Insert more coins in my wallet

Gamers everywhere this summer faced a challenge harder than trying to beat “Dark Souls” without swearing: keeping their money. 

First, there was the annual Steam Summer Sale in July. If you missed the sale or are a gamer of the console persuasion, you are both lucky and unlucky.

For those unfamiliar, Steam is the largest digital distributor of PC games. Several times a year it has a sale that makes Black Friday look like a rip-off. 

This sale was no exception. Every day, a different set of games went on sale, with discounts upward of 75 percent as the norm.

Countless titles could be purchased for the price of a fast-food cheeseburger. Even blockbusters such as “Skyrim” and “Arkham City” saw markdowns of 50 and 66 percent, respectively. 

For 11 excruciating and glorious days, gamers woke to find new sales threatening to drain their bank accounts.

Those gamers with extreme self-control or zero credit got by unscathed, but the rest of us ended the week like Tiny Tim: destitute, but happy.

As if that wasn’t enough, a new console called OUYA, pronounced ooh-yah, exploded onto the gaming scene via Kickstarter that week.

The OUYA is a small, white box running Android and powered by a quad-core Tegra 3 processor. Its designers plan to attract developers with a familiar platform and free software development kit.

To seduce gamers, all games on the OUYA will be free to play or free to try. 

The kicker? It costs $99. How is an avid gamer to resist a hot, new console that has the potential to tap a new sector of crowd-sourced creativity?

I don’t know, and apparently neither do more than 60,000 newly poor souls who were excited enough about OUYA to buy it eight months before its release. 

There were plenty more financial perils along the way. There was the Oculus Rift, a promising 3-D virtual reality headset, which garnered rave reviews from the likes of gaming forefather John Carmack.

The “Battlefield 3” premium service racked up 800,000 sales in its first two weeks.  Throw in pre-orders for a tidal wave of hotly anticipated sequels, including “Guild Wars 2,” “Halo 4,” “Call of Duty: Black Ops II,” “Assassin’s Creed III,” “Borderlands 2,” “Darksiders II” and “BioShock Infinite,” and I consider myself lucky to have returned to school without declaring bankruptcy.

I plan to celebrate with ramen. Lots and lots of ramen.