I was cranky and tired last night, and in a less than rational mood ended up pre-ordering Omerta - City of Gangsters. Rationally that is pretty bad bet, as the game is from Kalypso, and they have a long list of games with mediocre Metacritic scores around 60, not to mention one of their most recent games Legend of Pegasus which got a 35 score for being basically unplayable. So usually I don't pre-order Kalypso games. But I find that sometimes when I am not very fit, I make irrational impulse buys. Sometimes it's a game, sometimes it is something from the item shop of some Free2Play game.

Well, maybe I get lucky and Omerta turns out to be not so bad. It looks nice on paper: Boardwalk Empire setting, city-building game combined with XCOM-style turn-based combat. Pushes all the right buttons of my preferences. But usually the devil is in the details, and a badly executed version of your favorite genre is more likely to anger you than to please you.

Fortunately my impulse buying tendency doesn't apply to big ticket items. When I recently ordered a new car, the decision was months in the making, with several visits to the dealership, and extensive online research. But a game on Steam or a digital item in a game are relatively cheap compared to my disposable income, and increasingly easy to impulse buy. No longer do you have to actually go out to a shop to buy a game, you can do that instantly from your computer. The technology favors impulse buys. Events like Steam sales are especially dangerous in that respect.

How about you? Do you buy computer games impulsively, or do you carefully plan what you buy?