Category: Games

Two Treasures

August 22, 2019

I picked up a bunch of weird stuff during my California trip. Here I’ll show two of them.

This LCD Star Wars pinball game cost me $15 which wasn’t bad considering it was new. A glance on eBay tells me I wasn’t ripped off. The guy that sold it to me made mention of treating it carefully since the plastic packaging had become brittle but of course I was going to open it!

And here it is! Note the poor sticker affixed between the buttons, as if after they made it they realized they forgot to brand it! You’ll also see that the only Star Wars evidence in the actual game screen are the droids on the backplate…

The batteries had of course leaked (it’s 24 years old!) but not seriously and it was an easy clean. I popped two more in and:

It has flashing lights, a vibration function and very, very poor gameplay! Also the game itself has nothing to do etc Star Wars, and I imagine the others in this like (such as a Barbie game) play identically 🙂

A curiosity though, already in a box never to be played again!

Following on, I also bought this for $5 at an amazing antique store in Gilroy:

A European Panini sticker pack from 1983! Panini made gazillions of sticker sets for just about every sport and licensed brand you can imagine and sadly they barely distributed outside of Europe. So I never got any Dark Crystal or E.T. or Pope John Paul II stickers in my youth…

The ‘original’ art stickers in this set are strange and difficult to look at for long periods, but most of the stickers were from the cartoon;

I bought this in the hope of sending you all some He-Man nostalgia via future postcards but the adhesive is too weak after 35+ years and these will therefore remain as priceless additions to my collection 🙂

Oh and even though this post was just supposed to be two treasures… here’s some of the rest of my purchases:

Selling The Collection (Update)

July 14, 2019

Yesterday I went and sold these two for a lot of money:

I immediately spent some of the cash on these:

They’re the old Dragonlance modules collected into book form. They’re all in top condition and the prices were good. Also he threw these in:

With a pocket full of cash I then headed straight to the store and purchased this:

It’s both the sixth model of the 3DS and coincidentally my sixth 3DS! However I have multiples of some rather than every iteration. This is the ultimate version (2D only!) since the announcement of the Switch Lite essentially means the 3DS is now obsolete.

But my day wasn’t over! Turns out there was a retro game convention on in Albany yesterday and – after a quick stop to buy Magic cards so I can make an unbeatable deck to beat both BS and AW with – I headed over to check it out!

It was decent. Lots and lots of games, but very little I needed or was even tempted by. Looking at the prices I’m glad I’ve sold what I had and feel good about the amount I received.

However I couldn’t resist these two:

I’ve been looking for the second NES Ultima game for a while and had never seen it boxed in this condition, so I was very happy to find that. The other game is Wizardry 1 & 2 for the PC-Engine, a Japanese CD based console I’ve never owned and never will. Yes, I paid $40 for a game I’ll never play! For those of you that was ‘worried’ I was getting out of game collecting: that should rest your souls 🙂

Oh and I couldn’t resist this lot either:

All sealed! Some of these packs are over 40 years old! I reckon you’ll see some of these on the blog again in the future…

This shopping bender was fun but only used up a portion of the cash I got for the two games. I think the rest needs to go toward airfare…

Selling The Collection

June 30, 2019

Yesterday I sold 6 game consoles and 152 games. For this I was paid a considerable amount of money, but it was like parting with a piece of my personal history.

In recent years the market value of ‘retro’ games has been skyrocketing. In particular certain systems and game genres have seen prices rise to borderline unbelievable levels. I own(ed) many of these, and therefore the value of my collection had risen as well.

Over the last few years I’ve written quite a few ‘My Collection‘ blog posts, and more than once as I set up the systems and spent a day playing I wondered if I’d ever want to play those particular games again. I questioned the wisdom of storing them away for another decade or more.

I still love games and still buy loads of them. In the last year or so I started to recognize that in all likelihood I wouldn’t be playing certain old ones ever again. Furthermore the collection was just too large (>1600 console games) and it was time to focus.

So I decided to sell. For this first wave I settled on six older systems, and all the games I had for them: Genesis, Sega-CD, Saturn, Dreamcast, Turbografx and XBox. Last week I sent a list to a local store I know and trust, and they quickly responded with a generous offer, which I accepted.

In total what I sold filled the seven boxes you see above. It took a few nostalgic hours to sort and pack them up and it took the two owners of the store another two hours to unpack and assess everything. They were astonished by the condition. One guy said he rarely sees any Sega-CD or Saturn games (from 20-25 years ago) without disc scratches: I sold him almost eighty, all in pristine condition complete with all packaging. Virtually everything I sold was the highest quality. I think they were more excited by the sale than I was!

Several of the games I sold are amongst the rarest on their systems. The one above (yes that’s the original receipt) they may sell for $800 or more, and I sold two others even more valuable. I hope they make good money on this sale, and I hope my games – some of which are ‘holy grails’ end up making other collectors very happy.

The guys told me I should become a streamer or write a book. They were amazed by my history as a gamer, the depth of my collection and the gaming knowledge I had. Also the fact I could give details about virtually every game including when and where I bought it as well as mini-reviews. But I’ve never collected for it’s own sake: every game I buy is simply because I want to play it.

Although I sold a lot of games, it represented less than 10% of my total collection. I’m still buying games of course, but going forward will increasingly concentrate on Nintendo and/or handheld systems. While I will very likely sell more of my collection, I can’t see myself ever parting with the (sizable) Gameboy/DS portion.

Am I sad about this? Do I feel regret? No I’m not and I don’t. I got a good price, I sold to a store that understands and respects the hobby and will find all my games new homes. I personally bought every one of the games myself, played them all, and cared for them for over two decades. They were precious to me but it was now time to pass them on. I hope their new owners love them as much as I did.

Robot Claw