TOKYO — The Akihabara district is undeniably the place to go for high-priced collectible videogames, but what if you’re broke? What kind of weird and wonderful Japanese treasures can you dig up for just $1 per game?
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These crowded game shops usually fill a “junk corner” with overstocked games or titles in less-than-mint condition. So, if you dare to take the Broke in Tokyo challenge, it’s actually quite easy to land 10 games for $10 (or roughly 1,000 yen).
The hard part is locating odd-yet-promising games you’ve never played before: Games that look good, or at least really weird, and that provide a peculiar insight into Japanese game design or culture.
Here are the tainted treasures, hideous misfires and genuine diamonds I excavated in Akihabara’s cut-rate videogame vaults, plus a dollar’s worth of impressions for each game.
Above:
Remakes of retro videogames are all the rage today, but the practice is already more than a decade old. Namco brought back its classic 1981 arcade shooter Galaga for the PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16) in 1988, and it turns out to be a fun, inventive upgrade with pretty, 16-bit graphics and catchy music. The addition of scrolling levels that culminate in boss fights against giant alien bugs must have blown people away back in the day.
How much: 100 yen
Why so cheap: Damage. The case is cracked, the instructions are wrinkled, etc.
Worth it?: Totally.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
When this PlayStation game was released in 1998, Squaresoft’s role-playing games were all the rage. So why didn’t this one make it out of Japan? Because it wasn’t very good. It was one of the company’s first full 3-D games, with the characters and backgrounds all rendered with real-time polygons. But it looked like a low-res mess back then, and more so now. It features music by Hiroki Kikuta, the amazing composer of Secret of Mana, but that’s more of a reason to just buy the soundtrack.
How much: 90 yen
Why so cheap: Not even Square fans seem to want this.
Worth it?: To confirm that I made the right decision by not spending $70 on this back in the day, yes.