Retail loopholes, oh baby!

Street Fighter IV technically came out today (and I managed to stop myself from buying the Collector's Edition). EB and JB, the only retailers which actually mattered, kinda, both broke street date a few days ago. There may or may not be a pun there. Hahaha.

So after tossing up whether to buy it now or wait until later, I ended up getting linked to an article over at Ecogamer about how much retailers were charging for it, as well as a slew of comments about how much people were paying for it. So Jordaan and I decided to head out today and see what kind of deal we could get.

For reference (Standard Edition):
EB: $119.95
JB: $99

Hmm... not too pretty. JB chopping $30 off EB's price was pretty good, but could we get it for cheaper?

See, JB also had a little 'TRADE IN THREE GAMES AND GET SFIV FREE!' deal, which is what J and I were relying on to help us get a great price. This of course meant that we had to find three reasonably cheap PS3 games, which was probably not going to be easy, given the list of limitations on JB's website. So after checking EB and Target (with potential candidates being $30, and one at $25), we headed over to JB to see if they had any cheap preowned games.

They did. Several. But we ended up finding three copies of a single game, one that I don't think anyone gave a damn about, because they were only $24 each!

J suggested that we exploit this to the point that we should bring the three copies up to the counter as well as a SFIV display box. Eventually I had to persuade him to do all the talking because I was laughing too hard. After confirming the 'purchase' of the games, the clerk sent us back to the games department so that they could complete the trade-in. While we were up there, another guy was attempting to do the same thing and was turned away for having duplicate copies, which made me panic. However, the dude we got was a nice guy and was totally ok with us having three of the same game, which we had just bought. So hooray! SFIV for $72, $18 off the normal JB price and almost $50 off EB's. So, like, to recap, because I am actually really proud of what we managed to do:

Do the math.

Noby Noby Boy also arrived early on the 20th, which was silly of them since it was clearly supposed to be a 19th Feb worldwide simultaneous release. Indeed, I spent the whole of the 19th running outside and checking the Playstation Store. Dicks. So that's here and I'm excited, but I'm currently STILL downloading it because my internet capped. Which means that SFIV doesn't want to download its required system update. Which means I probably won't get to play either game until 12AM. Naptime now then, I suppose.