Last week I was in a thrift store while on vacation in Chicago and I picked up an original NES console for $5, plus 2 controllers and the orange light gun for $1 a pop. The console came with a non-working power adapter (luckily i had a spare) and had a copy of The Little Mermaid inside. Now granted I'm a college graduate, age 22, and (shh...) i still played that game for at least half an hour. Don't tell my girlfriend, she'll make fun of me.
I also got a Genesis game genie and NBA Live 98 for $2; and (this made me happy) Resident Evil 2 for N64 for $1.

Now, this wasn't a find from recently, but i've never posted before so i figured i'd put it up. Last year i got a lot of atari games off some obscure offering-for-sale site for $20 or so. With this lot was something like 15 Atari games, 2 near-perfect condition original 2600 controllers and the keypad controller, nearly all the instruction manuals (w00t! - including the Yars' Revenge comic book - brings back memories of playing that when i was 5 or 6).

There were also these weird little Amiga Power-Stick controllers for the 2600 (listed in the rarity guide incorrectly as "PowerStik"):

(click for larger versions)


for scale purposes, side-by-side with the original controller and in my (rather large and bony) hand:





Oddly enough, they're not too bad to play on (at least compared to using the original atari joysticks, which aside from looking cool were terrible control devices, or to going the "ghetto route" and just plugging original Genesis controllers - which have a terrible d-pad). I'd never seen these before, and supposedly they're pretty uncommon - they alone justified the $20 for the lot.