Monday, July 23, 2007

Battle of the hundred dollar robots or BIG FAT ROBOT CHALLENGE



Once when I was in a shady used car salesam's office I saw a poster on the wall with some old Cadillac looking car from the 40's and the phrase "Quality is remembered long after price is forgotten". Well I've been thinking about that a lot lately as I've been both buying and selling individual toy robots for over $100 each. Spending more than 99 dollars on any single toy robot is not only insane, it's fuckin' awesome. Nothing says you've arrived and you're a big boy now more than when you plunk down $250 bucks on some big ass super shiny flashy lights toy robot and believe me, if I'm spending over $100 on a roboplastico it better be big or shiny or have flashing lights. But how do I gauge whether I'm getting my money's worth? Is it possible to quantify the value of a roboplastico?

Now for the longest time I've admired how there's an easy to measure gauge for video games when it comes to estimating bang for the buck. You simply take the cost of the game and divde it by the hours of entertainment you got out of the game. So let's say a game that I bought for 60 bucks entertained me for 6 hours. That's 10 dollars an hour I paid. Then you take this number and compare it to the gold standard of entertainment, the cost of a movie ticket for a good movie. Typically I pay $8.25 for a movie and they last around 2 hours, giving me a $4.12 cost-to-entertainment ratio. If my game purchase comes in or under that, then the game was worth the money. In the previous example, the $10 an hour game would be indicative of a huge waste of money. Essentially the more you play, the more bang for the buck. Tetris is the all time cost-to-entertainment champion at my house because I bought that for ten bucks and it's been entertaining me for 15 years.

But what about the roboplasticos? How do you gauge whether or not you got your fun out of a hundred dollar plus robot? All they're going to do in my house is sit on a shelf looking fantastic. But how do you discriminate whether a robot is performing at a $200 level of fantastic and a $100 level of fantastic? I think I have it figured out. What I am doing is weighing each robot I paid over $100 for and dividing the cost by that. This really tells me nothing more than how much plastic costs per pound, but I figure these more expensive robots are going to be more heavy per dollar spent than your average $10 look-what-I-found-at-WalMart robot toy. Once I get the weight to money ratio, I'll compare that to the market price of various metals on the world markets and the robot closest to the gold standard is the most fantastic-est ultimate number one valuable robot!
To start off with a bang, for today's weigh-off I will compare Japanese Fortress Maximus to World's Smallest Hot Rodimus. I paid $800 for Fort Max and $30 for Hot Rodimus. Let's go to the scales!

I think Fort Max is going to be the only one I weigh on a scale meant for humans. He comes in at 8.6 pounds, and $800 / 137.6 ounces = $5 an ounce. This makes Japanese Fort Max slightly more valuable than copper. Not really that impressive for the largest Transformer ever made.
Next up is World's Smallest Hot Rodimus. He's only 2 inches tall and compared to the mighty 2 foot tall Fort Max, that's miniscule. But he makes up for it in sheer robot balls. Hot Rodimus weighs 2 tenths of an ounce! And $30 / .2 ounces = $150 an ounce. This makes World's Smallest Hot Rodimus today's winner! He's currently more valuable than Uranium!

Tune in next time when Hot Rodimus takes on a new challenger for the title of ULTIMATE NUMBER ONE VALUABLE ROBOT!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's frickin' hilarious. I did something kind of similar once. I made a list of every movie I ever saw, then calculated the amount of time it took to watch them all (including repeat viewings) and compared it to the relative time I've been around. By the time I was done with that math problem I forgot why I did it to begin with though.

Evil King Macrocranios said...

I'll bet that started with you wondering how much of your life you spent watching Monster Squad.

 

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