Retro Game Hunt #3 (previously Flea Market Finds)

Happy Holidays everyone – hope you all acquired some excellent additions to your gaming collections this year. And if you didn’t, oh well, there’s always next year, or better yet, get off your ass and get them yourself. But enough pleasantries, let’s get down to business.

What I love most about holidays, are all the new piles of crap that are making there way into thrift stores, and this includes video games. This is probably one of the better times of the year to make some good finds, especially in terms of old school games. This past week, I managed to snag a few good ones without really putting much of a dent into my wallet.

My first was at one of the nearby Goodwill locations. First let me say something about Goodwill which I’ll probably bring up numerous times in the future. I don’t really like this place, and their game selection is usually over priced garbage at best. But this is mostly in terms of their newer games. When you find the old ones, they don’t normally know how to price them, and you’ll usually find old playstation games lumped together with regular CD’s, and you’ll find some nintnedo games scattered amongst other product in the store.

This particular location happened to have some great condition copies of PERFECT DARK and GOLDENEYE for N64. Now if you know anything about N64 and first person shooters, these are the two games you NEED to have to complete your system. Snagged these both up for $2 a piece.

God damn you Odd Job – cheap bastard.

Later on in the week, I browsed a few more Goodwill and Salvation army locations, and came up pretty much empty handed. The only thing I managed to pick up was Crash Bandicoot 2 : Cortex Strikes Back for a whopping $2. Good game, but nothing to brag about.

Once again – my better retro finds come from UNIQUE THRIFT (which keeps on impressing me). There I managed to get a copy of Crash Bandicoot Warped, black label collectors edition, which is the rarer version of this game. Not bad for another $2 ($2 seems to be the magic VG price integer doesn’t it?)

My last trip to unique, I was able to snag two of their dollar plastic baggies, filled with 3 original Game Boy games each. While most of them were pretty much crap, the one good grab was one of my favorites growing up as a kid. TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES : FALL OF THE FOOT CLAN. I used to play this game obsessively when I took drives down to Florida from New York with my family.

All together this week – spent a whopping $8 on some older games, while not being worth anything crazy, still make great additions to my newly growing game collection.

I can only hope that one day, a CIB earthbound greets me. HA! I can dream.

On a side note – if you’ve read through this whole post, I’m hoping to complete my first VG Graphical poster this weekend. Decided to start the whole series with Mario Bros, and by some strange act of fate, I’m actually being commissioned for it. So hopefully you will all will like it as you did my Metroid piece (which I am redoing after mario)

Game on everyone.

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Retro Game Hunt #2 : Video Game Flea Market Finds

It’s been a hectic week, and Christmas is only a few days away, so I haven’t had the chance to update everyone with my pick ups from the last weekend at the local thrift stores. Hell, I haven’t even started Christmas shopping yet. Oh well – games are more important aren’t they? Who needs Christmas – bah humbug.

Let’s start off by saying that this past Sunday was the last day of the Bellmore flea market until the spring. I had dragged my wife and friend Kevin along with me, hoping to get some last minute grabs, but unfortunately most of the vendors that usually sold video games were not around. The only thing I came away with was 3 NES games -

Super Mario Bros / Duck Hunt
Bases Loaded
Baseball

(just look at those graphics – who needs MLB the show)

I purchased these for 3 for $5, which isn’t bad and I needed to add the two baseball games to my NES collection anyway. As for the mario, it’s just another double that I’ll end up selling or giving away. I’m just looking forward to next spring so I can buy out the flea market of every retro game they own.

I hit up the local goodwill, and as usual, it was devoid of video games. Look’s like I am going to be stuck just picking up games from shopgoodwill.com. But I’ll continue to check them out, since the goodwill by me don’t participate in those auctions.

Now let’s get to the juicy little morsels I picked up from my new favorite thrift store – UNIQUE THRIFT. For those of you who don’t have UNIQUE stores by you – sucks for you. These stores are amazing, and you can find yourself picking up some pretty unique games.

My first visit at the Westbury UNIQUE, I managed to pick up two genesis controllers and a genesis gun from the misc. electronics rack in the back of the store. I grabbed these for a whopping $3. But my true find came when I was browsing the CD’s as I was waiting to pay. Staring at me straight in the face was THOUSAND ARMS for PS. So I immediately picked it up, for $1.50. Knowing my luck, it’s probably a bootleg, but I didn’t care lol. I’ll take the risk.

(classic PS RPG – can’t get any better than this)

Now my last pit stop to the thirft stores this weekend ended up being a massive collection builder. My wife came with me to the second UNIQUE store in Levittown, and as we sifted through the plasitc baggies near the DVD’s we made a huge discovery. Literally 30+ atari games, just hanging around waiting to be picked up. So of course, I grabbed them all and dumped them on the register, and was greeted with odd stares from the sales clerk. 32 atari games and 3 genesis games (nothing worth mentioning or insanely rare)- for $16.

But, the find of the weekend, is all thanks to my wife. I’m telling you, this woman has eyes like an eagle. She can spot rare video games from a mile away. We did one last minute scout of the WESTBURY Unique as my friend wanted to tag along, but we weren’t finding anything. I mean I just cleaned out the store the other day. But the mrs. comes up to us, holding a little plastic bag containing two black carts. I didn’t know what they were at first, but after closer inspection they had turned out to be Intellivision games. One was golf, meh no big deal. But the second was a huge find -

BODY SLAM SUPER PRO WRESTLING FOR INTELLIVISION!!!

(just look at that shit!)

This is an insanely rare find to come out of a thrift store, and this bad boy is valued at around $50 – $75 for just the cart on EBAY. I bought it for a measely .50 cents.

Grand total spent this past weekend – around $25.

Did I mention I love my wife?

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The Cake IS a lie

The cake is a lie @ Astor Place NYC

photo credited ~ Brian Devine

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