HOW SOMETHING I DIDN’T WANT SAVED ME $240 A YEAR

I never really liked video games, especially the ones released in the last ten years. They seemed to have too much action and violence. They required the player to manage way more buttons than my brain was able to. Buying a video game system was definitely at the bottom of my list of priorities.

On the other hand, I love movies. I have a pretty respectable movie collection myself, with over 1,000 titles in DVD and now Blu-ray. I have the habit of watching the same movie several times, trying to get details that you can never get the first time you watch a movie, listen to music or read a book.

I had DVD players for a long time, but after I upgraded my TV to a powerful 1080p model, my formerly crystal clear DVD movies started to look a bit blurry. After advice from friends and testing a number of “upscale” DVD players, I decided to invest in Blu-ray, now knowing that the competing standard, HDDVD, was dead.

My research revealed that the best buy for me would be the very same video game console I used to dislike. All of my technical and feature requirements were met by the console. A couple salespeople said it was also a “video game” box, and I could have fun with it.

It took me two months after buying to use it for something other than watching Blu-rays. A friend recommended “that first-person shooting game that everybody was talking about,” and I decided to try it. After a few hours mastering all the different controls to play the game, I was addicted.

I decided to try another game, and another. I started exploring the Internet connectivity features of the console when I realized other friends had the same console. Some of them were people I hadn’t talked to for years. With a Bluetooth headset, I started to play online with them and get back in touch, competing in different games online with scores being compared on social networks, automatically posted by the console.

New features have been added to this system, and among them is the ability to stream movies over the Internet. Several of those were foreign movies recommended by the system based on movies I had previously watched. In a couple of months, I was so happy with all this that I cut my satellite TV costs by 30%, saving over $240 a year and watching a lot more movies than I could before.