In November 2017, Half Price Books had their coupon week. This is a week where each day has a coupon off your most expensive item. 20% on Mon/Tue, 30% on Wed/Thur, 40% on Fri/Sat and 50% on Sunday. To get the coupons, you just need to sign up for their mailing list. This week, held 2-3 times a year, normally kills me because I do a full range around the DFW area, checking every Half Price Books for good finds. It’s been shrinking a bit as my PS3 and Wii collections are complete, but PS2 and the occasional older title still pops up now and then.
Phil and I did a run to see what was there, more planning to scout for a Sat or Sun buy than anything. A tip on this sale: Half Price Books will let you put an item on hold for 2 days. So if you go on Friday and find something that just can’t be passed up, you can put it on hold until Sunday and get the half price coupon on it. Some stores won’t do this during the sale week, but a good number don’t stop you either. And they know what you’re doing and are okay with you working with their system for the best deal.
We ran a full gamut and wound up going back to a few stores over the course of the week, but ultimately, I got a few things:
Jak & Daxter Lost Frontier
Earthworm Jim CIB
Persona on PSP
Final Fantasy PSP Sealed
Little Nemo CIB
Metal Gear Solid Peacewalker
Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops
Sword of the Berserk
Digimon World 4
Front Mission 4
Baroque
GTA V on PS4
Shining Tears
Dynamite Headdy
Conquest of the Crystal Palace
Legend of Zelda Collector’s Edition CIB
Not all of these were for the collection. Some were marked below average value and then the discount lowered them further to make them worth picking up for trades or flipping. The Legend of Zelda Collector’s Edition for GameCube was a nice addition since I had just gotten the disc only copy for next to nothing. I ultimately was able to sell it and essentially cover the complete copy for my library.
Amidst the running around, we also stopped at a Game X-Change where I was further irresponsible and bought Captain America and the Avengers on NES complete in box, Silver Surfer, Robocop 3, and A Bard’s Tale on NES.
Everything, all said and done.
At this point, we were, once and for all, tapped out. Paypal was drained. Wallets were drained. GameStop credit was getting low. There was no more money to spend and so Phil and I both agreed we were done for the year, aside from Black Friday purchases. It was November and Christmas shopping was coming up. We could not do another retro game hunt.
Oh how wrong we were….
In my next post, I will finally get around to detailing the events of the biggest retro game haul I’ve ever had.
An antique store near work had an outdoor sale where people were able to bring things and set up for basically a collective garage sale in the parking lot. I didn’t expect to find anything, and I still hadn’t recovered from Retropalooza, but I still stopped. No games, but the original Star Wars trilogy on VHS for $3 was a great deal!
While I was there, I did a quick check inside and found a booth with games was doing 50% off sale, so I picked up Paperboy 2 and Bubble Bobble on NES as well as XIII on GameCube and Brutal Legend on PS3. I already had some of these, but they’d make for good trade offerings later. I also got a sealed copy of Has Been Heroes for half off, which was nice since I’d been wanting to pick that up anyway.
Shortly after, GameStop had a B2G1 sale, so I picked up Tokyo Mirage Sessions FE, Kirby & The Rainbow Curse, Sonic Lost World, Sonic Boom (I’m a sucker for getting all the Sonic games, even the bad ones), and Snoopy’s Grand Adventure. All of these were bought with store credit, so I didn’t feel like I was doing too bad in what should have been a financial recovery period.
I did, however, snag Wolfenstein + The Old Blood combo for cheap online from Amazon. Despite these few purchases, the cost wasn’t too high and I still didn’t consider myself back in game hunting just yet.
Super Mario Odyssey, Asdivine Hearts/Ys Origins, and Undertale were pre-orders that came in.
A Long Intended Sale
Despite being low on cash, I had recovered a little from a few sales of doubles and there’s a sidewalk sale in downtown Dallas on the first Saturday of each month I’d been wanting to check out for a long time, but just hadn’t gone to yet. The sale actually starts on Friday night around 7PM officially. I decided I’d make the trip to check it out.
When I first got there, there was nobody there. A couple of vehicles sat in the area, but nothing for sale. The site said people tend to get there early and are looking at things as they’re unloaded and I started to wonder if the sale was still held.
I walked around a while and finally saw someone setting up. I asked if this was smaller these days and they said people usually get there later. I decided to walk around some and, although I didn’t want to spend more money on dinner, I wasn’t going anywhere (I already paid for parking), so I went to Hooters.
You must answer three riddles and determine which owl is the liar before entering.
After eating, and killing some time, I went back out and a few more people were set up, but nothing too impressive. There was one GameCube game, a Simpsons game, that might have been worth picking up for a trade or flip, but they wouldn’t budge on price at all. Finally, someone pulled up and had some gaming items, including an original NES complete in box! It was priced slightly high, but still fair, but they didn’t have anything that interested me.
I was told there was one guy that usually came and had a huge set up and he might have games, but it would be another hour before he arrived. I was tired and sleepy, but figured I’d wait around until 11. Sure enough, he showed up.
As he and his team unloaded things, I actually lent a hand, helping organize some things on their table to maximize their available space. Eventually, I did see some games start to come out. Tomb Raider games for Playstation (disc only) and a few Xbox titles. I snagged FF X-2 and Fable cases with manuals (no games) and Rock Band on Wii as well as the Oblivion Collector’s Edition on Xbox 360 and Race Drivin’ CIB for Sega Genesis.
Still nothing amazing and I wasn’t sure I’d want to buy these after all. Then I spotted the portable screen for the psone! That was worth grabbing and ultimately was only $5. I kept looking as they put more out, but didn’t see anything else. As I started to decide it was mostly a bust, I opened a little case that turned out to be full of Leapfrog cartridges…..and The Legend of Zelda Collector’s Edition disc! I’d been looking for that, though I wanted it complete. Still, for the overall price, I took all the games, plus a PSP game and a Spongebob GameCube game, as well as a Warcraft CCG raid deck for Black Temple all for about the cost of just the Zelda disc.
All for $25, worth around $100
I’ll probably check the sale out again in the future. You never really know what will be there and that Zelda disc was an exciting find to end the night.
Despite a lack of updates here, I’ve been insanely busy the last few months 2017 and a great deal of that busyness has been due to three things. First, of course, was game hunting itself, but for the last six months of the year, I was working on converting my father’s vinyl collection to mp3 to give him for Christmas. That was about 200 albums in total, which required each one to be recorded on each side, then converted with meta data added in. In addition to this project was organizing another large quantity of items, but that’s where this story will eventually lead.
While I normally wouldn’t reach back and relate game hunts from months back, these sort of snowball into the biggest gaming find I’ve ever experienced, so it’s worth telling the whole story over the course of a few posts.
So get your Super Scope, put on your Captain N jacket, and strap in. We’re going on a game hunting story time adventure!
Retropalooza 2017
On October 7th and 8th, The Game Chasers held Retropalooza V in Arlington, Tx and despite the relatively close scheduling between it and Let’s Play Game Expo, of course I had to go. I had spent about half the money I set aside for Let’s Play at that convention, so I assumed I would spend about the same about, and the remainder of my game hunting cash, at Retropalooza.
In addition to that cash, I had a number of the sealed games from the Half Price Books gold mine for trade. As is becoming tradition, my first stop was at seeing the Nostalgic Nerds at their table to see what they had. Honestly, not too much caught my eye with the exception of Kickle Cubicle and Mega Man X3. That price tag on Mega Man X3 caught my eye as well, though. As expected, it was pricey. Around $250, though the quality of the label certainly demanded a high price tag for a rare game.
I wasn’t looking to wipe myself out immediately and wasn’t sure I wanted to spend that much on a game in general, so after we chatted a bit, I moved on to see what else was around. As always, Retropalooza had a ton of vendors and they all had great stuff. Prices weren’t outrageous, though some were higher than I was willing to pay and a few a little higher than I thought was reasonable. Of course, as with most conventions, you can usually negotiate if you buy a stack of things.
The first booth we came across that really caught my attention was a small one, a bit cramped with 3 tables in a “U” shape that only allowed a couple of people to stand in there at a time. My friend Phil looked over some of their hand held games while I waited to get in. Nothing much on top of the table really got my interest other than Winback Covert Ops for N64 at a fair price (finally) and Tiny Toon Adventures 2 on NES, but there were boxes and tubs under the table that weren’t open. Only one was and I wondered what might be down there.
The one box that was open had the Nintendo Power StarFox 64 promotional VHS, which was kind of interesting. I remember having it as a kid, so I pulled that out, but nothing much else in there besides Powerpuff Girls Relish Rampage (Pickled Edition) on GameCube, which was on my hunting list. A few more good games were there, but nothing else I was looking for from my list.
Moving over to the closed boxes, I opened one to take a peek and saw a pretty good stack of things. Namely NES game boxes. In great condition! I asked about Super Mario Bros 3 and he wanted $10. Star Tropics complete in box (with the letter) was about $10 as well. Lion King for SNES box, GBA Sonic collection, Sonic Advance box. An Akira figure of Kaneda with the motorcycle for a few bucks. Digimon World and Digimon World 3 were super cheap as well! Then, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on Playstation. It was a blank case, but the disc was in great shape and it had the manual. Normally $30 for just the disc, for $5, it was a steal!
Phil got a few things from them as well, but we combined it into a single purchase and started Retropalooza off taking a pretty big chunk out of my cash, but we got far more value than what we paid.
I stopped by The Gamer Chasers booth and caught Billy clearly up way too early for his liking. It was almost 10AM and he informed me it was closer to the time he normally went to sleep, not got up. They’re not kidding on the show when they say he’s not a morning person. I purchased a Caught ‘Em Slippin’ t-shirt and each season of the series on DVD, but left them with Billy to, over the course of the convention, get everyone to sign them. I managed to get Billy & Jay, Melvorn, AlphaOmegaSin, and Woods, but it would take a return on the second day to manage to get Dodongo’s signature.
A big goal of this convention was to finish off the last of my N64 targets. I had just gotten Winback Covert Ops, leaving Loderunner 3D and Goemon’s Great Adventure to be found. Towards the end of my winding through the booths set up, I finally found one with the last of my N64 targets, and for reasonable prices. Done and done. I was finally finished with my N64 collection. I didn’t go for a complete collection and don’t plan to, though I might start keeping more if they fall in my lap. For what I set out as my goal on the system, though, I had finished that set. Plus, a booth cut a price to almost half off to convince me to add StarCraft for N64 to my collection as well.
Finally found Crystal Castles and the Tron games for Atari 2600 and I picked up a few manuals as well.
Overall, a good day and certainly the bulk of my spending and game finds, but there were still some gems to pick up upon returning the next day!
Day 1 was not too shabby!
Day 2 – Return to Castle Retropaloozastein
The second day is usually either pretty light or extremely heavy, depending on your luck. Sometimes vendors want to go deep on discounts and clear as much as possible so they don’t have to load everything to take back. That wasn’t on my mind, though, with so little left in my wallet. Don’t let that deter you at a convention, though. I know someone that made a wild pitch of $10 for an entire box of games and walked away with them. Nothing great, all commons, but they traded into a local store and he got enough credit to get a high value game from said store for essentially the $10 he spent.
I hadn’t had any luck with trades the first day and the second proved lackluster in working any trade deals as well. Although I had some good titles, sealed games didn’t grab much attention since they’re hard to move and take longer to find a buyer.
I picked up an SNES Super Scope for $5, which was just a fun thing to have, even though I’ll never really use it. The big score out and about was a booth that I guess had opened a lot more of their crates and were trying to clear them out. Crate after crate of Atari 2600 games at $3 each or 3 for $5. I knocked out 9 Atari 2600 titles I’d been looking for and was more than happy to do so.
Wrapping up the day, I rounded back to Nostalgia Nerd’s booth and took a final look at what they had. I had a few things they were interested in taking as trade and so, with a combination of trades and the last of my cash, I got that Kickle Cubicle and, of course, that Mega Man X3, completing my SNES Mega Man X trilogy. And, as tends to be my luck, Mega Man X3 has steadily dropped in value since I bought it…. but I have a beautiful condition label and it’s a great game, so I can’t be too disappointed.
I didn’t quite end the day there, as I finally decided to add one final N64 game to my library that wasn’t on my original list. Since I had Goemon’s Great Adventure, I decided to sell some Texas Instruments game cartridges and used the money to pick up Mystical Ninja starring Goemon to have both Goemon N64 games.
Finally tapped out and rather tired of two days of convention walking, I headed home. Of course, an hour before the convention ended, I came back when I realized I had left my Super Scope with the Nostalgic Nerd guys so I wouldn’t have to carry it around. It was this final hour return run that let me get Dodongo’s signature on my Game Chasers DVDs as well.
Day 2 wasn’t as hefty, but Mega Man X3 was a huge addition.
And with that, finally, Retropalooza 2017 drew to a close for me. I thought my game hunting was pretty much done for the year. After all, October leads right into holiday shopping season and Christmas gifts would need to be bought, but of course….
NinjaFox Games & Geekery 