I Bought Stuff! 8/22/2014: A whole mess of gaming junk.

Holy crap, when’s the last time I publicly documented my game finds on the blog? Seems like it was just last year when I wrote about find a “NOT FOR RESALE” copy of Streets of Rage 2, and a 20 minute video that about 3 of you watched. Let’s resurrect this old series, because I got some good stuff this time around.

Throughout most of 2014, I’ve found a bunch of cheap games, mostly junk like Eye Toy: Antigrav, licensed games based on The Great Escape and Starsky & Hutch, old PC games such as Mickey’s Word Adventures, even recent Game Informer issues for 50 cents each. If you’re following me on Twitter, you might’ve seen these already.

Funny enough, I found Mickey’s Word Adventures after taking advice from YouTuber LGR. After mentioning him on Twitter, I found out one of my finds were in a viewer finds segment of his “LGR Thrifts” show. I was floored when I saw it too, I didn’t expect it to be featured in the slightest. (It’s at the end of this episode, if you’re wondering. Look for the magazines on green bedding.)

Back around job, while I was doing some job hunting, I went into my local Bi-Mart. I’ve mentioned Bi-Mart before when I wrote about Atari Hot Wheels, and the place hasn’t changed one iota: It still feels like I stepped into a supermarket that hasn’t changed its look since 1985. While perusing their games section, I found several copies of this gem that I didn’t know got a GBA version.

– Rayman Raving Rabbids (GBA, $6)

I’m finding sealed Game Boy Advance games. In 2014. Even the guy at the counter was surprised, mentioning some war fighting game and a World of Warcraft expansion that had been at the store also collecting dust for years. He then went on to say “Somebody made the wrong call on this one.” At least this copy of Raving Rabbids has a home now. I bet there’s still plenty of copies, provided they haven’t been thrown into a dumpster yet.

– Need for Speed: Carbon – Own the City (GBA, $1)

The GBA game finds don’t end there: I found Need for Speed Carbon: Own the City at a garage sale. I snagged it because it was a GBA game released towards the tail end of its life. This, along with Rabbids makes me wanna pull out the GameCube with Game Boy Player and give them a try sometime. The Game Boy Player: The only reason to still own a GameCube.

Update: I would eventually get around to this game the following year after this post! You can check that out here.

Now we get into the nitty-gritty. After getting some magazine bags at Things from Another World, a local comic book chain, I started checking the thrift stores down in that area of Milwaukie, Oregon, an areaI don’t go to that often.

– Putter Golf (PS1, $1.99)

The Goodwill that I usually hit down there had some interesting stuff, like Crazy Taxi for the PS2, a load of ridiculously overpriced EA Sports games, even found NASCAR Racing for DOS. Sadly, I passed on the NASCAR game, but did get this: Putter Golf for the PlayStation. I got this because I thought of a friend who’s kinda into arcade golf games, but I later found out this is a “Simple Series” game.

The “Simple series” were a series of budget games D3 Publisher made for many different systems, notably for the PlayStation. Since D3 wasn’t known much outside of their home country, companies like Agetec and 505 Games would take these games, give them a quick translation, and sell these for those same budget prices in their respective countries. Some of D3’s franchises like Earth Defense Force and Oneechanbara started as Simple series games.

I already owned a few of these games, like the plainly-named Snowboarding, and Burstrick Wake Boarding!!. And now, Putter Golf.

I seem to have amassed a small collection of these Simple series games. Alas, since I’m American, I can’t own some of the ridiculous ones like Demolition Girl or Fighting Angels as they only got localized in Europe. Oh well, there’s always emulation.

– Pokemon Official Magazine: Special Edition (95¢)

– Resident Evil: Degeneration Blu-Ray ($3.95)

Next was a local place called the Red White and Blue. I don’t go to this one often, but I did remember them at one time them having all their board games put together in plastic bags, which was cumbersome if you just wanted a single game. Though many years ago, I did find Double Dragon V, Road Rash and Mortal Kombat inside a Home Alone 2 board game. They stopped this practice years ago, reserving the blind bags for just random toys.

While I didn’t find buried treasure like hidden games in board games this time, I did find a Pokemon magazine from 2009 covering the then-upcoming HeartGold/SoulSilver; and Resident Evil: Degeneration on Blu-ray. Degeneration is a competent Resident Evil movie, certainly better than the live-action movies that were basically Paul W.S. Anderson’s excuse to have his wife Milla Jovovich do things on screen for two hours. Maybe I’ll write about Degeneration sometime.

The Operative: No One Lives Forever (PC, $2)

Ballistic (Nuon DVD, $3)

Finally, at another local thrift store, I got two more games. First is No One Lives Forever, a classic first person shooter by Monolith. I found this game at thrift stores before, but I stupidly passed on it because I thought the game was supposed to be on two discs and that disc two was missing, only to find out disc two is a bonus disc. I seem to have a habit of doing this, as I had the same issue with a Parasite Eve disc I found a few years back in a previous post.

The other game was one I didn’t expect to find in a thrift store: a game for the freakin’ Nuon! The Nuon was this fancy DVD technology that could be used for many things, including playing games on a DVD player. It didn’t take off, thus the Nuon players and the games are hard to find in the wild.

You may know this game better under the names Puzz Loop or Magnetica. It’s that marble-shooting color matching game that inspired the more popular Zuma. Much like the original Puzz Loop/Magnetica, this is made by Mitchell Corporation. As far as I know, Ballistic was exclusively sold as a pack-in game with Samsung Nuon players. Sadly the DVD player itself wasn’t in the same place, and I genuinely don’t know what models support the format. I hope someone makes an emulator of it, would be neat to see how different this is from the more notable installments in the series. Until then, I will have to find a Nuon DVD player.

Well, I hope you guys liked this interesting pile of junk this time around. I like documenting these finds, even years later, as they’re a reliable time capsule for me when I stumble upon these games and wonder “when the hell did I buy this?”

The downside of this is that I tend to hoard these and don’t really do anything with them. I should probably rectify that eventually.