The Gamer's Quarter

[dhex]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/60/22

this was pretty interesting, though "$500 bucks worth of stuff" is an obvious miscalculation. unless some of this stuff is incredibly valuable and i'm unaware. the msrp from 15 years ago isn't really all that useful in determining value now.

i've never found anything insanely cool at a yard sale regarding games, but i have gotten some great stuff at yard sales. (mostly records)

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/60/3

this was pretty good too. i liked the art.
_________________

[OtakupunkX]

I actually just read this article.

It resonated with me because I do a vast majority of my videogame shopping (if you can call it that) from mom and pop stores, yard sales, and my friends' garages.

[sawtooth]

Mario is Missing for 50 cents! What a bargain!

Yard sales do have a lot of good deals sometimes. I haven't been to one in awhile, though.
_________________

[wourme]

Years ago, my brother used to frequent yard sales, and he'd tell me when they had video games. He once found a pretty nice SNES and Genesis collection (the consoles and a bunch of SNES games). Everything had prices, but I offered $50 for all of it, and they actually found even more things in another box in the garage, so I got a very good deal.

But the best deal I ever got was from a locally-owned video store where I used to buy previously-rented games every so often. One day, a friend and I stopped by and found that the store was locked up in the middle of the day. They opened the door to tell us that they were going out of business and selling everything. They then said that because we were regular customers, we could come in and take first pick of whatever we wanted, which included all NES, SNES, Genesis, and PSX games for $4 each.

I came away with several garbage bags full of games, with the intention of selling enough on eBay to break even. This wasn't hard to do, considering they had just about every NES and SNES game and I knew which ones were worth something. I guess I probably didn't quite break even, considering that a lot of the games I wanted to keep had the highest market value.

It's too bad that I didn't yet know anything about PSX games at the time. (I've always been several years behind on console generations.)--I just grabbed a bunch of random ones that looked interesting.

[highlandcattle]

These days triftstores and carboot/yardsales are my main suppliers for videogames.
I've made some ace deals but also been seduced so many times, that I bought something crappy simply because I didn't want to go home empty handed.

[OtakupunkX]

[highlandcattle]

[OtakupunkX]

[Mr. Mechanical]

My cousin's mom once bought him an Atari 2600 and a box of games for it that she found it a yard sale for super cheap. I can never manage find cool stuff like that myself when I go to a yardsale, unfortunately.

[SuperWes]

[friedchicken]

[ApM]

Tell me you've got a copy of M.U.L.E. you can put into that Atari 8-bit!

Probably my best garage sale find was a small fold-up pump organ for $10. I kind of need to tear it apart, though, since one of the pumps doesn't work (acceptable) and one of the keys is stuck (not acceptable). It's put together mostly with nails, rather than easily-replacable screws, so I've understandably put it off.

I doubt you can get a more uselessly awesome thrift store find than my MSX1-based Yamaha CX5M II/128 music computer. Now if only I had an DX7 FM synth to hook it up to, instead of this useless DX9! Or the will to convert it into an MSX2 and play Metal Gear on it! Then I'd be cookin'.

[GSL]

Haha, I've got a CX5M as well. To be fair, you can still play most MSX1 cart based games on it, both in English and Japanese, as most of the character fonts for games are stored on-cart. There's nothing like Dragon Quest on the MSX to make the NES' Dragon Warrior not look so bad.

If you're pretty good at soldering small things, I had a rudimentary schematic lying around here somewhere for the MSX2 conversion on the CX5M; if you'd like, I can dig it up for you.

[Cryoburner]

[highlandcattle]

[sawtooth]

[J.Goodwin]

The 600/800 was a quality games machine...well, until SEGA showed up with their damned arcade conversions and .... ugh ... R.P.G.z
_________________
Gamertag - FalcomAdol -- Don't Click Here 触手
Playing - Ninety-Nine Nights - Xbox 360

[highlandcattle]

Well today there was a suprise fleamarket in front of the trainstation and this one guy had like twenty nes games lying around. Whilst he was ripping off an african man(asking fifty euros for a reaaally oldskool digital camera), I asked him how much these games cost. He replied three euros a piece (which is like four dollars), while a bit steep I saw that he had a rather mint coditioned Simon's quest. After touching every Game Pak twenty times,I got Rad Gravity (which I remember being recomended to me by someone), SMB3, SMB/duckhunt, Batman and Simon's quest. I left behind a turtles game,Duck tales, another disney game by capcom and double dragon) With my mad haggeling skillz,I got the price down from fifteen to 13 euros. (Score!)

The thing is I do have a NES but I found it a couple of years ago on the street and at the time it really smelled like catpee. (luckly I was drunk when I found it). Later on I found a zappergun for half a euro and a a nes pad for a two euro.

SO now that I finally have some games I head into china town to find me an A/C adaptor. I find one but what do i notice when I get home? The NES doesn't work anymore. tradgedy

[GSL]

It's really funny that almost all of the old Disney licenses developed by Capcom on the NES were absolutely fantastic--Ducktales remains one of my favorite NES titles to this day. Contrast this with the present day, where games based on licensed properties spell doom for the title 98.381% of the time.

[highlandcattle]

[OtakupunkX]

Wasn't there some kind of Disneyland RPG made by Capcom for the NES? I remember playing one when I was going through some ROMs a friend burned for me a few months ago.

[GSL]

I'm not sure about an RPG, but there was this really strange game where you were some generic character playing through the different theme areas in Disneyland to... I don't know, save Walt's cryogenically frozen body or something. Most of the levels were sidescrolling, platforming affiars (like most early Capcom), but the whole thing was pretty solid from what I remember. Can't for the life of me remember the name of the game, though. Adventures in the Magic Kingdom or something?

[OtakupunkX]

I'm about 101% sure the game had Magic Kingdom in the title. Next time I have a chance to go through my NES roms I'll look for it. I've been busy with work and school so I haven't gotten to play on my home computer lately (and I just updated all my MAME stuff too).

[GSL]

I'm pretty sure you're right. I did a cursory scan of eBay and couldn't find anything likely to be the title. Now this is really going to bug me, not remembering the name. I just remember the Pirates of the Carribbean and Haunted Mansion levels being quite fun in that 8-bit sidescrolling-platformer sort of way, with the later retrospectively reminding me of a few areas of Symphony of the Night.

[ApM]

C'mon, man, Google!

You can see how you might get the impression that it's an RPG.

[GSL]

What, by virtue of having an Overworld™? :P Going from that shot, yeah, it can look pretty RPG-ish (and what the hell is up with the main character? He looks like someone trying to cosplay an Australian when their only impression of Australians has been taken from Crocodile Dundee) but that whole top-down world only serves to connect the more typical Capcom side-scrolling levels. Think of the map screen in Zelda II: The Adventure of Link.

Looking back at the screenshots, it seems like some sort of Ghosts 'N Goblins/Spy Hunter love child, with a bit of WTF thrown in for good measure, like the Space Mountain stage, which is essentially just a rhythm game of being able to press controller directions as fast as possible after they're shown on screen.

[ApM]