Highway Robbery!!

It’s summer holidays and my wife and I just got back from a trip to the pacific northwest United States.  We flew into Seattle, Washington and drove to San Francisco where we flew home.  We visited several National Parks, including Yosemite, Olympic Rainforest, Kings Canyon, etc..  We also stopped by in Astoria, Oregon to see all the sites from the 80’s classic movie The Goonies.  All in all it was an awesome trip, but of course that’s not really what this blog is about.  Onto the games that I found on our trip!

Firstly, there isn’t much to tell for several reasons… the biggest one being that my bag that contained all my loot was stolen from my car.  Some guy broke our back window and stole our passports AND GAMES:(  This was very upsetting as there were two good ones (well, maybe ‘good’ is a word I should reserve for special games).  Nevertheless I was looking forward to adding to my collection.

The best game that was stolen was Mario’s Time Machine for the NES.  This game was purchased from a store in Portland, Oregon called Video Game Wizards.  The store was difficult to find, and at first glance didn’t look like they had any games that I didn’t already have.  I asked the owner if he had some rare games, and he replied that they only had a copy of Mike Tyson’s Punch Out… a great game, but hardly rare, and was one of the first games I picked up when i decided to collect.  He said I could snoop behind the counter if I wanted as there were some misc titles that haven’t been put out yet, but he warned me that they were all commons so there wasn’t much point.  I did anyways and came up with Mario’s Time Machine.  It is much more uncommon on the NES than it is on the SNES… that being said it isn’t that great a game.  Plus, there was no price tag on it… I hate having to ask for prices as usually the owner will just look it up the inflated prices on Ebay and quote me some nonsense.  But he came back to me with $55.  I offered the guy $50US for the game and he accepted.  I was quite happy with this as according to my app, it sells for around $90CAN.  Even with the American/Canadian exchange rate being so crappy right now, I thought this was a deal.  BUT IT WAS STOLEN… so who cares!

Another game that I’ve been looking for, and found a decent copy of was Wizards & Warriors 3 for the NES.  It is rare that you find this game with an unsoiled label, but I found a good copy at a store called Blue Shell Gaming & Collectibles near Fresno, California.  The owner of this store was very friendly and we talked for a while about games… disagreed about which games were the best to play, then haggled a bit on the price.  We agreed to $50US for a copy of W&W3 and Ninja Crusaders and again I thought this was a rather good deal…. BUT IT WAS STOLEN… so who cares!

Their were a few other commons that are not even worth mentioning THAT WERE ALSO STOLEN!

So all in all, my trip was awesome, but would have been much better if we hadn’t had our car broken into.  The missing passports cost us an additional $1,200US as we had to reroute our flights to Buffalo, New York as this was the closest the airlines could bring us back to Toronto with out proper identity papers.  Personally I thought United Airlines gouged us in our time of need… not to mention gave us the crappiest seats possible for the flight. I’ll never fly with them again!

A special thanks to CDN for picking us up at the airport in Buffalo.  CDN doesn’t follow this blog though so he’ll never know about this shout out to him:(

Hopefully next time I’ll have more games to talk about that weren’t stolen.

SEGA Corner:  No news this post.

Later,

Nintendo Joe