Week 2 [02.05.06]

Day Total: $1.00

Sales Visited: 5

1 John Madden Football box
Paid: FREE


1 Mystical Ninja (SNES)
Paid: $1.00


(kept games underlined)
1 Super Mario/Duck Hunt
1 Gyromite
1 Mighty Bomb Jack
1 Deadly Towers
1 Operation Wolf
1 Iron Tank
1 Super Mario 2
1 Tennis
1 Rambo
1 Popeye
1 Volleyball
1 Metal Gear
1 Pinball
1 Urban Champion
1 Tecmo Baseball
1 Zelda 2
Paid: FREE


Hit 4 flea markets this weekend. We've really had the yardsale bug lately, so we decided to hit up our local indoor fleas. Saw a lot of stuff overpriced that we sadly had to leave behind. But at least we came home with a few things.

We found Mystical Ninja at one of the flea markets, on a shelf inside of a small cupboard. It was tagged $5, but we offered $1 and the woman took it. Note the dirt-encrusted case in the picture (above). Not even 3 minutes with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, and you can see the results (below).

It pisses me of seeing all of these dirt-encrusted, filthy games and systems sitting at flea markets with ridiculous pricetags. Like, if you're going to charge $40 for a SNES, take 10 minutes and make it look nice. If you're going to try and sell me a SNES cart that looks like it was burried in the ground, don't try and milk $5 or $10. All of the flea market vendors are sitting on their asses all day, either watching little black and white TVs or going outside to smoke cigarettes. It's like they don't even care about selling their products at all. Take some of that time that you spend doing absolutely nothing, and clean your shit. Ugh. IT TAKES LESS THAN 5 MINUTES!

Saw a box of 10 or so Atari 2600 carts, and 3 Intellivision game boxes. We later found out that there was an Atari 2600 Jr. in a box somewhere, which was covered up by other junk. Everything was in horrible condition, yet he would only go as low as $30 for the entire bundle. I informed him that he had mostly common games, that were in poor condition, that usually corrode and become unusable after all this time (especially in the state they're in), and are readily available on PS2 compilation disks. He didn't care, so we walked.

The Madden box was sitting on a table at another flea market (outdoors - it was a nice day ). We saw there was no game in the box, just the manual. We asked the guy about it and he said it must've been stolen. We went on to ask what he was going to do with the box, and he told us to just take it.

Went to another indoor flea, and saw a HUGE collection of videogame stuff. Bins upon bins of cart only games, tons of systems and boxes, everything you could think of. They had a GCN kiosk set up, and a bunch of systems set up to play. This store/set-up was run by an elderly skinny black woman, and her son. The son was probably 40 years old, weighed about 400 pounds, and was confined to a wheel chair. He had a long gray beard, 4 inch long purple fingernails, and a rastafarian hat. Unfortunately, everything they had was overpriced. The only thing I found that I would want was Alex Kidd in Shinobi World (Sega Master System) with Box and no manual. She wouldn't go lower than $10, and when I offered $5 she kicked me out of the store. Ah well.

Finally, the burnt NES games were a Craigslist find from a few weeks ago. They were listed for free, and the guy indicated that they had been left near a radiator. Most of the games have burns or melted edges. The games in blue are the ones we are keeping, because they are the least damaged or dirty. Metal Gear isn't in spectacular condition, but it's a game we don't yet own. Normally we would throw it out, but we're going to hold onto it until we come across a better cart. The bitter irony of it all is that Mario/Duck Hunt is in great shape, while the games we didn't have are scorched and warped. It's sad that we have to throw away games, but they are really beyond repair and there's no point in keeping them.