There are lots of great black friday sales on (even some black friday-esque sales in Canada) and I was very tempted but I managed to beat the temptation and convince myself that it's not a good idea to splurge just because stuff is on sale. I have had a lot of backlog problems in the past (I only owned a PS1 and PS2 in previous gens and even then I had big backlogs) and I don't want to repeat the same habits this gen. Thus far I've been very good with backlog maintenance (I'm working on Crackdown right now and I have Halo 3 and Mass Effect coming so I have some new games to chew on for the holidays. The rest of my backlog is taken care. Any game this gen that I bought that I liked or even consider decent, I'll play through it. It's only the games that I end up not liking that I won't play through.

So I've pretty much developed a policy where I won't buy more games, even if it's on sale, if I already have a few current-gen games on my plate. Not sure how that is going to work out but if I splurged on Black Friday I probably would have a bunch of games that I might not even get to (because when theres a new sale, I'd get more. lol) due to time constraints. For eg. I would have picked up stuff like Ninja Blade and Family Game Bundle on sale (yes I find that stuff to be fun). Games that are fun but could potentially be lost in the shuffle when there's a new sale! Would you say this is a wise way to go about things when budgetting for time and money? Buy stuff as you need them (and ignoring the lure of stuff like Black Friday)? As opposed to buy stuff whenever there's a great sale on? I figure that I'm doing the right thing since time is such a precious resource.

How about you guys/gals? What are your throughts re: sales and backlogs piling up?

Honestly, I pick up whatever I want. I don't look at my (insane) backlog. This way, when I go to the next game, I have a larger choice of what game I want to start playing. Plus, if I ever get that urge to want to play a game that I didn't get, it may be OOP and hard to find. I'm still paying that price for some PS1 titles.

Yeah it does make things interesting like that. It all depends on how you look at things. I can't help but feel guilty when I look at my old PS1 backlog. I'm not even going to bother trying to clear the old gen backlogs because I won't have any time to buy and play current-gen games that way (however I do occasionally retro game. Having a laptop is great for that. I can play classic NES/SNES/Genesis/Playstation 1/etc. games while bored during lecture and while in bed. lol.) But for this gen I haven't fallen into these habits (though I still have out of print OCD. "oh look another niche Japanese game. It's on sale and probably going to be out of print. *buys*" (that explains why I have lots of Japanese software on my 360)

The Black Friday scenario was funny because the mini-devil was egging me as I added stuff to my cart whereas the mini-angel was like "no, don't do this. You are falling into old habits you wasteful consumerist western bastard. You're going to end up with a whole bunch of games that you play through only part-way because you got distracted by the next great sale of cool games. You're gonna do the exact same on Boxing Day" Then I just removed everything from the cart [Ninja Blade, Family Game Bundle, NHL 10, Assassin's Creed, etc.] and probably some other stuff I can't remember at the moment. lol.

That's the burden of time being such a precious resource. As I age, I realize more and more just how valuable time is.

The great thing about backlogs is being able to let someone borrow a game knowing that you have no time to play it anyway.
I dunno, at least I feel different when I let someone borrow a backlog game than a game I've already beaten. It...feels good.

My budget is limited so I only buy if its a game I need. In the past couple months I've bought MW2, UC2 (received as a gift) and GTA4