FujiSkunk

Actually, come to think of it, I did try the "hit the machine for free games" trick once, and it just so happens it was with an arcade video game... more or less. It was a Baby Pac-Man machine. Someone had just told me the rumor about hitting the coin door of a machine for free games. The machine was in my apartment complex's club house, and I was in the room by myself. So I figured, "Why not?" I hit the coin door fairly hard, and immediately heard a crash and saw "SLAM!" on the screen. Then the screen started displaying garbage, and I, being nine or so years old at the time, started freaking out. But then the attract mode started again and the game seemed to be none the worse off. I decided to walk away quietly. I'm fairly confident that was the first and last time I tried that trick.

I want that Gemstick...

I don't know about arcade machines, but pretty much all pinball tables from the '80s onward are designed to reset if you hit them hard enough. The technical term for it is a "slam tilt". If a game is in progress, obviously it will be lost. The goal was to keep people from getting funny ideas about making the game give up free credits or other unexpected bonuses when "properly" abused, and so cut down on unnecessary wear and tear. Of course, for me and many other once-temperamental players, the slam tilt was the perfect way to rage-quit a bad game, so machines frequently still got a good share of abuse.

This brings back some memories. Some time in the mid '80s, the nearest arcade to me was nice enough to set their Asteroids and Missile Command machines to two credits per quarter. Not everyone knew this, so it wasn't uncommon for credits to be left on the machines. I would hover around when people played, to see if they knew. Once I tried to be smart and "casually" cover the flashing player buttons after a guy played. He was smarter. I didn't get a free game that time. Then there was Power Drift, one of my favorite arcade racing games, which the local Walmart happened to have during my early teenage years. One day it had an "out of order" sign on it, much to my dismay, though the machine was still turned on. Looking around, I quickly discovered the game itself was fine. The problem was the coin door was open! You could put a quarter in, fish it back out, and get all the free games you wanted! Surprisingly this lasted for several weeks, before they finally replaced the machine rather than fix the coin door. I guess they thought it wouldn't make enough money. In college, those of us who worked in the rec area and stayed on campus through spring break were treated to free games when the distributors set all the machines to free play. One school quarter they forgot to set one machine back: Space Lords. I got really good at that one before they finally got wise and reset the machine. I can at least for the record state that I never broke a game myself, and I never took any money that was already in an arcade machine, just my own quarters from Power Drift. Laundromat driers, however, are a different story. I never broke into their coinboxes, but I didn't have to. At the laundromat of the apartments I lived in at the time, people would leave change in their pants, and so coins were always falling out of the tumblers and into the area below. Almost all of those old machines had broken locks on the filter doors, and so it was stupid easy to open the machine, reach up toward the tumbler and fish out handfuls of coins at a time. I got to know the guy who worked on the machines, and he would even open the one machine that had a good lock so I could help "clean" that one too. Good times. Nolan Bushnell himself has a similar story about those first Pong machines. Often the technicians would come empty the coinboxes and find them full of wet money. It turned out people were tricking the coin mechanisms with quarter-sized disks of ice! What Catpix said is true. If there is a way to get a free game, real or imagined, people will try it. I had heard of the "turn the machine off and on X times to get a free game" trick too, but was never brave enough to try it myself.

I sold some games and related items to Jdm101518, who was very patient and understanding when I got a little distracted before finally getting his box in the mail. Excellent buyer, and I'll do my best not to make him wait so patiently next time!

Edited bump. Disney Sing It Family Hits for the Wii, with case, manual and Disney-branded microphone. The disc is in fine shape and the microphone was tested and found to be working. Asking $7 for the bundle. Sold! Four games for the ZAPiT Game Wave... Individually priced; asking $1 each. All sold!

I miss the Warner Brothers Studio Stores. I still have a couple of bits that I bought from the one that used to be in Atlanta. Game's coming along nicely, Spice!

A 5200 Masterplay and a VCS adapter? Dude...

Bump! That "mountain" of things waiting for my return turned out to be more of a molehill, but since then the store has actually gotten in a little bit of everything. By that I mean new titles across most of the more recent consoles, including the Xbox, Xbox 360, PS1, PS2, PS3 and Wii. Over in the portables thread there are some DS additions as well. Nothing super fabulous, and admittedly there are quite a few sports games in the mix, but all are dirt cheap and perfect for that completist friend of yours. Happy browsing!

FYI, ElectronicSentimentalities is completely out of the mod business at the moment, due to the owner's wife getting cancer. More info on the home page. Hopefully this will have a happy ending and he can get back to business at some point.

Sucks. My prayers to his family and friends. RIP Mr. Siders. Thank you for some of the 7800's greatest games.

Family events kept me away from the thrift stores last weekend, and Hurricane Harvey had the honor this weekend. What to do with all this spare time? Organize and snap pics of all the stuff I'd brought home before last weekend! The video game pickings have been a bit slim at my thrift store. The day I saw these was no different, but you know, sometimes you don't need actual games to make a score... Sure, they're flattened, but whoever did so took the time to flatten them carefully. And then donated them. Go fig. I won't complain though, because a few of these will fit nicely into my collection. The rest I'll have up for sale soon. The rest of this post has nothing to do with video games, but plenty to do with my other big passion: music! A lot of good vinyl has come in to the store, so much that I am once again woefully behind on my listening! There's been a little bit of everything, from '50s and '60s oldies to '70s and '80s classics. I even picked up a few Richard Pryor and Cheech & Chong comedy albums. Fun for the whole family! Pictured below is just the very tip of the iceberg. The rest are still waiting patiently in my game room. But it isn't just vinyl that's come in. On two separate occasions, the store got big stashes of audio cassettes. Since cassettes don't sell very well on the floor, I gather them up and then sell them in bundles on eBay. On occasion I'll also set a few aside to listen to, if I haven't yet heard a particular album on vinyl or CD. Well, after wading through the most recent donations, here's the "few" I'm currently holding onto: And those are just the ones I'm "borrowing". Against better judgment, I started yet another collection a while back. I decided it would be fun to collect the biggest album from every successful '80s artist on cassette, to celebrate the decade's music and its most popular portable media format (portable CD players weren't really a thing until the very end of the decade). Well, whoever donated the last batches of cassettes must've also been '80s music buffs, because a good third of this collection, maybe even half, came in only in the past month! I'm already out of space on the shelf where I'm keeping these. Heaven help me if any more come in. Do me a favor and wish or pray that I don't see, say, Pink Floyd's Momentary Lapse of Reason or the Alan Parsons Project's Eye in the Sky or Falco's 3 on cassette anytime soon! Then there was this... Nothing special, just an old CD-ROM, right? Not exactly... You know, it would almost be worth trying to find more of these to store and show off PC games on floppy. Almost. And finally, if you thought the Harman Kardon CD-R I ran across was ridiculous, check this out: Yes, you can get genuine Apple DVD-R's, certified for use in your Apple DVD-R recorder. Accept no substitutes!

Quick note for those currently waiting on me to test games and calculate shipping costs, and for everyone else who might be interested in current and future listings. Unfortunately some family business (not the eclipse) has extended what was supposed to be a quick mid-week vacation, and so I will not be back home until the middle of next week. The good news is, my roommate and fellow thrift volunteer tells me there is a mountain of things waiting for me to look at when I return. I didn't ask for details, but there just might be a fairly big bump in the near future. Until then, stay tuned, and thank you for your patience!

On the 2600, I owned and played several rarity 4's back in the day and I owned Rampage not long after its release. On the 7800, I've had Pete Rose Baseball since 1990 or so. It was a clearance-shelf purchase (only cost a buck or so), but I still say it counts.

Edited bump. Two Atari XEGS cartridges and several Commodore 64 cartridges. Individually priced. All sold! X-Men vs. Street Fighter for the Japanese Sega Saturn, complete with outer box and 4MB expansion cartridge. Asking $25. Note that you will need a Japanese Sega Saturn to play this, unless you know your way around disabling the Saturn's regional restrictions.

Edited bump. Ant Nation, complete for the DS. Asking $8. Sold!

Did you use Melody/ARM code at all in this game? If not, he may have copied your code since the NES also has a 6502-ish CPU, making at least the game logic easy to steal port. Less likely is he only ever saw 2600 Scramble and decided to have a go at that instead of any other version.

The alchemists were just a bit off. You can't make gold out of lead, but you can make gold out of silicon!

Edited bump. Two original NES controllers, model NES-004. Some minor physical wear and discoloration, but still in good shape for their age. Asking $3 each. Sold! One original orange NES Zapper, model NES-005. Again, some minor physical wear, but still in good shape. Asking $4. Sold! One original NES power supply, model NES-002. Asking $5. Sold! Iron Man for the PSP, still factory-sealed. Asking $5. Sold!

An idea for a Pac-Man upgrade literally came to me in a dream a couple of nights ago. I actually remember most of the dream, but I'll spare everyone the details, except to say it began at a game convention where I realized I hadn't yet set up the systems I'd brought, and ended with me on a running track trying to escape the men in black. My dreams tend to be rather disjointed. Anyway, the idea. Arcade Pac-Man has been fully conquered. We know exactly how the ghost AI operates, and since there isn't any randomness, we know exactly how to work around that AI and get the highest possible score, level by level. There have been mods both subtle (speed tweeks) and grand (Ms. Pac-Man) designed to disrupt those patterns and make the game "challenging" again. How about a mod that instead embraces that lack of randomness, while also daring players to buck the established patterns? Instead of dots, the maze can be populated with little arrows. If Pac-Man follows the arrows, he will eat them for the same points as dots. But if Pac-Man moves against the arrows, they will stay uneaten and also grow larger, like the dots in Jr. Pac-Man when touched by a bonus item. Also like those Jr. Pac-Man dots, eating larger arrows earns more points but also slows Pac-Man down more, making it harder to escape the ghosts. In my dream I saw only small sections of the maze where arrows replaced dots (the maze itself was also garbled, and yet somehow still playable; I determined this was due to some sort of memory corruption, which when you think about it was actually not wrong... but I digress), but I figure, why not fill the maze entirely with these arrows, and make the arrows follow whatever the optimal pattern is for that level? The challenge would then be, if you want the "perfect" score, go right ahead and take it... provided you know the patterns well enough for the empty parts of the maze, of course. But also be aware, the old "perfect" score is no longer the highest possible score, not in this version of the game. How often would you dare to go against the pattern in pursuit of those larger, more valuable arrows? There could even be different levels of arrow values, where the more often Pac-Man crosses an arrow the "wrong" way, the more valuable but also more "sticky" it becomes. Since this wouldn't actually affect the enemy AI, the ghosts would still have their same predictable behaviors, which means the true Pac-Man masters probably wouldn't have too much keeping them at bay. But then the true masters would want to know what the new highest possible score is, and what new patterns will get to that score. Those patterns just might take a while to find out, and they will certainly take longer to execute. And so this would indeed be a Slower, Harder, More Challenging Pac-Man. At least for a little while. (Surprisingly, no, I wasn't without apparel at any point in this dream, though I did find myself in my pajamas for a while... but again, I digress.)

Edited bump.

Actually if it's as good as the game list is suggesting it will be, I just might buy a Gold 8 as well, or ask Santa for one. I said before I thought the 7 (or was it the 6?) was this close to having an ideal cross-section of first-party and third-party 2600 games. Now, with third-party support from Activision in addition to existing Taito and Konami licenses, and with a strong possibility for at least one Namco game (assuming the Pac-Man license for the portable carries over to the 8 ), we just might get that ideal cross-section. About the only thing still missing would be a Midway/Williams license for Defender, Stargate and Joust. So yeah, I suppose i'm interested in the 8 too, even when I usually sniff at these things. Is that another sin for me?

"Hi, Grig!" I don't blame you in the least. There's no reason to hang onto an old tube, unless you're a classic gaming fan who still loves how games look on those old sets. Unfortunately for me and potentially my back, I'm one of those.