Weekly-ish update: August 17th - 26th, 2012

Hey fellow 8bits!!

This is another weeklyish update of my NES pickups.  My last entry (forgive me) was a little bit of a rant, but needed to be said.  From there we added 4 new games to the bunch:

Crystallis
Super Team Games
Robocop
Nintendo World Cup

This past week we took a day trip to Vernon, BC about an hour out of town for a beach and thrifting day.  Checked out the local game store, Ebenezer's and found some pretty cool games there that may warrant a future trip when my pockets are more brimming with cash, but I did find an affordable game not currently in my collection and so I picked up:  Seicross

Today was a quieter day at the flea market, but I scoured the tables and found an almost mint copy of Deja vu (CIB).


At another table I obtained Racket Attack and Roadblasters

Deja Vu earns a 'bright spot' in my collection as it is the most complete and near-mint condition boxed game that I have. The manual looks like it has never been cracked open (like a 10th grade Math textbook NEW).  I know I've said in the past that I am concentrating on carts only for now, but when you find boxed games in the wild for not much more than the loose games cost you just have to pick them up.

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Player One Score:  310

Pirates!! Or Mutiny on the high sea flea market

It seems like an eternity since I did an entry that wasn't a simple game pickup update.  I was inspired, or maybe fueled is a better word by my experience today at my weekly pilgrimage: The Sunday flea market.

The 'market' opens to the public @ 8am and as is customary each Sunday I arrived at 8am with coffee in tow.  I made a beeline to the table of the dealer who only comes once every 4 or 5 weeks and saw he only had about half the games he normally does.  Perhaps he saw the confusion on my face because he answered a question that hadn't even yet been spoken and said that he sold a box of games that morning.  I dug a little deeper.  This morning?  Did the market open early? No, he replied.  He was unloading his treasures when another dealer came and made an offer on the box.

I'm gonna guess that since he generally sells his games for $3 each that the other guy probably didn't pay more than $2 a game for the lot he bought.  At any rate I managed to find a few boxed and unboxed games that I didn't yet have and he gave me a good deal.  I then carried on and found the box at the other seller's table.  He had not yet priced the games and so i pulled a few aside and asked for a price.  For the 3 games (that I'm quite certain he didn't spend more than $6 on a mere half an hour ago) he was going to charge me $20. Ouch.

I get it, I mean I know he's gotta make a living too, but to buy them before the flea market was even officially open is a little like sniping an auction at the last second.  I would've probably paid $5/game, but twenty for three games that he had got in a somewhat questionable manner was not a fair deal as far as I was concerned and so I left his table empty handed (for the first time in awhile).


At the end of the day I'm happy with the games I did end up buying:

Maybe it's just fate that the other games were already bought before I got there as I may have spent more than I should have otherwise.

Weekly-ISH update? August 6th - 16th, 2012

Hmm... this one's a little bit late, but I've been waiting for a package from ebay for awhile before I did an update.  Gotta love tracking #s that stop updating after the package leaves the sort facility. Have to admit I was starting to wonder when I hadn't got an update in 10 days on the whereabouts of this box of goodness, but it arrived today so all is well!

Let's start with last Tuesday....

I traded a friend from work for 4 games I didn't have.  In return he got 3 games and an RF cable.  Nice guy that he is, he even threw in several manuals and some pages he had torn out of his Nintendo Power magazines that show cheats, maps, powerups and other cool facts. (see pics below).

As  you can see, some very cool additions!  I had to pry Gunsmoke from his 'vulcan grip' like grasp.  It was also cool to get Maniac Mansion.  I remember playing the mini-game version of this in the PC game Day of the Tentacle.  Those point and click adventures were some of my favorites of the day and I have a lot of fond memories of the King's Quest Series, Return to Zork, Police Quest, Sam & Max: hit the road, and who could ever forget the Leisure Suit Larry games!

Those games provided hours of fun.  It was so cool to discover new things you could do with your environment by trying different actions out.  One of my favorite discoveries was realizing (in Sam and Max) that Max was the more ruthless of the pair and that if you utilized his gift for violence you could finish some of the more interesting puzzles in the game.  For instance, when a baddie was stuck on a stairwell railing by his chin I tried to see if Sam could fix the scenario, but to no avail. Instead, I switched to Max who calmly walked up to the 'stuck' bad guy and flicked him off like a bug.  Much laughter ensued.

Wow!  That was a tangent... So from this trade I got the following:

Gunsmoke
Basewars
Maniac Mansion
and Kid Kool w/manual

I also got the manuals for the control deck and Zapper, Megaman 3, TMNT, and SMB3.  Thanks again K!


Yesterday I was out running errands and just decided that I'd stop in a my local Value Village and to my surprise there was an actual NES game on the shelves with the hordes of PC games of yesteryear. From there I picked up Toobin'.

For me this was a good find because usually the only games there are the SMB/Duckhunt cart and several baseball games that shall remain nameless.  To find a Tengen black cart in such good shape was a rarity for sure.

And then today I finally received my ebay package I had been waiting for all week, so rather than wait until Sunday to do this update I decided I'd add it now.

The games in the lot were as follows:

Balloon Fight 
Urban Champion
Metal Mech
Adventures of Gilligan's Island
Chip & Dale Rescue Rangers
Kirby's Adventure
Narc
Mighty bombjack
and Ikari Warriors

Standouts from this lot in my opinion would be the two Black box games: Urban Champion and Balloon Fight and of course Kirby's Adventure.  I'll add Chip and Dale too as I have yet to find a bad game made by Capcom and I do remember playing this one as a kid.

Well that's it... till the next Weekly-ISH update.   Thanks for reading!

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Player One Score:   302

Wow. I've made it over the 300 game plateau!  Thanks to all for their generosity and willingness to barter, negotiate, and part with these treasures.  I assure you they've found a good home.

Weekly Update: July 30th - August 5th, 2012

NES pickups for the week ending August 5th:

Well first off this was definitely one of the best weeks I've had so far in my collecting history. On Monday night I took my 2nd mini road trip in as many weeks to a neighboring city to visit a collector who found an ad I'd placed.  He sold me a lot that contained 12 games.  See picture below:

Even though the condition of a few of the games was less than perfect it was still a rush to add RC Pro-am II, and Batman Returns to my stable.  Other standouts from the lot were:  Adventure Island 2, Tale Spin and Little Nemo.

I was still coming down from that when, Tuesday morning, I got a package from the US (off of ebay) that contained several games w/instructions.   Included in the lot was Street Fighter 2010, WURM, Demon Sword and Mig 29.  I always get excited about Camerica games (maybe I just like shiny things).

The rest of the week was pretty quiet.  Made my usual trip to the flea market on Sunday and picked up:  Karate Champ, Sky Shark, Captain Skyhawk, Duck Hunt and Super spike V-Ball.  It occurred to me while buying the last two that Nintendo were pioneers in the field commonly used by movie distributors, mainly, let's take a game and package and re-package it as many ways as we can.  This way the hardcore collectors will have no choice but to buy them.  I've seen this used by magazine editors who put 3 or 4 different people on their covers for the same issue and of course I've got I don't know how many Critereon collection, Director's cuts, extended cuts, Theatrical cuts, etc.  I think for Starwars Alone I probably have 5 different box sets between VHS and DVD.   The reason I bring this up is I purchased Duck Hunt and Superspike V-Ball.  Both games I have on other carts:  I have duckhunt on the Dual cart (supermario bros./duck hunt) as well as the trio cart for the powerpad edition (smb, duckhunt, world class track meet).  I have World class track meet on it's own and SMB on it's own too.  Don't even get me started on the 3 screw /5 screw variations.  Same holds true for Superspike V-ball.  I had this game previously on a cart with Nintendo World cup.  In fact today I had to  hold myself back from buying (uggggh) another copy of Bases Loaded because the spine sticker was different.  The one I have says Jaleco in a scripted font and the one I saw today had Jaleco in a straight (bigger font) like on my copy of city connection.   it's all a little bit excessive Nintendo!  Anyway rant over.  Let's check my score:
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Player One Score:    288