If you'll remember from one my last entries (from October of last year) we made a bit of a thrift circuit in the nearby neighboring cities. Yesterday my wife and I decided to leave the kids with my mother-in-law and take another such road trip. We essentially travelled in a large circle visiting thrift stores in Armstrong, Salmon Arm and Kamloops. 12 hours, 400 kms and a few coffees later we returned with our treasures. The route took us from Kelowna to Armstrong and Salmon Arm (via Vernon) then on to Kamloops and home to Kelowna (via Merritt).
Although I saw a few artifacts that would have made other retro game system collectors interested such as the Atari Touchpad (aka the Star Raiders controller) and a Colecovision Adam complete with some games on tape, I didn't even get a sniff of anything NES related until Kamloops.
Once we had visited a few of the second hand stores in 'Loops' we went to the local game store: All-A-Board games -- but found it closed. Fortunately they had only relocated and not closed up shop for good. We found their new storefront one street over. From what I can remember their original location was a lot larger than this one and seemed to have more selection but they had said that a lot of their stuff was still in storage. Despite that they still had some highly collectible cartridges on display. Definitely a wish list of sorts with games such as Secret Scout and several of the multi-carts in the display case. Most of your run-of-the-mill cheaper games did not make the move with them and I presume are boxed up in a locker somewhere (waiting for the next season of Storage Wars: British Columbia edition).
Lining the, sparser than I remember, shelves were games priced between $20-80 which ran the gamut from totally worth it to IMO a little overpriced. They had 2 copies each of a few of the unreleased titles: King of Kings and Exodus (the former of which I already have), but even though I like the carts that look different than your average joe gray ones I didn't think it was worth the asking price. I almost grabbed Adventures of Lolo 2, but in the end I chose one I had been looking for for awhile: Little Ninja Brothers. This is a game that satisfied my current game requirements of specialty store purchases: 1) it needs to be a fairly uncommon title and 2) it has to be halfway decent. There are altogether too many games in the catalog that are rare by virtue of their being monumentally bad. Thankfully this one does not fall into that category and it is a cool looking RPG with above average music and graphics. I look forward to playing through this game and perhaps posting a review some time down the road.
NES Carts: 459
Licensed games: 425/687
Unlicensed games: 34/90
