Games are a fairly pricey hobby - maybe not as pricey as Warhammer, or collecting vintage cars, but not cheap like, say, walking in the woods (grab a decent thermos and some wellies, and you're set). Between the growing number of Netflix-style subscriptions and $70 price tags for the latest blockbusters, there's a fair bit to pay for. The sense of getting a raw deal is compounded by the fact that so many big games launch buggy on release, making that $70 price tag for a Redfall or The Last of Us PC port almost insulting.

Our advice? Stop preordering games! Looking to the future though, if all games came with a Day One trial, then the world would be a better place.

All this got us thinking though: which game or accessory or console represented the biggest waste of money in your gaming life? The DualShockers teams share their tales of wasteful woe.

Rob Zak - Lead Features Editor

PS Move (with all the crap)

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I've always been a bit of a bargain hunter, but when the Playstation Move launched in 2010, all my caution and discernment sensors short-circuited. For some inexplicable reason, I just had to own Sony's answer to the Wiimote the day it came out.

I bought the full PS Move bundle (navigation controller, wand, camera) for about $100, along with one god-awful fighting game for it (imaginatively called The Fight, as I recall). I then basically neglected the whole thing for about a year until the $50 Sharpshooter attachment came out alongside Killzone 3. What was meant to be the Move's great redemption fizzled out after about a week, when I realised that constantly having to point a two-handed gun at the screen in order for my character not to look at the ground was a pain in the ass.

In fairness, I had some fun picking the PS Move up a few months ago to play House of the Dead 2 on PS3, but I'm not sure that quite amounts to $150 of fun.

ALSO READ: Why Dark Souls 2 Is Still Worth Playing

Chris Harding - Multimedia Editormario strikers

Mario Strikers: Battle League Football

I'm a soft touch when it comes to my son, Charlie, so whenever he asks me for a new game on his Nintendo Switch, I usually end up caving in and buying it for him. He's seven and he has boney little fists. That's not a fight I want to get involved in, so when he asked me for Mario Strikers: Battle League Football for the Nintendo Switch, I ponied up the PayPal pennies (money doesn't count if it's digital, right?) and did my Daddy duty. To be honest, this was the easiest purchase - I like a bit of football (soccer for you wrong'uns) and thought it might be a decent game to play two-player with the boy. I've never been so wrong about a video game purchase.

The kid has played it a total of two times, once by himself, and once with me, and even I had to concede that it's just not a great game. That's €60 I won't see again, and a lesson learned: boney beatings by a little boy will only hurt for a short time, but seeing the icon for a game that has basically remained untouched will hurt for months. My trust in Mario has been seriously damaged...

RELATED: 10 Best Mario Sports Games, Ranked

Matthew Schomer - News/Features Editor

Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest

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I've always been a sucker for quirky game mechanics. One of my favorite childhood games was a little Super Nintendo platformer called E.V.O.: Search for Eden, a game that started you off as a pathetic li'l fishy in a time before earth had land. As you killed and devoured other animals, you gained XP that you could spend on a wide list of better jaws, scales, dorsal fins, and even attachments like that little angler fish light bulb thingy coming out of their foreheads, all of which altered the gameplay experience in fun ways. The graphics were a bit cartoony, but about as realistic as the SNES could get, and the freedom in your evolution is something I've never found an equivalent for.

It was my fault, really, when a couple console generations later, I stumbled across Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest for the Gamecube. It cost $50 at the time (which adjusted for inflation today comes to $84 - ouch). While the box never mentioned E.V.O., the description seemed pretty similar—kill animals, eat them, grow new appendages to help you move and fight. The box art looked kind of blocky, but given the name, that seemed to be a stylistic choice. And since we weren't confined to the 16-bit era anymore, my naive young mind decided that this was E.V.O. in 3D, baby!

At least, that's what I tried to convince myself for the half-hour that I played it. Then I earned enough XP for my first evolution and made the startling transition from 'cube with a face,' to 'cube with a face and a weird, flat square just sort of awkwardly flapping off the side of it.' In retrospect, it wasn't Cubivore's fault; I was looking for a spiritual successor to something I'd loved in the past, and I was trying to make Cubivore something it wasn't meant to be (that's great relationship advice, by the way. Don't do that).

Jack Coleman - Lead News Editor

Xbox Kinect

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These days, I'm the last person to buy into technological trends. I'm yet put on a VR headset, never mind whatever augmented reality is. Things are different when you're a kid though, right? Much like Robert's experience with the PS Move, I was conned by Xbox's answer to the Wii, the Kinect. I don't even like motion controls, but it was the new shiny thing and I just had to have it. So, my family got the Kinect for $150, complete with hit games like Kinect Sports and Kinect Adventures! Well, that pricey bit of hardware probably saw about five uses during its lifetime.

While the Wii was conceived with motion controls in mind, and Nintendo had a lot of high-profile first-party titles for it, the Kinect didn't have such advantages. Developers were not interested in adapting their games for the Kinect, leading to a situation where the only noteworthy game on the platform is probably The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. To Microsoft's credit, they really tried to make it work, only shelving production of the Kinect in 2017, but we shelved it within about a week of its release.

NEXT: 10 Best Action-RPGs, Ranked