[Ghoulish Delight]

You can play the games without ever dealing with the scammy bits. 99% of the time they were just ways to earn bonuses or get ahead faster, but not a requirement to play the game, which is how they were able to get away with it. The bonuses were indeed tempting as they really would have made the games easier, but only an idiot would look at 100 pages of "Free trial" offers and be suckered in.

As long as the games were fun, I didn't really give a crap about the scamminess because it was obvious scamminess, the kind I've been successfully avoiding on the internet for a decade+.