It has been some time since I’ve been able to find anything even remotely interesting at a thrift store, but that all changed the other day. After coming up empty for months, I found a few NES games huddled together in the glass case, and I could’ve sworn they had my name on them!
I found three NES games there: Gauntlet, Gauntlet II, and Shadowgate. Though I was happy to see some retro games in the wild, I was particularly unimpressed with the pricing of each game: $20! I couldn’t believe it. Checking into these games online showed prices ranging anywhere from $10-$20, and the price tag of $20 per game was certainly closer to the high end by far. In the past, the local thrift store has usually leaned toward the lower end of the pricing, especially for cartridge-only items. I luckily had a 25% off coupon or else those games could’ve stayed right where they were for all I cared, but I did end up buying them in the end with the discount. I’m honestly feeling really discouraged about this particular store, as well as others in my area. Over the last year or so, the last few havens of where I felt I could find fairly priced games are starting to get greedy, which means that I’m likely going to stop shopping there sooner than later. How can I continue a collecting blog when I won’t be able to buy games in town anymore?! Bah. Either way, for the time being, here is a photo of the three games!
Gauntlet is the Tengen release, and I don’t have a lot of unofficial NES games save a handful. I’ve heard that there is absolutely no difference between the Tengen version and the official release in terms of gameplay or content – even the cartridge art is identical. Shadowgate and Gauntlet II were in lovely shape and literally look like they’ve never been inserted into an NES. I honestly wonder how people end up dumping things in this condition off at a thrift store in the first place. I wish I could somehow draw people in to give me their games instead of sending them off to these greedy stores!
I answered a classifieds ad recently that was an absolute steal. Someone was selling Soul Blazer for SNES, and though I had a copy of that one already, I bought a second copy to put in the mail for my cousin. I took a photo of mine and his copy together since I barely ever see this game out and about, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever see two copies together again!
The same person put up another ad a few days later for 8 SNES games, and though I had all of them already bit Pilotwings, I couldn’t help myself. There were some absolutely great games in there, and I like to buy up well-priced games to use for trades at swaps. Here’s a photo of all the games I picked up with my very favourite Pusheen mermaid. The guy even threw in an SNES Game Genie. I picked up all these games for $200, which is a very, very excellent deal. The games are:
Donkey Kong Country
Donkey Kong Country 2
Actraiser 2
Pilotwings
Super Metroid
Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island
Secret of Mana
Super Mario RPG
I really lucked out buying these since many of the new-to-me cartridges were in better condition than the copies of the games I had already. Worn/torn labels, sticker goo, un-removable security labels/stickers, etc. are all things I wish a lot of my games didn’t have on them. These labels were in particularly excellent shape! In the photo below, my previous copies are on the left, and the newly purchased copies are on the right. The sun totally interfered with my photo here, but I promise that new Yoshi’s Island is lovelier than old Yoshi’s Island.
I was pretty excited to finally get a different copy of Yoshi’s Island because the copy I bought with my SNES when I was 17 had always been really finicky. It would take a lot of wiggling and praying to get that one working, and wouldn’t you know? The new copy is even worse! I started wondering if this particular game just has issues, but I think it’s just my luck to come across that game for the second time in my life only to have it perform less well than my ill-performing first copy. Ugh. Even with the addition of some extra solder on the PCB contacts to increase the contact area in the console slot didn’t seem to help much. I’m just going to go with the fact that it isn’t meant to be. On the bright side though, I did swap the front covers. That green crayon scrawl is now out of sight! I’ll be excited for spring/summer swap season to roll around so I can see what trades lie on the horizon. Maybe Harvest Moon for SNES? Who can say for sure?!
Lastly, I found another SNES game at a store out of town: Dragon View! It wasn’t a game I had even heard of before glancing upon it in the store, and I hummed and hawed a whole bunch before finally taking it home with me. I’m glad I did because it’s apparently an uncommon game that is pretty good according to some reviews I read. It’s the sequel to the reviled Drakkhen, but Dragon View apparently fixed all the problems that Drakkhen brought to the table and added a whole bunch of new awesome stuff. The opening sequence and title screen both look amazing, and loading up an old save file on the cartridge had me bopping my head along to some awesome-sounding tunes! I’m pretty excited to try this one out and maybe even review it down the road. There doesn’t seem to be too much out there on this particular game.
Well, this might be one of my last posts for a while. Things are looking awfully sparse out there in the game collecting world, and with more and more stores around here getting greedy, I’m not sure how much more luck I’ll be able to have locally in the next few weeks/months. I will try to think up some cool other stuff to post in the meantime though. I love this blog and all you folks out there, so hopefully I can showcase a few things I had hanging around pre-blog, among other things. Stay tuned!
Thanks for reading! I hope you’re all having a wonderful week.
-GG