So in case you’ve been wondering, these days I just stack my thrift store purchases up in the other room until the pile threatens to tip over and kill someone. When it hits this critical mass, it’s time for another thrifting post.
The competition seems to have cranked up here in San Francisco; if I leave something in a thrift store that’s even remotely interesting, chances are it’ll be gone the next time I go in. Did I ruin it for myself by writing so much about my finds? Anyway, I still seem to have a decent amount of luck, as evidenced by the $7 3DO (pictured top). It’s the Panasonic FZ-10, a later model is notable for actually resembling an honest-to-God videogame system. It even has a flip-top lid.
What it didn’t have was a controller, so I can’t actually use it. It works, though — played my 80-yen copy of D just fine.
Between this and the $7.50 CD-i I got in May, I’m building a nice collection of inexpensively acquired failed early 1990’s multimedia consoles. If only I could find a Laseractive.
There’s another thrift store that seems to always be having a sale. One day, anything on a disc was a mere $1, and they for some reason had a pile of Japanese PlayStation 1 games and U.S. Dreamcast games. Nothing amazingly exciting in the bunch, but I did get these for a song:
- Soul Calibur
- Oddworld: Abe’s Odyssee
- Arc the Lad II
- Arc the Lad
- Wild Arms
- OverBlood
That last one featured the programming expertise of none other than Level-5’s Akihiro Hino. I left many games on the shelf, from common Dreamcast titles like Crazy Taxi to Japanese PSone games like Choro-Q.
Continuing down that pile of games, there’s Surf City for CD-i (featuring the music of the Beach Boys!), World Class Baseball for TurboGrafx,* Gangster Town* for Master System, and a sealed copy of Thunderstrike for Sega CD. All of these were around $2 each. Also, check out the box art for Gangster Town:
It’s like Final Fantasy XIII all over again, 25 years earlier.
At right, two uncommon loose games: Math Blaster Volume 1 for Super NES (there was no Volume 2, natch) and Ecco Jr. for Genesis. Ordinarily I wouldn’t spend $3 on loose SNES or Genesis games, but these are hard to find. Digital Press‘ verdict is that a loose copy of Math Blaster should fetch about $14 by itself.