Share your pickup loot and finds

[ncman071]

been a while since my last post...but most recently picked up a nice copy of Ogre Battle 64 with the manual for $75 at a local thrift location. game with manual goes for about double that amt so pretty happy with that....i may keep it or possibly sell it cause i have been thinking about getting some games together to trade or sell on ebay to get my dream system..NEO GEO AES. probably wont ever happen...but we'll see. also got several games off ebay over the last couple weeks....On Wii U...Mario Kart 8, Sonic all star racing, zombi u...on ps3...transformers fall of cybertron..double switch on the sega cd..complete..on orginal xbox...vietcong and urban chaos...super mario wonder on switch..was able to use my ebay "spendable funds" to purchase these games using funds from stuff i've sold recently....

[ncman071]

went to gamestop today...found several games that were 50 to 75% off...Gollum on xbox series x, tennis world tour...switch...friday the 13th...xbox series x, star ocean divine force ps4....all for $55 with tax

[Steve W]

Over the past week of vacation time I went to my favorite game store and bought Dusk Diver 2 Launch Edition and Toki Tori 2+. I tried playing Dusk Diver 2 but found it too difficult, as if I was missing something by never having played the first one, so I gave up out of frustration and ordered the first game off Amazon. And at a Half Price Books yesterday, I picked up Hover.

This morning I woke up early and went to a Japanese flea market. It was in the parking lot of a Japanese supermarket on the far side of Dallas. I was hoping I'd find games, but it was mostly kid's books and toys. I don't know how often they do flea markets there, I think it might be a couple times a year, I'll have to keep looking for it. I'd love to see boxes of games at one of these.

[Steve W]

I've gone and done it, I finally had to start buying off eBay for PS3 games. I've always avoided eBay since I've heard nothing but sob stories from people who have been scammed over the years, to the point where that's all I know about eBay at all. I bought a gift card for it and used it that way, trying to mitigate risk.

Obut Petanque 1 and 2 are French releases, number 2 having come out near the end of the PS3's life and shot up in price around lockdown because of its scarcity. Since then it's come down to sane levels, mostly because there aren't a whole lot of people who are interested in virtual lawn bowling simulations. The thing is, my sister happens to love lawn bowling but could never get her kids interested in it, so when she visits for Christmas we can attempt to play it.

I've got Tower of Guns for the PS4, but I wasn't aware there was a European release for the PS3. So I ordered it. Weird thing is, the Obut Pétanque were part of a two-pack ordered from France and Tower of Guns came from the UK, they showed up on the same day. I ordered them something like a month ago from different places, it's weird they'd show up at the exact same time.

[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.

[celerystalker]

I have mostly been buying Christmas presents, but I did grab myself Eiyuuden Chronicle Rising and Tohou Remlia or whatever it's called on Switch for myself at the playasia Black Friday sale. They just arrived yesterday, so I have no idea if they're fun yet.

[Steve W]

I've ordered a couple games off Amazon this week, Battle Axe and Astronite for the PS4. And then I went to a Half Price Books this afternoon and found a load of PC Engine Super CD games like Cosmic Fantasy 1, 2, and 3 along with Record of Lodoss War. I picked up Mamono Hunter Yōko because I had no idea what it was, It turns out it's a digital comic. I went to a GameXchange later and picked up Jo Jo's Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven for the PS4, yet another game that came out on the PS3 in Japan only but was finally translated and published for the PS4.

[YoshiM]

There are times I should never look at eBay....

A couple weeks ago I just happened to look at Tandy Color Computer 3's as I started getting into a retro-computer kick thanks to the Mac 512K pickup. One came across with a "make an offer" price that was lower than these things go for that included the box and two complete games: "Castle of Tharoggad" (sequel to "Dungeons of Daggorath") and "Downland". It also had a tape, cassette cable and a couple books of BASIC programs. Kicker: it was untested and it was a new seller.

So I asked the person if they could plug the computer into an outlet and just turn it on. If it made a click noise, that would be a good sign that it worked. Thankfully the seller accommodated me and did so. Based on that I crossed my fingers and gave a lower offer which they accepted. The shipping was more than I wanted to pay but total it was still WAY lower than what a package like this would go for. And when I got this sucker home, I hooked it up to the VCR and it worked just fine and so did the cartridges!

When I did some Christmas shopping with my daughter, I saw "Hogwart's Legacy" for Switch go for almost half off the MSRP at Wal-Mart. They only had one copy left and my daughter is a HUGE Potter-head right now (especially for Draco Malfoy who she has a character-crush on). Thankfully some of my step-kids are also fans (though that has waned over the years) so I could claim that it was a "gift for all" when really this is going to her.

[celerystalker]

I pre-ordered Kraut Buster so long ago I had a different career and 2 less kids who are now 4 and 5. It finally showed up today. Good lord.

[Niku-Sama]

I pre-ordered Kraut Buster so long ago I had a different career and 2 less kids who are now 4 and 5. It finally showed up today. Good lord.

i had no idea any one was still making AES games

[Steve W]

I ended up going into a GameStop yesterday, and I was amazed by how many games have a "this is just like an old game that you loved, but the company that made it doesn't feel like doing anything with that property nowadays" vibe. For example, I picked up Clive 'N' Wrench (I bought a used copy, but they couldn't find a used copy so they gave me a new sealed copy instead). I also picked up Gundam Versus since I keep buying Gundam games for some bizarre reason. And Dungeon of the Endless looked cool.

[Steve W]

I went to the Dallas headquarters of Half Price Books and picked up a sealed copy of Paper Beast, and I broke down and bought another sealed game called Breach & Clear: Dead Line, both for the PS4.

[celerystalker]

Yeah Niko-sama, there's a weirdly active indie scene still. Bitmap Bureau did Xeno Crisis and Final Vendetta (but they're also on other consoles), Neo XYX came out a couple of years ago as the first tate mode vertical shooter, Hypernoid came out as an Arkanoid clone, a port of that crap puzzle game Super Bubble Pop, and a new run and gun called called Cyborg Force is up for pre-order.

Kraut Buster is pretty fun. It's very much a Metal Slug clone. Controls great, difficulty is pretty well-balanced, and the graphics are really nice with loads of cool death animations. There are some alternate stages to play for replay, a good weapon variety, and 8-way shooting unlike Metal Slug. It does not have as many cool vehicles. The stages a biton the long side, and it's only like 5 stages for a playthrough. It would habe been more fun to me with more, shorter stages, but maybe that's just a personal preference. I'll do a full write up of it soon, but I just finshed off my (stupid) Kid Klown collection this week, and am not sure what I want to blabber on about first. I have a rather silly affection for a few franchises like that, and may write up a couple of series retrospectives to see if I can drum up some conversation.

[SparTonberry]

I believe LordBBH has done a big rant on the anti-dumping of homebrew/aftermarket NeoGeo carts and how that ultimately hurts the games' availability.
Having them limited to just a small physical print run ensures few will ever play the games.
Not too many are going to pay hundreds of dollars for a single video game, but then even among that small group willing to pay the asking price, only a hundred copies available?
I feel like the above game was one he specifically named.
Should at least get them digitally released or something so that all the effort gone into making the games isn't lost on something only a hundred people being able to play it.