Ottawa

My wife and I went to Ottawa to visit a good friend of ours over the spring break.  Along the way we thought we would stop off at the local thrift stores and a small chain (5 locations) called Chumleighs so I could do some retro video game shopping!

These were all pick ups from the Chumleighs at the Belleville location.  Of everything here, the one I’m most excited about is the official NES Cleaning Kit.  It isn’t that it’s worth a lot, but more that I haven’t seen one (let alone in the box) in a very long time.  At $12 the price seemed about right too so I nabbed it.  The four Super Nintendo games I bought are ones that I’ve been looking for for a while, however every time I see them they are in some over priced game store where I have had to take a pass.  Both Ultima games look like fun, and if Lemmings 2 is half as fun as the first chapter then it will be a worth while purchase.  Galaxy 5000 was just at a good price and I didn’t have it yet so I picked it up.

 I already have these games and thus I bought them to trade at the Waterloo game swap which happened last weekend. I will give an update in my next blog of what I ended up trading them for (I still have to take the pictures… also I’m still waiting for the Sega Dude to email me a picture

I got really happy when I found a copy of Mario Party 6 for $4.00 at a Salvation Army thrift shop in Ottawa, however I was disappointed to discover that the game inside wasn’t as advertised.  I bought it anyway as I’ll never get a case and manual for that cheap.  Now I just need to find someone (perhaps jjgames.com) who will sell me just the disc.  I always wondered who in their right mind would ever order “just the disc”, but now I know… ME.

At the same Salvation army they were auctioning off an NES console with 12 games.  While there were a few titles I didn’t have, tucked away at the back of the lot was a mint copy of the elusive Action 52 with manual!  The highest bid was only $120, but seeing as how I don’t live in Ottawa I couldn’t really place my own bid unless I put my friends information down instead of mine.  I bid anyway at $250… cheap for an Action 52 cart.  I probably (actually definitely) should have bid higher but the thing is I didn’t really want it for my collection.  I’m going for a complete NES officially licensed collection and the Action 52 does not fit this part of the criteria.  It would have however been a very valuable trading piece.  It’s all moot however as I don’t think I won it. The auction was yesterday and my friend in Ottawa would have called me by now… or maybe he is just being a dink about it and bid on the game for himself!  Oh well, it was fun to think about for a while.

Sega Corner:  No updates from the Ottawa trip aside from that I will be going back to Belleville at some point with the Sega Dude to visit Chumleighs again.  They had quite a few Genesis games for sale.  The thing about Chumleighs is that while they are a gaming store, their prices are usually what I would call fair… meaning that they are at or slightly below that of pricecharting.com or one of my several gaming price guide apps that I have on my phone.

All the other stores in Ottawa like Microplay were inconsistently overpriced… meaning that they were asking for either WAY too much money, or just a bit too much money that I took a pass.  In fact there was one store in Quebec that we went to that was in the middle of nowhere that had the BEST selection of games that I’ve ever seen.  However you guessed it… asking too much money.  For example they wanted $250 for a copy of Snow Bros. on the NES.  I suppose I could have tried haggling a bit, but you know how that goes when the person you are bargaining with is some underpaid teenager who just couldn’t give a hoot, and we are just lucky that they showed up for work.

I managed to score these two titles at a Value Village somewhere along the way:)

Until next time…

Nintendo Joe

 

Another Week of Collecting Retro Games

This was my “best” find of the week.  Unfortunately I already have a mint copy in my collection.  I thought I would use it for a trade, but apparently the Sega Dude doesn’t have it and i just can’t resist giving it to him.  It’s important to keep him happy so that when he finds something that I don’t have he’ll give it to me.  Otherwise I can always expect a text saying “look what I found… no big deal”, whereupon he lords his purchase over me.  I haven’t had that happen in a while though… maybe keeping the beast fed is a good thing:)  The price I paid for the game is a bit more than I would have liked for a thrift store, but then again it was Super C (part of the Contra series) and usually sells for around $20.  To put it in perspective, they wanted $9.99 for a copy of Super Mario/Duckhunt so they were just throwing numbers out there when pricing these games.  Usually they go for around $3.99 at this place, but alas because it is retro they figure they can get more for it… and they were right as the next time i was in the store all the games had been sold.

 

I don’t know anything about it, but it has the Silver Surfer in the title, and I needed it in my collection.  Plus $8.99 isn’t bad.  The graphics and sound are pretty good, but the game itself is REALLY hard!  It’s so hard that it makes it not that much fun to play.  It’s an side scrolling and overhead shooter which normally i’m pretty good at, but in this case I’m terrible.  The one redeeming feature in the game is that like in Mega Man you can choose which stage you want to conquer first.  That way you get a bit more variety in how you start the game.

This game I bought because it was under priced at $6.  For a complete game this is a really good price and I’m hoping to trade it for some more NES or SNES at the next video game show in September.  While I’m waiting though I’ll enjoy playing it.  Graphically it looks amazing, and if you are a fan of Robotech this isn’t one to miss.  There are a few problems with the game, the biggest being the controls.  I’m not sure why they didn’t use the two stick analogue controls like most games do… this would have made the game much more fun in my opinion.  However that being said I haven’t played it much at all so we’ll see what it has in store.

The last game I purchased was Lemmings for the SNES.  I don’t know why but I have always wanted to play this game but never have.  It is a puzzle game that you have to solve in order to prevent all the Lemmings from falling to their death in mass hordes… as they sometimes do in the wild.  What a gruesome and bizarre sight that must be.  I remember seeing this game on the PC and it looks like fun.  Hopefully the SNES version holds up to the test of time.