Besieged with Choices

"There was a poem
in ancient Rome
about a dog
who found two bones
he picked the one
he licked the other
he went in circles
he dropped dead!"

Freedom of Choice, DEVO

Can't decide! Brain aneurysm!
(image from IGN)
(also, Psyduck looks less like a Pokemon here
and more like a bit character from a Munch
painting.)

People like choice, but they hate deciding between two equally appealing choices. That's the dilemma I'm currently facing with the eShop New Year's sale, which offers a whole lot of appealing choices and only so much money to stretch between them. Do I get Clubhouse Games, packed with over fifty different diversions? None of these insubstantial games would be especially tempting on their own, but when you pack them all together in one package and cut the price to the lowest it's ever been, you start to take it a lot more seriously.

Perhaps I should go one step further and get SmileBASIC, a programming language which lets you download hundreds of games or even create your own. The promise of infinite gameplay for a paltry seventeen dollars is hard to ignore, but then you realize that a programming language also demands an investment of your time... time to download the fruit of others' labors, and time needed to learn that specific dialect of BASIC. Let's not forget that without a keyboard, typing in those programs is going to take a whole lot longer on the Switch than it would a personal computer.

No no, that's starting to sound more like work than play. Maybe I should snap up some of the games in the Sega Ages collection, currently being sold at healthy discounts. Maybe recently released indie titles like A Short Hike and CrossCode (a dual stick shooter/RPG mash-up?) would be a better investment. Then again, I could always set my sights a little higher and buy one of the big budget games  on sale, like Ghostbusters, or Crysis, or Assassin's Creed IV, or Borderlands: The Handsome Collection. I've got to assume that Borderlands 2 would be a much better experience on the Switch than it was the Vita, which could barely keep up with its demands.

Perhaps I should just save what money I got from the stimulus and put it into the computer I bought at a thrift store a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, that comes with its own tough choices... should I stick with the small form factor case the system came in, saving space but also sacrificing expandability? Or should I risk transplanting it into the more spacious case I purchased at an estate sale last year? There'd be plenty of room for a video card in there, but it's also plenty big and bulky.

I can drag my feet on the computer for a while, but with the New Year's sale ending on January 21st, I've got a whole lot of choices on the Switch and not much time or money to make them.