Tuition and university... explaining the price

Sorry it's been a couple of weeks without a post - I'm not disappearing again, I just started a new school. I didn't have to move, fortunately, because my new campus is close enough to my old that I can keep my apartment. Which is amazing. Because moving is a bitch. I haven't decided which I hate more: packing or unpacking.

Anyway, my old university had a very good reputation and was relatively cheap. My new school has about the same reputation, but is ten times the price in tuition. I was wondering what explains the massive price gap. Like I said, it's not simply reputation, because both universities are about the same on that scale. I thought maybe it was the level of faculty? But no, again, about equal on that scale. So I looked into equipment and tech... labs and that sort of thing. Maybe the new school is more modern, better equipped for science kinds of things? Nope, not that either.

So it was a big mystery until I went to class for the first time. It's the campus. My old university was bland, plain, downright ugly in areas. It's a city school, so I never thought much about it. But the new campus is ridiculous. It's like a forested paradise. So that's my explanation. Ten times the cost, because the grounds are so much nicer.

And you know what? I might be ok with that.

More school - and an old game

So, apropos of my last blog, my new school offers textbook rentals. Great, thought I, this way I can save tons of cash! Only as it turns out, the rental costs almost the same as actually buying the book. Like 85-90% percent of the cost. Now, you might say that any savings are good, but not if you think about value. If I buy the book, I'm paying 10-15 dollars more, but I actually OWN the book. You can keep these things forever, or even sell them on Ebay or Amazon, and get at least half price back. Renting it, paying nearly the full amount, and getting no lasting value? Makes no effing sense.

Anyway, rant over. No comic today, because I have youtube links instead. Remember Mario is Missing? That game was awesome. Education entertainment. Edutainment. I learned all about like, Roman history when I played it. For those of you who don't know it, it was an old game from the early nineties. Mario has been captured, so you play as Luigi, travelling to different places in the world via magic portals in Bowser's castle. You'd have to wander around these cities collecting clues as to your location, and when you figure it out, you could return and confront a koopa on every floor, eventually getting access to Bowser and rescuing Mario.

Anyway, I looked it up for the sake of nostalgia. Apparently, there were some huge differences between the computer release, which I had, and the far more popular SNES release. It's the same game, as far as I can tell, but it looks totally different. Was it remade when it was ported, or what? Just thought that was kind of neat. Check out the comparison below. And check out the game! It's awesome.

CD-Rom version:


SNES version: