Fishing for Nintendo game bargains

There's been a lot in the press recently about how hard it is for people in the UK to get onto the property ladder with their first house. But no-one seems to appreciate how hard it is to get into the gaming market.

A lot of us can't afford the mortgage on a brand new DS Lite, and leasing out a DS Phat in the rough end of town just isn't an option. So what to do?

There are plenty of ways to get great gaming for less money. Whether you're already a tooled-up DS player or you're looking to start afresh, it's simply a case of knowing where to look.

We took a stroll out to the shops first, but stayed away from the high-priced chain stores. Pre-owned offerings in shops like GameStation are relatively cheap – we were pleased to find Advance Wars and Doom for £7.99 each – but a lot of the time the mark-up is too high to make it worthwhile.

It's also much harder to find genuine bargains out there, because the really rare and popular finds are snapped up. The consoles were also far too expensive in-store, even pre-owned.

However, we didn't come back empty-handed. Down the side roads and away from the big shops we found charity shops – and though we admit you'll need to be very lucky to find anything here, we picked up The Legend of Zelda : Link's Awakening for the Game Boy Colour for £2 and Mario Kart Super Circuit for the Game Boy Advance for £4. Plus you get the warm feeling of helping a charity out through gaming.

To be honest, these days, whether it's old or new, 'cheap' means that a trip to eBay is in order.

Auction sites are popping up all over the internet now, but the monolithic eBay still remains the centre of most internet trading. We continued our search for cheap gaming here, and got some good DS game plunder. A brand new copy of Spectrobes reached us for less than a tenner, and we were thrilled to get the addictive relaxation simulator Animal Crossing for just £12.50.

Usually, though, DS games remain costly wherever you look. So we opened our minds to Nintendo's legacy of games that runs into the thousands, available for great prices online. We took a list of top Game Boy games from Pocket Gamer's GBA reviews archive and hunted down some bargains – in the first half an hour we'd grabbed a used Street Fighter Alpha 3 cart for just £3.10 and Final Fantasy VI for an astounding £8.99 brand new.

Ebay can be dangerous, and you should take our advice for spotting fraudulent games, as well as using common sense at all times. But most sellers are there to make money fairly, and the competition means that there's plenty of great wins to be had by the patient and the lucky. We soon tracked down copies of Link's Awakening for the Game Boy Colour at just £3.00 and Super Mario World Advance 2 for £5.50 brand new.

Patience also got us Mario Kart – Super Circuit for the DS at just £9, but we had to hunt through the auctions to get it. It can be frustrating, but it's cheaper than the high-street price, which is still £20.

It's not just games that are economical online – you can also get the consoles to play them on too. On eBay, a used handheld console will go for less than £20 – we found a red Game Boy Advance SP with ten games including Mario Kart and FIFA 07 for just £34.99 – which is only a little more than a fresh DS game release would set you back.

Once all our eBaying came to fruition, we'd collected eight of Pocket Gamer's top fifteen Game Boy games, as well as a couple of past classics, and a worn but working Gameboy Advance to play them on for less than £50 – half the price of a DS Lite on the high street, and with hours of great gaming on our hands.

Don't forget that the system works the other way – old games are still worth something, and places such as eBay and pre-owned traders could be an even easier way to raise funds for new games.

But nothing beats settling down to the 56-colour joys of a game you bought for less than the price of the bus journey you're on.