Back in 2002, when I was in college, I was walking down the street from one of my classes, and a friend randomly walked up to me and handed me a video game. It had a shiny box, so I accepted it, but for whatever reason did not even try playing until recently. The game was Age of Mythology, and as I found out in the last few weeks, it is awesome. It's so much fun, that I want to recommend it to all of my friends. And there's where the problem lies. As far as I can tell, you simply can't buy it anymore. I have looked at all of the major online retailers, but all of them either say temporarily out of stock or unavailable. It's not like age of mythology is some rare game that you have to look especially hard for -- it won several awards in 2002 including "game of the year". And now it's just gone.

Earlier this year I had the same problem with We Love Katamari. After trying to buy it from six or seven places that claimed they had it -- each time it turned out they had miscounted their inventory -- Amazon got a new shipment and I managed to snag a copy before it went out of stock again. Once again, this isn't some obscure PlayStation RPG, this is a recent and well-received game.

So what's the deal? Will this trend continue? Am I going to have to purchase every game that I think I might want to play in the future? You would think that digital distribution would solve this problem, and maybe it will eventually, but right now I just want to give somebody some dollars in exchange for a couple plastic discs. Is that too much to ask?

(This entry voice-recognized, courtesy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Apologies for any weird wordos.)