console and television, many people are forced to leave their gaming days behind them. Even the games themselves are ridiculously expensive, as a £45 spend on one item does not fit well into a student budget.
Playing console or PC games at university can also sometimes invoke the idea of people playing single player or online games for hours at a time, often on their own. But I think that gaming can be one of the most social pastimes at university, and can be achievable whilst not paying a small fortune.
Nearly everyone has had some experience of gaming during his or her lives (even if at first they don’t admit it).Even though I see myself as being slightly old fashioned when it comes to gaming (for example, I have never played Halo, let alone Call of Duty), I was surprised at how many people had had experience playing the same games as I did when they were growing up. Just mention the words Spyro or Crash Bandicoot in a conversation and more people than you think will join in, even to the point of starting a lengthy discussion on how Spyro was never the same when he moved to PS2. And though I am yet to meet anyone else who played Croc, or Sheep, Dog, Wolf, I am still holding out hope.
So, if you do want to bring gaming to University, but can’t bring your newest console, then it could be a good idea to bring an older console. In my case, the first console to enter our corridor was a PS2 connected to a square, SD TV: very nostalgic. We could therefore only play either PS or PS2 games, and it was amazing to see how many games people still owned, with hoarders, like me, still own every game they ever bought for that console, even if they don’t actually have the console any more. We had great fun revisiting games we hadn’t played in years, which were still enjoyable and challenging, whilst feeling fresh compared to modern games. Our top games included: Worms, a great strategy, multiplayer game which soon gets very competitive; Harry Potter Quidditch World Cup, a game which everyone seemed to remember playing, another great multiplayer game that gets hugely competitive (though I would advise not skipping the tutorial); and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, a game that a lot of my friends remembered, back from when film tie-in games could still be good.
Between a group of people, you should be able to produce a huge number of classic games which have been sitting in the back of a cupboard just waiting for an excuse to be played again. It’s gaming on a student budget, avoiding you having to buy the newest games in order to get a gaming fix.
Gaming is something that can be continued and enjoyed at university and, in my opinion, is not something to necessarily be done alone. It will surprise you how quickly a rainy Exeter day can go by with everyone trying to get past level two of Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. If anything, it helped remind us that maybe we were better at gaming when we were younger.
Rosie Howard
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