SRGilbert

I hear you man, but there is nothing wrong with collecting for the sake of it. I collect a lot of other stuff besides videogames, like old robots and space toys, but I don't "play" with them exactly! I just think they are cool.

I'm on the fence for most of this. It's hard to say that a dealer is ripping someone off if the customer willingly make a purchase. It's not like we are talking about the last loaf of bread in town. I feel most people get ripped off on just about everything compared to myself, but that's because I consider myself a smart shopper. I don't blame the store though, I blame the customer. If a dealer is charging more than I want to pay for a game, and they aren't willing to haggle, I don't buy it, simple. Maybe they will find a customer that wants it more than I did, or one that doesn't have the patience I do. More power to 'em I say. As far as messing with dealers, I don't see the point either. Many of us are pickers because we want to build our collection cheaply, or there are those who do it simply to make a living. I personally am on the collecting side, but have to sell extras to make room and pay expenses of being a collector (gas, whatnot.) On the other hand, I know another guy in town who is a 100% re-seller, and that's how he makes his living. He knows games (mostly Nintendo and later) as well as 80's toys, so that's what he focuses a lot of his time on. He's beat me to a lot of sales over the years, and I him. Sure it's annoying, but that's part of the game too. I know I wouldn't want to do that for a living myself as I'm sure it's crazy work for not a ton of money.

Yeah, and your address and work hours too.....yeah........... I don't know, I guess Smurfs Save the Day with the Kid Vid is probably the most valuable thing I own personally or at least the rarest off hand. Forgot about this thread, and can update it to my CIB copy of Rescue Terra I from VentureVision.

I understand what you mean to a point, but the hunt is part of the fun for me. I think of it in terms of what fishing was to my dad. He went all the time, whenever he could anyway. He even goes ICE FISHING in the UP of Michigan, so you know he's hard core. More often than not, he would catch fish, bring it home, and we'd eat it for dinner. It's not like we couldn't just buy it, but that wasn't the point to him. It also depends on if you resell or not. Hunting in the wild, you can find all kinds of crazy stuff, not just game stuff, that you can resell and more than make up for what ever gas you spent. If you keep everything you buy, then it could end up being a pretty expensive hobby. Usually I can pick up a lot cheap, cherry pick what I want, clean it up, test it and sell what's left for more than I paid. And I know I'm not the only one around here that does that. For the most part, in spite of having a pretty extensive collection, I'd say at worst I'm at the break even point. So in a way, my collection hasn't really cost me anything!

Couple of nice scores this weekend. Yard sales on Saturday turned up the following... Like most weekends, a bunch of cheap CD's, highlight was an Eagles The Best of 2 CD set with bonus DVD for $.20, which blows me away since this is a $20 set. Coleco Telstar Pong clone. Pretty rough, but has the box, all the paperwork (including the Montgomery Wards receipt for $72.68) and the optional Coleco power supply (also in it's little box!) for $3.00 Funny thing, the receipt was dated 8/19/1976, 36 years ago to the day! Nintendo DS Games - Super Mario 64, Warioware Touch, and Brain Age all 100% complete - $3.00 each Little Luigi Mario Kart toy, $.50 Flea Market on Sunday Wife and I always split up to cover more ground at the flea markets and a few minutes after we get there, she calls me to ask if I'm interested in a Sega Saturn set. I'm thinking, meh, not really. I have one in my collection, and another I've been trying to sell already. I told her not to worry about. Well, I should have asked her for more info because I little while later I found what she was talking about. It's a boxed 100% complete Model 1 system, with 3 extra controllers, 6-Player adapter and 12 complete games. Sure, there's a lot of sports titles in there, but waaaaiiiit, what's that? Is that a mint condition copy of Bomberman in there? Oh yeah! Almost all cases are crack free too. I actually didn't see the Bomberman until I got it to the car. Also in the lot were some random Sega Genesis cames, including a loose copy of Zoom! (exclamation point not mine) and he threw in a loose copy of Entombed for the 2600. Price on the lot...... $30.00 Overall, pretty good weekend!

Nice deal, I paid a small fortune for those when they came out, but at least I got $90 for them a few months back to cover the cost of the upgrade to Blu-ray. No complaints though, I love the show too much.

Simon was/is awesome! I have the trio, Simon, Pocket Simon and Super Simon, all CIB and all less than $10 each!

Fry: "Why couldn't she be the other kind of mermaid, with the fish on the top and the lady on the bottom?"

Those were available at different stores. Basically, it's a plug-and-play game inside an inexpensive arcade cab. Fun enough to mess around on, but not something a serious classic gamer would find appealing. Still, pretty cool to have one in the break room, I just hope it can put up with regular use.

Just remember, the bad guys NEVER think they are the bad guys!

Even though I was an Atari guy, I wanted the Adam sooooo bad when I was like 12. Now, I've passed them up on many occasions because I'm just not into the retro computers and don't want to dedicate the space to it.

So far, this year has been really weak. Now, I know that if you search through my posts in this thread, I'll say that over and over, and then I find something cool. That said, it's still been a weak year for game finds. So much so, that I haven't bothered to post. That's not to say I haven't found anything, so here is a wrap up of the past few months. Quite a few CD's, which I like to grab cheap (for my library, not to resell), as long as they are in good shape, and are complete. Anything decent a dollar or under, and I'll grab it. The highlight was a copy of Jackson Brown's Running on Empty Expanded Edition. It's an OOP 2 disc set, and the second disc is a hi-res multi-channel DVD-Audio disc, which I collect, and it's awesome! It's a $20-50 set all day long, but I got it for a quarter! Another odd CD I found today was a strange collaboration between Weird Al and composer Wendy Carlos doing a rendition of Peter and the Wolf. Everyone knows Al, but Wendy you might know as the composer of the electronic score for Tron. Wendy (well Walter Carlos at the time) was also an important person in the dawn of electronic music. Well worth looking into! Game wise, the only worthwhile bargains I've picked were a big bag o' 12 SNES games at a thrift for $6.06, and last weekend a nice SNES set with 8 games for only $2! It came with a copy of Uniracers too, which sounds fun so I'll keep it. The rest will get bundled together and off to Craigslist for a tidy profit. The most unusual find so far was at a Goodwill today. Walking around, I see this big thing on a table, and I recognized it immediately as I use one like it a my job sometimes. It's a massive 40" table top shrink wrapper. It was a little dirty, but it seemed to be in good shape. I look at the tag, it was only $20! A quick search on my phone, and it turns out this exact thing sells new for over $600 bucks. Tossed it in a cart and found an outlet to test it, it works! I even came with a partial roll of 36" wrap, which itself is pretty damn expensive. Now I just have to figure out what to do with it. I cleaned it up, and it looks like it's brand new. I may offer it to my boss at the print shop since we don't have one nearly that big and see if he will buy it (at a considerable profit to me of course.) I may put it on Craigslist. Or most likely I'll keep it for a while. I'm planning on stepping up my selling (I might do some through a local place on consignment) and it would be handy to use to bundle stuff together.

Not bad, where in Michigan are you? If you don't mind me asking!

Sounds like you answered your own question, obviously it was a bootleg, but that would be pretty cool to have! I take it you no longer have them?

(Darth Vader voice) Impressive. Most impressive.

That is an awesome score, would love to find a Halloween in the wild like that. You know what though, I never ask unless I see something else game related. I've thought about buying an Atari shirt to wear, hoping they might ask me! I really should start asking though, as this years has been crap. I haven't had time to go out at all, and when I do, I don't find much of anything.

Dang, you really get the goods man. When you were selling at MGC you always had some of the best stuff.... It seems I MISSED some of the best stuff this time...my fears about this find were confirmed by a fellow local collector yesterday, who told me that the motherlode arrived ay my Goodwill (I'm there 3-4 times a week over lunch) while I was on vacation. Speculation is that a collector who died must have had his collection donated to goodwill by his unknowing family, and it came out over 3 days. He got over 100 CIB Gameboy and PS1 games, but even this was leftovers. Someone else picked up a bunch of mint CIB NES games that Included Little Samson, Bonk's Adventure, and Flintstones 2 - which the finder just sold on Ebay for over $2,200!!! What I found were apparently the scraps...that'll teach me to go on vacation! I can't get over a feeling of betrayal that the Goodwill I have been so faithful to over the years allowed a score like this to go the one week of the year I'm not around Just more motivation to keep going, I guess...win some, lose some. I'm guessing your Goodwill doesn't do the auction thing?

Ah-may-zing!

Can you pick up an old VCR? It's pretty common to use those as an RF converter. Alternately, you could get a Flashback2 and mod it to accept carts, it already has AV out.

If you are considering getting one, check out Kohls. They had them on clearance a little while back for something like $19.99.

That's too bad too. In my opinion, video games are much like other performance art forms, like movies for instance. Sure, they can require a huge team of people create, but in the hands of a strong director, it's still his vision. There needs to be a Joss Whedon of video games, someone who can develop a fanbase. Someone who can shift back and forth between huge releases, and smaller cult classics. The problem is that gamers can be so fickle. Carmak and Romero may have been rock stars to the FPS crowd back in the day, but they almost became typecast for those games. I guess Will Wright had a good run too, but he was hardly a household name.

This is easily the worst summer on record for me as far as yard sales and flea markets (and forget about thrift stores, I can't remember my last score there.) I think we've only managed to get in three or four Saturdays since April and the picking are weak when we do. Two of the three past monthly flea markets have been rained out too. I do finds lots of non-game stuff, like CD's and tools and stuff, so it's not a total loss. The highlight of last weekend was finding a boxed and almost complete Radio Shack/ Tandy Armatron. Guys who grew up in the late 70's early 80's will remember this! The guy didn't know if it worked (and the leaking batteries didn't give me much hope) so he told me I could have it for a buck! Even though the bats leaked, the contacts were clean so I took a chance. I figured even if it didn't work, it would still display nice. Took it home, cleaned it up, new bats, and it works great! Always wanted one back in the day too. Interesting note, like a number of RS toys, this was made by Tomy, who made a TON of cool toys back then. I personally collect Tomy robots, so this fits in great!

You can't help but wonder how many of today's young game designers were inspired by Activision's policy of promoting it's designers the way it did. I'm sure a lot of kids saw that and realized if that guy can do it, maybe I can too?

Sounds great! I can't wait! Thanks for posting. Although I have my complaints about Pitfall! and Pitfall II: Lost Caverns, because they lack Randomness and Replayability, they are still great looking, high-quality games. If you get a chance to make a new Atari 2600 game, please consider using controlled randomness for placing treasure, enemies, and so on. I'd also love some smarter enemies to deal with instead of having us mostly jump over things. Oh Random, you are just so......what's the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah, predictable! Oh the irony!