“Do you collect these?” asked the cashier at the thrift store as I was purchasing a carded Chun Li G.I. Joe action figure for $2.50.
“No,” I answered truthfully. “But I had this when I was a kid.”
Leaving the store, I took the Chun Li out of my bag to reminisce about how truly godawful these figures were. Just at that moment, a bird kicked me in the head. You cannot make this stuff up.
This weekend of thrift store scavenging was a high-volume one — I ended up carrying around two bags full of junk by the time I finally got home. I think I may have that disease where you compulsively buy things. Whatevs.
The first thing I bought was that copy of Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 for Sega Saturn. “But Chris,” you might reasonably ask, “why would you buy a completely worthless copy of the worst fighting game ever made?” Indeed, even in the stack of lame Saturn games that it was sitting in, it was hardly something I’d spend money on. But look what came spilling out when I opened it:
Oh hi, copies of Rampage World Tour and Guardian Heroes! Especially the latter. Sure, Treasure’s Saturn side-scroller wasn’t as good as the Genesis game whose name it vaguely borrowed, but $3 for three Saturn discs isn’t a bad deal. I passed on copies of things like Virtua Cop and a disc-only Street Fighter Alpha — not worth it.
From that same store, the two Atari 2600 cartridges. These have actually been sitting there forever at $2.50 each. I initially thought the whole pile was just a bunch of common games, and for the most part it was. But as it turns out, Miniature Golf and Slot Machine were discontinued, so they’re hard to find as far as first-party VCS games go. Slot Machine is also one of the first games designed by David Crane.
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 for Dreamcast is totally worth $9, right?
Also, apparently somebody dropped their entire Genesis collection into one of the Goodwill donation bins around San Francisco, because every Goodwill store suddenly all had a bunch of Genesis games. Mostly common, but some weird ones from publishers that I’ve never heard of: D.J. Boy (Kaneko), Junction (Micronet), and *Championship Bowling *(Mentrix Software). Chuck Rock and *ESWAT *rounded out the Genesis finds for the day — everything else was ultra-common.