New cheap classic will be right within your gaming budget

Did you hear about the butcher who went global with his pork chops? Capitalist pig!

To be fair, we don’t begrudge anyone making money, but that’s not to say we’re willing to waste our own.

That’s why, in our latest search for cheap classics on Steam, we’ve found Recettear — a game about setting up your own shop.

Have you ever played an RPG like Final Fantasy, or even the Elder Scrolls series, and wondered what the life of a shopkeeper was like in those games?

Seems like it would be pretty boring, right? Well, Recettear not only answers that question, but proves your assumption very wrong.

Thanks to an abundance of charm and a relatively deep economy and dungeon system, Recettear is one of the best games under a fiver you can buy on Steam.

The story would be tongue-in-cheek, except the tongue was sold for twice its real value and the cheek was redecorated to make room for even more stuff to sell.

The house of Recette is about to be seized by the bank, because her adventurer father had a run-in with a dragon and left the family unable to make repayments.

So the bank’s representative, a fairy called Tear, suggests that Recette turn the home into a local shop due the booming adventure economy in the region.

Thus begins a very funny and addictive story of one girl’s rise through JRPG capitalism, as she acquires new loot by purchasing at cost price from local retailers and hiring adventurers to explore dungeons, while selling the products for at least 30% more on the open market.

So Recettear (which the game itself pronounces close to ‘racketeer’) becomes a mixture of dungeon-crawling, shop design and witty storytelling as the relationship between Recette, Tear and the surrounding town develops.

The dungeon-crawling aspect is where Recettear gives players a chance to unwind from capitalist planning and button mash their way to riches. While Recette and Tear themselves don’t swing the sword, the player does control whatever adventurer they hire, with each dungeon getting progressively more difficult, yet rewarding in terms of its rare ingredients and loot.

Recettear has suffered the effect of capitalism itself now, with the price long since having lowered to meet the market value for an old game. But the value has only shot up in opposition, making this one of the better budget games you can spend your hard-earned cash on.

HUGE FUNDRAISING

Meanwhile, British YouTuber Harry Bewis, better known as Hbomberguy, raised huge money of a different kind recently.

Brewis managed to raise a staggering €299,000 in funding for trans youth organization Mermaids, during a 57-hour marathon run of the N64 classic Donkey Kong 64.

Brewis, who was expecting just €3,000 in total, obliterated his target with the help of activist CaseyExplosion and the LGBTQ community. During the stream, he was also paid a visit by some gaming alumni, including Irish resident and Doom creator John Romero and actress Mara Wilson (who played Matilda) and fellow YouTuber and critic Jim Sterling.

A US congresswoman even dropped by.

"As a person living in Britain, I find the media discussion about this issue in the country, especially the tabloids, to be woefully misinformed,” Brewis said.

I’d like to do my bit to help support the people who do the hard work of contributing to people’s thinking on an important issue.

KOMBAT POSITION

Finally, if there’s one thing we know about capitalism — it’s that if we keep buying it, they’ll keep making it. So it was no surprise to hear that Mortal Kombat XI was announced recently, despite the first game releasing over 25 years ago.

To its credit, the series has been ‘rebooted’ the proper way, with the 2013 entry proving hugely successful thanks to a brand new engine and a focus on what made the originals so much fun (gore and ‘Get over here!’).

The eleventh entry to the series doubles down on the Kombat lore, picking up where the previous game left off, with Raiden having saved the day — but seemingly turned bad guy in the process.

Mortal Kombat XI, which releases on April 23, will also see the return of fan favourite Baraka, who was shown biting muscle from the forearm of an opponent during the game’s reveal.

Everyone gets their pound of flesh!