Share your pickup loot and finds

[SparTonberry]

I've bought hundreds of games off ebay and I only got scammed a couple times. When I do, I just report them and ebay gives a refund.
If it's risk of credit card reveal, that is the advantage of Paypal being the standard payment method. The seller doesn't get my card details.
(the only time I ever lost money on a game purchase was when I bought a Game Boy game off some some seller's own shopping site that used Google Checkout for payments. Found out Google, rather famously, had no customer service to report to for their service being used for fraud. Luckily I was only out like $10, for the lesson "don't use Google Checkout anymore.")

I just don't take a big risk on new sellers for valuable merchandise.
I'd also watch for HK/China/Russia sellers, places where bootlegs are known to be common.

[Steve W]

I'd also watch for HK/China/Russia sellers, places where bootlegs are known to be common.

That's a shame, considering Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore had releases of Japanese games translated into English just for the Asian market. I've got a few for the PS4, Kamen Rider Climax Fighters, Girls Und Panzer Tank Battle, and Summer Lesson: Hikari Miyamoto. Odd games that generally don't make it Stateside but still get a multi language physical release in places like Malaysia. I've got a PS3 game called The Last Guy that's the Japanese version that only cost something like $25 off Amazon. In Malaysia they had the only other physical release that was translated into Chinese and English and that goes for more than $250 on eBay. A game called Rain for the PS3 can be bought for a somewhat reasonable price in Japanese but for the translated version it goes for over $500. Asia has the only English versions of really good, weird stuff that companies don't think have an appeal to US buyers.

[Steve W]

So I bought another eBay gift card the other day, and... the last three digits in the code is missing. I pulled the scratch-off sticker off the card, and was horrified to see there were no numbers at the end of the code, I thought that I'd accidentally peeled them off. So I put the sticker back on and scratched it off to see if I could see the numbers, but there weren't any. I honestly don't know what to do. I talked about how I only ever heard about people getting cheated on eBay, now eBay itself has just screwed me with a misprinted card. I still have the receipt, I don't know if I should report it to eBay to see if they can recover the code.

[Niku-Sama]

you should be able to return that, also dont peel off scratch off covers, a lot of companies still use anti tampering methods to keep shitty people from returning them claiming them as unused.
This is something i've experienced first hand working in cell phone sales. If its not been redeemed and its a decently large corporate company their return process should be able to see if its been used or not

As far as finds, i did some black friday shopping. there was jack shit this year. I remember last year Mario Kart went on sale along with joycons and controllers. This year none of it went on sale. there were no bins of movies and/or games and even the little stuff they bring out around the holidays was missing. The retail sector was complaining in the news about how they expect the holiday shopping to be way down, well when you dont really put any thing on sale really what do you expect? they did it to them selves.
I know a lot of people were hoping to get a few bucks off of their holiday shopping with the recent inflation issues but i guess not.

I usually go black friday to get stuff for around the house that i need to replace or dont have. since i am on my own this year for the first time in over a decade i was really hoping to get that stuff.

in the end i really only got a vacuum... and that really sucks

[Steve W]

I can't return the card to the store I bought it from, I guess I have to go through eBay. If they can just read the last numbers off the barcode on the back that would be fine.

A few days ago I bought Dangerous Driving for the PS4, and today I bought Dungeons and later I bought a European version of Unravel both for the PS4. One Half Price Books had a 2021 Apple TV - I don't even watch TV so I don't need it for that, but another location had an Apple TV compatible controller, and it makes me want to research what kind of games can be played on one. I might go back and buy it if there's a decent amount of stuff to do with it.

[Steve W]

I went to the Half Price Books Dallas headquarters and picked up Astebreed, sealed, for the PS4. That place always seems to have good uncommon games in it.

[Steve W]

I popped out today and went to my new favorite game store. Picked up Blue Reflection for the PS4 - I have the second game, but started thinking I should get the first game if there's stuff I need to get up to speed with before getting into the second title, which is what I found when trying to play Dusk Diver 2. And creeping ever so slowly to the 700 game mark for the PS3, Gundam Extreme Versus: Full Boost. I swear, every time I think I must have collected all the Gundam games for the PS3 I come across another one. There must be over a dozen. I don't even care about Gundam, never saw any of the anime, but I love giant robots kicking ass. And this one is a mech arena fighter in the style of Virtual On. So I'm onboard.