The act of conning is a mischievous and sly procedure that really finds a way to get under your skin once you realize you yourself have been conned. I know this because I myself was conned. Yes, yes, haha very funny Alex has $40 or so less in his wallet, but how did I get here? Getting scammed in 2020 wasn't one of my goals, but I can always use this as a learning experience.

As a personal task, I've been slowly attempting to acquire games of the past, specifically pokemon, in attempts to catch every single pokemon and transfer then up from Gameboy to DS to 3DS, etc.. So obviously the starting point would be the games released on the Gameboy advance, those being: Fire Red, Leaf Green, Ruby, Sapphire, and Emerald. Like all old things that people want to get their hands on, my main question was "how can I get these games for a reasonable price?" Most of the time this usually comes to eBay or Facebook marketplace and luckily enough, that's exactly where it put me.

Even though these games are almost as old as me I had a really easy time finding copies of these games, which was very weird to me because the games have been out for so long, and yet they seemed untouched in the picture. I guess I should've known sooner that this was the beginning of the end. With my impending fate in hand, I added every Gameboy game to my cart and confirmed my delivery.

Receiving the games felt amazing, the chance that this would be so easy to get ahold of these relics and transport them to current generation consoles. Alas, this would not be the case, and here's why. See, the 3rd generation pokemon games were built for the Gameboy, a system tethered to it's limiting hardware, so ROM's (Read-only memory) are bound to appear for these games decades ahead. With my expectations way too high I beat the games that I spend so much money specifically to transfer. The biggest problem of all arises when I hooked my GameCube and Gameboy up only to find that the Gameboy games I put time and money into refused to connect to transfer pokemon. I'd been gypped, fooled, made an idiot by these cons.

All in all, is this really a bad thing? No, not really. I had a super fun time experiences games I either haven't played in years or haven't played outright. I'm sure I'll eventually find the legitimate copies of the games for a decent price one day, but until that day, I'll think before buying something from a stranger. What went wrong? Well, first all the games alone were super cheap, like $12 each cheap. An authentic copy of something no matter what it is will never be that common or that cheap at the same time. Another place I went wrong was the copy's artwork. It's very hard to tell by itself, but if you compare it to a real copy the flaws start to show themselves. Like I said it's not a big deal but it definitely hurt to see my time wasted. Although this brought up an important anecdote: If it's too good to be true, that's probably because it is.