I might be home for Christmas but the retrogame search continues unabated. The local Goodwill stores were having a huge day-after-Christmas sale: 50% off everything in the store. As you might imagine, they were pretty picked clean, but that didn’t mean totally barren. And a trip to the mall, of all places, turned up some surprising (and surprisingly awful) finds.
A stack of Genesis games sat inside a glass case at the front counter of one Goodwill. Bunch of junk, mostly: Lion King, Aladdin, Jurassic Park. Yeah, I know Aladdin is great, but by ‘junk’ I mean ‘ultra-common plus I already own three of them’.
But for Konami’s Tiny Toons game and Battletoads? At $3.99 each I was only mildly interested; at $1.99 each they were a steal! Funny how my brain works. A little lesson for you guys: always open up the box. This isn’t just to make sure the game is in there, but also to check that somebody didn’t spill a whole thing of apple juice in there ten years ago.
This is what happened to Battletoads. Luckily (miraculously), none of it got on the game label, the manual, or the paper insert. So I took all that stuff out and soaked the box in soapy water, and all the sticky gunk came off. Good as new!
Speaking of sticky gunk, the PSone games that I got at FYE in the mall are also covered with stickers, as is their modus operandi there in FYE. I’ll try to get them off later, maybe. Mostly I bought them because I knew a bunch of us were going to get together later and probably drink, and I thought having some shitty games would be funny. It was. I’ll write more about Austin Powers Pinball and Swagman (by Core and Eidos; why the hell have I never heard of it before this?) later.