Well, the exchange rate is terrible at the moment, so buying imported videogames from US/Asia is very costly right now. So it's time to look at the UK market for bargains. Fortunately, the market downturn is producing a lot of bargains that are remarkably good for the last quarter of the year / run up to Christmas.
We still don't have Tales Of Vesperia - that comes out in June 2009, and we don't have Chrono Trigger DS or Castlevania Order Of Ecclesia either - they come out in February 2009 (from what I've seen). Square Enix will be publishing the European versions of Persona 4 (PS2) and Disgaea 3 (PS3) next year, though they're made by Atlus and Nippon Ichi.
But here are some bargains I found:
For XBOX 360:
Fallout 3 and Fable 2 were under £20 each on Amazon.co.uk recently, and in-store in branches of Gamestation, last week and the week before last - though the price has gone up again.
If you want a Square Enix RPG: Last Remnant was featured on a "Deal Of The Day" offer on play.com soon after it came out - at £17.99 but it's gone back up in price again now. It's under £25 on Amazon if you're impatient, but I think it'll drop to under £20. The Tri-Ace game Infinite Undiscovery - published by Square Enix - is currently £17.99 on play.com as well. They haven't received that good reviews but I do like Infinite Undiscovery (though the achievements are annoying). I haven't tried out Last Remnant.
Pure is currently £9.99 and that's a good deal, I bought it for twice that and it's a great game - a lot of fun racing dirt buggies and doing SSX style tricks on them.
Also for £17.99 on play.com at the moment are: Farcry 2, Grand Theft Auto 4 and Midnight Club: Los Angeles, if you're interested. I'm playing GTA4 at the moment and I like it a lot because I find it pretty funny, and a lot less buggy than the previous games (though this weekend I did manage to go for a date with a girl in the game, we got drunk in a bar so I thought I'd stand there waiting for us to sober up before leaving. Then all of a sudden she was lying dead on the floor, two barstools lying on her. I have no idea why, but I suspect a bug rather than natural causes).
Mirror's Edge was down to £19.99 on both Xbox 360 and PS3 over the weekend, but from the demo I played I wouldn't rate it as worth that much.
For PSP:
LocoRoco 2 and Star Ocean First Departure are £17.99 each on play.com - there haven't been very many other notable releases on the PSP for a while, IMHO.
For DS:
Some really terrible games are really popular on DS here in the UK; Brain Training and Nintendogs are still popular here, and you get DS ports of gameshows like Deal Or No Deal or Golden Balls, and board games that make no sense to play on a DS like Pass The Pigs. Wading through that, though, Dragon Quest Monsters Joker is £9.99 right now on play.com and the newest Dragon Quest Monsters game if you like those or Pokemon style collect-em-ups (I like the DQM games because you don't have to be gentle in catching monsters, so you don't have to keep anyone in your party deliberately weak just for recruiting monsters). Also, The World Ends With You is £14.99 and that's the RPG I've spent most time on this console; definitely worth it at that price, I think. Bangai-O Spirits is only £12.71 on Amazon if you want story-devoid frantic-but-intentionally-laggy shmup fun. Dragon Quest: The Chapters Of The Chosen (the remake of the 4th Dragon Quest game) is listed as £12.45 but I think it's 3rd party.
EDIT: If you're wondering why I'm listing old bargains that no longer exist, I'm just saying that even though the games are a few months - or sometimes a few weeks old, their price has halved, and it's worth checking daily for the best prices.
