More random thrift store finds from San Francisco’s thriving secondhand market. This is actually two weekends’ worth of casual browsing — I haven’t really gone out with a mission in a while, just when I happened to be passing by.
Having already been smiled upon by The Patron Saint Of Flea Markets last month, I think I’ve cashed in all my karma and won’t be finding anything especially rare for a while. But there’s still some interesting stuff in this pile, including Dreamcast. Yes: I say to you today, my friends, I have a Dreamcast game.
But first, take Battlemaster for Sega Genesis — please! I’m always fascinated to see Genesis games that I’ve never heard of. I paid close attention to the Super Nintendo lineup back in the day, because that’s what I had, but the vagaries of Sega’s 16-bit output mostly escaped me. Battlemaster is apparently a tactical strategy medieval something or another, that takes “at least 100 hours” to complete, according to the canary yellow box.
I’m more pleased, in a kind of weird and creepy way, to have found Slaughter Sport. I didn’t actually realize it at first, given the kickass box art and title redesign, but this is actually the Genesis version of a completely effed-up fighting game alternately called Tongue Of The Fatman or Mondu’s Fight Palace. It had a different name on every single platform it ended up on, and they were all ridiculously bad. I never did figure out if this freaky Street Fighter clone was taking itself seriously or just kidding, but you have to see some screens of it — from a fan site, of course it has a fan site — to understand:
And that’s what we played back in 1990, kids, because that’s all we had sometimes. Moving right along. I wasn’t going to pay $6.99 for Jaleco’s Carrier on the Dreamcast, because who would, but apparently there was some kind of sale and I got it for free for buying Carly Simon’s breakthrough 1972 album No Secrets for $3.50. No, it doesn’t make sense to me either, but I’ve stopped asking questions.
Same thing with Star Wars: Demolition. Vehicular combat set in the post-Episode 1 Star Wars universe? Boba Fett versus a Podracer? How could I not? This must be deliciously bad.
Sealed copy of PGA Tour 96 for the 3DO? I have a feeling somebody from Ziff is going to email me and tell me that they threw this away the other week and donated it to Goodwill along with some old clothes and Patrick Klepek’s hair.
Finally, I was in Berkeley and found a loose copy of Zelda: Late To The Party for $0.69. Any higher — seventy-five cents, like — and I’d have left it there, but I bought it out of… I don’t know. Self-defeatism? I have a feeling I’m going to end up like one of those old people you hear about whose apartments are just stacks of newspapers and garbage, except when the cops find my body they’ll just have to navigate through a maze of loose Super Nintendo games.