Another lesson for me in not giving up. I was tired and pretty much wanted to skip the last few stores on my usual route this Saturday, especially one that was a bit out of the way and doesn’t usually turn up anything good. But I went down there, looked around, saw nothing, and was about to leave when I passed by… Puck Monster! I can’t believe I nearly didn’t buy it, but for $3 I took the chance that it wouldn’t work.
Impressively, it did, and I found out that Gakken’s Pac-Man clone — only released in the UK and Japan, so I don’t know how it got to a Goodwill in SF — is actually the same game as Coleco’s well-known and highly collectible tabletop Pac-Man mini-arcade machine. Licensed in one territory, unlicensed in another. Fancy that. It’s probably one of the best little LED games around, with plenty of color, amusing characters, decent music, and really nice use of the limited screen space. (As the ghosts move around, the dots become their eyes). Totally worth having to get four C batteries just to play it.
Improbably, I also found a sealed copy of Crazy Taxi 2 at a different store for $5.49. This brings the total number of sealed Dreamcast games that I’ve found at area Goodwills to, like, three. Which is a lot. Don’t know why it’s always sealed Dreamcast games.