Now I know for sure that the video game God’s have gone completely insane… JJgames.com was charging $440USD for the Flintstones: Rescue of Dino and Hoppy several weeks ago! The game usually sells for no more than $20, and that’s pushing it as the title isn’t rare, and isn’t that good!
I’d like to say that JJgames got it wrong, and realized their error in that it wasn’t Surprise at Dinosaur Peak, but here we have the reduced price of $90USD for the same game a few weeks later?! I’ve ordered from these guys before as if you really scan their website there occasionally is a deal to be had… but 99% of the time I feel that they way overcharge… that being said they’ve been around for a long time, and if they are getting their asking price, more power to them! In fact I no longer see this game on their website… does anyone want my copy of the original Flintstones for an unreasonable price?!
This is a screen shot from Lukiegames.com. Again I’ve ordered from them before several years ago, but seeing as I only need rare titles for my NES collection I doubt I’ll be doing business with them again. In the above picture, you can see that they are charging $276.47USD for Bubble Bobble 2. This is actually a semi-reasonable price considering that it usually goes for around $300USD according to my collectors app, and videogamepricecharting.com. I sent them a request to check the condition of the label, and they replied that they wouldn’t bother. I requested again and told them that this isn’t a $5 game we are talking about… and was still rejected (reading between the lines I can infer that it isn’t even worth their effort)?! WTF?! Do they not care about customer service even for higher priced items?! I want to be wined and dined for this kind of cash!
When I was in Miami several years ago I asked if I could see the Lukie Games warehouse, and was told that it wasn’t possible. Here I am 1,500Km away from home, and they still wouldn’t accommodate me?! It’s not a difficult decision to cut them off from my business and recommendations! Suck it Lukie Games!
The trend on retro game prices still seems to be declining though… I can wait for my $400 copy of Little Samson!
My 100th post! Mega Man 11 was released today and I’m super excited! I’ll definitely pick it up this week as the $40 dollar price tag is fair… and I’ll actually play the thing! I’ll do a review of it in the weeks to come. The boss robot masters look great, huge, and intimidating. I can’t wait to destroy them! This doesn’t pose as great news for the newly acquired Mighty No. 9 however. It will go on the back burner, but I WILL play it!
This past Saturday, a few friends came over for our first “Alien Isolation No Gurlz Allowed Sausage Party”. The wife was out of town, and this was the perfect opportunity to engage a horrific Xenomorph… and terrify me it did! I’m sure the Sega Dude will be posting an unflattering video of me playing the game and getting cornered by an Alien. I screamed just before it tore me apart. It’s been over a decade since I’ve screamed in panic like that and unbeknownst to me it was filmed which I’m sure the Sega Dude will post on his site in the near future. In my defense however, how can you not scream when you are being hunted by an Alien?! I can’t remember if we made it to the fifth or sixth mission, but we plan on getting together again this Friday to advance further into the game.
In other news, Nintendo successfully sued a company called MariCAR in Japan that was renting Mario Kart costumes and go-carts to people (mostly tourists). You can read the article here. Or not, I pretty much summed it up.
As mentioned in my earlier post, I have a lot of things that are really bugging me lately and even though this is a video game hunting blog, I’m running out of ideas. There just isn’t really much to find on the cheap in terms of thrift stores, Kijiji, garage sales, and certainly not Ebay. The days of possibly finding Little Sampson for an awesome deal are long over unfortunately. As such, I’m opening up a new department on My Nintendo Dimension aptly named “Joe’s Grievances”. Here is today’s issue:
I was listening to the morning show on Q107 while driving into work, and one of the hosts (Ryan Parker) said he has been on Tinder app the for a while and is finding it hard to find dates as most women aren’t interested in dudes under 5’9. I bet he’s right, and I stand at a measly 5’7 with my Doc Martins on, I guess I would still be having a hard time finding a date! This is even weirder as my parents are both taller than average. One could argue that my mom got “friendly” with the mail man, but this theory is debunked as besides the hair colour, I look exactly like my old man. This sucks! I am happily married to a woman who apparently has a shorty fetish, so it isn’t really an issue, but it’s more the principle of it all.
SEGA Corner: Sega makes Alien Isolation (see above) so that’s the news for today.
Next week we will be discussing what ever happened to the game swap in Waterloo which was put on by Video Game Collectors Community (VGCC).
We are back from Africa without so much a sliver of an injury… though the anti-malaria pills are wrecking havoc on my digestive system and thankfully the symptoms didn’t start until the day we arrived back in Toronto!
What can I say… Africa was the best trip I’ve ever been on… and is a huge bucket list accomplishment. I saw every animal I wanted to see… including several of my beloved Great White Sharks which I’ve wanted to see so desperately since 1984 when my dad let me stay up late one night to finish watching Jaws… which to this day is still my favorite movie!
We saw four of the Big 5 animals (buffalo, elephant, leopard, and rhino) on the first day, and they were magnificent. But the best moment came when we came across eight lions eating a giraffe carcass one night. We had a spotlight on them and got some great video… however it was what you didn’t see but rather heard that made it so memorable. In the darkness you could hear the hyenas rallying the troops to come in and steal the kill for themselves. They got closer and closer, and a few minutes later there they were! Three of them stole what I think was a hip bone and dragged it off into the darkness with that creepy yowl/laugh they are so famous for. That was the first moment that it actually hit me that I WAS REALLY IN AFRICA!
A few things I learned on our trip:
$15US is all it takes to “balance out the plane” if you are over the 15Kg limit in total baggage in Uganda… there was a bit of a shakedown at the Entebbe airport.
Male kudus only live to 8 years compared to the 15 years a female kudu lives. This is because at 7 years old, kudu males are ready to mate, and can think of nothing else and often forget to even eat. This weakens their body and makes them easy prey for lions!
The red crested korhan is also known as the suicide bird, as during mating season the males will all fly super high in the sky, then dive-bomb towards the surface. The last one to pull out of the dive wins the right to mate with the females. Apparently many of them slam into the ground. (This proves that men of all species a stupid, and isn’t limited to us humans).
Ant lions only poop once in a lifetime.
As this is a video game blog, I figured I should give Africa a look. I have concluded that there are no video games left in Africa. Not that they would be usable in North America anyway as they would be on the PAL format.
I’m going to make a short video that I can post on YouTube, but it is going to take a while as there is over 50 gigabytes of footage to go through, and 5000 pictures. I’ll let you know when it is up.
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.
I remember when I first asked the Sega Dude if he wanted to go game hunting with me, he thought that I wanted kill a deer and eat it. I was shocked when he told me an emphatic “NO!”, but then later realized what he thought I meant. Anyways… So I went to the above three events looking for games and I came out with some pretty cool titles.
First the pick ups are from Fan Expo. What’s interesting here is that there was a store represented here called The Blue Gryphon which is a place that I visited in Gatineau, Quebec last year… but at the store their prices seemed a bit high… however at Fan Expo the games were not only at a good price but the owner was also willing to deal with me. Also I finally acquired a title that I’ve been looking for since I started collecting for the NES… Might & Magic: Secret of the Inner Sanctum! I’m a huge fan of the M&M series and as this was the only title on the NES I figured it wouldn’t be too hard to find; I was wrong. In fact I had only seen the game once before at a store called Buy & Sell Kings but they had it complete with the box and that jacked up the price to over $100+tax… even though it is a cool game, it’s just too much. Besides as you know I lik to buy my own boxes thanks to the help of the universal game cases, and thecoverproject.net (which by the way was down for a bit, but is now back up and running business as usually…phew!). Might & Magic is an RPG that is from a first person POV. There are many monsters to defeat, and many items to acquire… I can’t wait to get started as I’ve only played the beginning on an NES emulator for my Mac. So in addition to M&M, I also bought Rollerblade Racer, Rally Bike, Garry Kitchen’s Battle Tank, and Tecmo Baseball, all for $70 cash.
For whatever reason I just didn’t have Tecmo Baseball in my collection… it is such a common game. I sifted through several boxes of games and managed to pick out the few I didn’t already have from his common titles. In his “rare” bin there were a few I needed but just didn’t want to spend the money. One title that I kind of regret not buying was Nobunaga’s Ambition 2 for the NES. The price was fair (I can’t remember how much exactly) but as I said, he wasn’t giving it away for a song:(
We went to Fan Expo on Friday night, and hit up the Barrie Game Exchange the following Sunday. While I didn’t win any of the door prizes (they were actually really terrible prizes) a good time was had. I met up with a few people I knew who were selling games including the Retro Game Bros., Flavio, Fred (my guy in Lakefield ON), and also had a chance to meet SeeJayAre who does a live garage sale pick ups video on youtube (he was just selling games like other vendors but no one knew who he was except me. You should actually check out his channel as it is pretty cool… he was one of the pioneers of the hidden camera at garage sales video (at least up here in Canada). He is actually from a city just outside Toronto… and man does he have lots of luck… but in a way he makes his own luck. You’ll see what I mean.
Anyways the Barrie Game Exchange was bigger than I thought it would be… at least compared to the July exchange last summer it was fairly big… like 90 tables. Still though it was no Waterloo Video Game Swap Meet which puts on the best game exchange in the area. I believe the next one is on May 29th.
Above are the pick ups from the Barrie Game Exchange, the most notable being Rainbow Islands that I picked up for $30 which was a deal as most other dealers had it up for $50. At least I didn’t talk myself up in price this time! Paperboy has been a title that I have wanted, but the price was always too much for the game that it is. I haven’t played it on the NES, but I have played it on the Commodore 64 and I remember thinking it was pretty good. But the $20 most vendors wanted just didn’t seem worth it. I managed to score Paperboy, Paperboy 2, and Jackal for $30 all in. Not bad eh?! F-15 Strike Eagle was part of the Rainbow Islands deal… this s a game that isn’t really worth speaking about so I won’t.
The above carts were traded to me from the Ice Man for the store credit that I had accrued last Christmas. While the credit wasn’t “free”, it sure didn’t feel like I was spending my cold hard cash. If you’ll recall, back last Boxing Day I went into the Ice Man’s store in Peterborough ON, and traded in pretty much all the doubles I had collected in a year… usually I sell these at the game exchange, but the Ice Man gives the best trade in value in town… the downside to this is that his games are also fairly expensive, but if you look hard you can find a deal. The best deal that I found was for a copy of Dusty Diamond All Star Softball which according to RetrowareTV.com is the second most rare sports game on the NES (Stadium Events was not included in this top 10 list but rather as an honourable mention). This is officially the rarest game in my collection. The game normally sells for around $70 – $85CAN, but this carried a $65 price tag. I’ve never seen the game before so jumped at the opportunity to trade for it. Plus when you trade there is no tax on retro games… that’s another 13% savings:) The other titles were fairly pricy… too much for my wallet, but not for trade. To acquire the $450 in store credit, I probably spent about $100… so $4.50 on the dollar isn’t bad and makes these pick ups great as I probably would not have otherwise have gotten them. Anyways the titles are Conan (obviously cool), Mickey’s Adventure in Numberland, and Nigel Mansell’s World Championship.
There is absolutely nothing remarkable about the above two games except that I once owned them and they disappeared. I had the universal game case complete with covers printed, but somehow managed to lose these games. The Sega Dude swears he didn’t steal them… and I believe him… which means they disappeared into thin air which does happen from time to time around these parts. Anyways my North American NES black label collection is now complete:) What is interesting is that this was all I started out collecting. Then it got out of control, but that is a story for another day.
First and foremost, I have to thank the Sega Dude’s beautiful and thoughtful wife for finding (and giving me) a near mint box and instruction manual for my Diddy Kong Racing cartridge for my N64. Thank you, and this service will not be forgotten! It will go in the collection and shine with pride:)
I’ve been doing a lot of garage sailing on Saturday mornings and I must say that I’m getting much better at it as I gain more experience. I’ve been watching a youtube channel by some guy named SeeJayAre who documents his garage sale finds and has quite a substantial collection of his own. I wouldn’t classify him as a reseller, but more of a trader. He seems to trade all his doubles to pick up games that he doesn’t have in his collection. The big difference between SeeJayAre and myself (well his collection is much grander than mine) is that he collects for pretty much every single system. I limit myself to NES and SNES… and I dabble in Game Cube, Wii, and the N64. I have a few titles for the Sega Master System, and Sega Genesis which I usually cover in the ever popular “Sega Corner” portion of this blog;)
Below is a score that I made at Value Village last Tuesday while on my way to pick up my wife at work. This post is titled “Got It” because of this find. Nothing in here is really that big a deal (Super Mario All Stars has some trading value), but I swooped in on another guy trying to buy the games. He asked, “can I see the SNES games” and the person behind the counter gave him half the pile. I waited for a few seconds and then asked if I could see the other half. Low and behold in my half there was a game that I didn’t have… Dr. Mario & Tetris double cart for the SNES! Yay… but more than that the other guys pile of games were worthless pieces of junk like Wheel of Fortune… sucks to be him! I finally scored (though it doesn’t make up for the “Early Bird Gets the Worm” tragedy where I missed a NES with about 8 games for $5. I’m still bitter about that one!
These games are some of the loot I bought while garage sailing. While there is nothing special here, these are games that were not out on display at the yard sale. I used my typical line (picked up from SeeJayAre)… “do you happen to have any old video games like Nintendo or Gameboy, or Sega” For once the lady said that she actually had a few games inside the house if I wanted to take a look. She brought them out, and while there was nothing to write home about at $2 a piece for complete games this was a bargain. I’ll probably keep Pac Man Party and trade the others for more desirable titles.
The Pokemon Pinball came into my collection thanks to my amazing, beautiful, and generous wife. While I don’t really collect Pokemon, this game was a big hit at the Swap Meet last March. I should be able to get some good trade-in value for it. That being said, I just looked it up, and it isn’t worth that much at all, but never the less I still thank my wife for looking out for me and the collection! Keep your eyes open honey… you might just find something great!
Sega Corner: A special congrats to the Sega Dude for setting up a youtube page that is becoming ever more profitable for him. I think he was up to $0.34 the last time i checked. That’s a lot more than I have earned, but then I don’ t have a youtube channel. I’m not quite at that calibre yet (I still have lots to learn about this blog page first!). I’m so proud of him and just a bit jealous!
My wife and I are back from out annual highway127 yard sale trip and it’s good to be home. In the past 5 days we’ve been yardsaling across the state of Ohio…. and to think that is only the tip of the iceberg. This sale goes starts in Addison Michigan, and goes all the way down to Gadsden Alabama. It would be impossible to do it all on one trip… that being said, if I was by myself I would have made it WAY further (I really only wanted to acquire more video games where as my wife was looking at all sorts of uninteresting things). However as far as Nintendo goes the pool was rather dry. In the entire state of Ohio, I only managed to get my hands on 5 NES games I didn’t already have. I did score a big hit for the Sega Dude in that I got him 8 non-sports Sega CD games for $20. That seemed like a good deal, but wasn’t really helping my collection any. So further south we travelled, and my patience was running thin…
…that is until we hit Cincinnati…
... here I went to two different retail stores (Game Swap, and Games Galore), and for a resale outlet I must say that their prices were more than fair on many NES and SNES titles. There was a few oddball prices… like $55 for a copy of Super Smash Bros. on the N64 with it’s label completely destroyed (to the point that you could barely tell what game it was). That being said, some guy bought the game when I was there… thanks buddy, because you bought this piece of crap for such a high amount, games will continue to have overly inflated price tags! I however only picked up the games that were priced blow that stated on my iPhone ap and/or pricecharting.com. In fact, some of the prices were far below the listed rate… and this was true at both of these stores, so it wasn’t like I caught them sleeping. Video games are just that much cheaper in the United States than they are up here in Canada. The staff at these stores were very friendly and anxious to help me out. I felt like a kid in a candy store… I’ll take that one, that one, and that one…. oh that one looks good, etc..
The next morning we went to two flea markets (Traders World, and Treasure Aisles) that were right across the street from each other… and like the stores, their prices were low as well for many games. I picked up a copy of both Caslevania IV, and Act Raiser 2 for the SNES for $45. It was not the listed price… that would have been $52. But my offer was accepted:) Now according to pricecharting.com, this is a fair deal. But up here in Canada I’ve seen stores charge $55 for Caslevania IV alone… granted prices here are not as expensive as in European countries, but still I must protest! I liked that people were willing to haggle a bit on their prices, and overall were a joy to do business with. There was one video game store in Traders World that had prices I would compare to that from Canada. For example he wanted $150 for The Adventures of Lolo 1,2,&3 as a set… i wasn’t impressed and didn’t buy anything from that guy. But all the other stores were pretty cool. $10 on Mario Time Machine for the SNES, a buy two get one free… actually I got two free games (Final Fight and Fatal Fury) as they were already priced low at $5, and $4 respectively.
All in all I spent $240 and came home with 34 NES games, 9 SNES games, and a few miscellaneous titles that I want to trade. The big lesson to be learned from all this… save up your money and go down to the United States to do your game hunting. It’s just hurts my wallet too much to be buying games up here from stores… so what do you say Sega Dude, road trip?!
It’s been a pretty dry garage sale season when it comes to game hunting… until last weekend!
All this plus a complete SNES console for a mere $54. The Gameboy games were a big find, but the score of the day was the SNES along with 7 games… six of them boxed for $20!! The best game that I don’t already have is Yoshi’s Island: Super Mario World 2, but the others are pretty good traders and I should get something pretty sweet for these titles. Now the debate I’ve been having this: I already have Donkey Kong Country 1 & 2 in a case that I had made, now I have an extra copy of each in the original box. The box (while cool to have) doubles the trade value. Donkey Kong Country in the box alone is $40 all day long. I don’t necessarily want the cash… in fact i would rather have another $40 game that i don’t have…. like Mega Man 4 for example. Then I would keep my old copies of both games (already in a fancy universal case with a printed cover). Your thoughts?!
To be completely honest, one of the Gameboy games in the above picture wasn’t from the big garage sale score. Pokemon Blue Version for the Gameboy was actually a Value Village purchase ($10.50). It’s complete which great, but as you all know Pokemon isn’t really my cup of tea. That being said it has fantastic trade value and will sell on Kijiji fast. Again… I would rather trade. But I’m going to hold on to this game for a while for if you remember several months ago I was ripped off in a trade by some douche bag who claimed to have sent me in the mail a copy of Mega Man 5 and Mega Man X in trade for this game along with three others… all I ended up with in return was some bad feelings and a more suspicious mind. It’s bitter sweet that I ended up finding this game again, and complete in the box at that:)
These N64 carts were also a recent Value village purchase and in total amounted to $23 after tax. Perfect Dark is an early FPS that isn’t that great by today’s standards, but back when it came out was revolutionary. Castlevania is the other title which is yet another 3rd person perspective game… much like most other N64 titles. It’s like Nintendo found something that was pretty cool a few times (Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, Mario 64) and decided that, hey, if it worked with a few hits, lets make ALL of our new games with the same engine. That being said, Castlevania is actually a pretty cool game on the N64. It has a targeting system much like that of the Zelda 64 titles, but I found that it was rather repetitive and became boring quite quickly.
Just throwing this out there… I would go so far as to say that the N64 is the worst of all the Nintendo consoles, with the SNES taking the top spot as terms of overall gaming fun.
What do you think is the best Nintendo console (excluding handhelds)?
k ups are from Fan Expo. What’s interesting here is that there was a store represented here called 
oject.net
My Nintendo Dimension 