As you know from my last few posts, I have been in a very retro mood for the past few months. This past weekend I continued on my retro quest.
I’ve been watching a lot of retro game collecting channels over the past year. Knowing there were 3 shops in my local area that deal in retro games, I decided to go out and take a look at what they had to offer. I went to 2 of these shops a few weeks ago, but I was looking then for a NES system and a PS2 system (this was before I found my NES in my attic). Knowing I had a NES somewhere I held off that beast, but the PS2 beast still wanted to be fed. I held back the hunger and left both stores with nothing in my hands.
After getting home from work on Saturday morning (I work an early shift) I was in the mood to go out and look for some retro games. I had a small list in my head of NES games I was looking for when I thought of a system that is totally beloved to me and that was missing several large gaps in its library — the Sega Dreamcast. The Dreamcast and I go waaay back but I’m not going to go into that history here. Back in the day I used to have a HUGE gaming collection. Well, I should say that we had a huge collection, the we being my girlfriend at the time and I. When we broke up in 2002 we had to have a parting of the collection. We bartered and traded and in doing so I kept some of my gems and lost a few in the process. It still bothers me to this day that I lost some really good games, but I have to look at the other side as well — I also got to keep some very good games. But thinking about that system I went upstairs and did something I have actually never done before — I took an inventory of my games and wrote them all down in my phone. With that done, I left the house and went on my own game chase.
The first place I stopped at was a store I had never been to before. It’s a little hole in the wall and and well, kinda seedy. I went in and looked around. They had a decent amount of NES games but none of the ones I was looking for. Then I spotted a small stack of Dreamcast games in one of his cases. I asked if those were all the Dreamcast games they had and they were. I asked to see those and about the prices. The prices were really decent and they had a some interesting titles. They had 2 games I know I needed to pick up (one being one of my top 3 favorite Dreamcast games that I just can’t find) and another was a launch title. I picked up both of those and headed to the next store. Really feeling the Dreamcast vibe I called the 3rd store on my list while walking to the next store and asked to see if they had any Dreamcast games. They did and he read me off their list. Happy with some of the titles they had I entered the next store to look around. This store had one of the NES games I was looking for at a very fair price, but I was really in a Dreamcast mood at that point. I checked out their Dreamcast games and found one or two that I wanted. However, after paying what I just did for the 2 games that I picked up ($8 total) I didn’t know if I wanted to spend more than that here until I found out what the prices were at the last shop. So making a few mental notes, I headed to my last shop — and this would be an interesting stop. When I got there 2 people were behind the counter watching TV and pretty much ignoring everybody. I looked around but they didn’t have any of the NES games I was looking for. I finally went up to the counted and told the person that I had just called about some Dreamcast games. That’s when a disembodied voice from their back room yelled back that I had talked to him. I asked him if I could see the games and he told me I couldn’t since they were buried under a bunch of PS1 games and he didn’t want to unbury them (not very good customer service). Not wanting to be defeated, I asked him again what games he had and that I would still like to pick some up. He read off the list and I told him the 2 titles I was really interested in. He then told me he would have to ‘look up’ what the current prices were for the games, a.k.a., what they are selling for on eBay. Right then and there I knew I was walking away empty handed. One of the games, which granted was a AAA title, he wanted $39.99 for and a more obscure online multiplayer title he wanted $11.99 for. I honestly would have bought the obscure title, but I honestly didn’t like his attitude and walked out. Feeling pissed off, I went back to the first store I stopped at and bought the rest of their Dreamcast games. Not all of them were great titles, but I did score a mint copy of Virtua Tennis (one of my favorite games that I just can’t find in the house), Airforce Delta and Flag To Flag, both of which were launch titles, and 3 sports games one of which I had never even heard of before. All in all, I netted 6 games for $20!
The next day I was still craving Draemcast games, and looking at a lot of the AAA titles the second store had the day before made me wonder what they were going for on eBay. I made the mistake of going on there and looking some up. Long story short, over the next 24 hours I purchased 3 AAA titles for about 1/2 of what that store wanted and a not so AAA title for $4. In fact, I just got my first game, Resident Evil Code: Veronica, about 20 minutes ago in the mail. So in this instance, I got a better deal on eBay. Here are the 4 games I got on eBay.
So where does this all lead me to? I don’t know. I don’t have enough funds to do this every weekend, but if I am careful and patient, I could certainly build up a nice Dreamcast collection for a decent price. Hell, I even brought down one of my Dreamcasts on Saturday night, hooked it up in the bedroom and was playing games for a few hours. I think the biggest thing is that I just have to be patient and wait for the right game at the right price. I know I let a few games go on eBay that I was watching because they went just a little higher then I was willing to pay for. Even though patience is certainly not one of my virtues, when it comes to game collecting, it’s going to have to be.
