I haven't been thriftstoring in a while, so I decided to set out today and hit up every store I know of. It wasn't exactly a red-letter day (although I don't think anything will ever top The Best Day Ever), but I found it odd that, the very week that we discussed Pro Wrestling for Master System on Retronauts, I saw its guy-giving-himself-a-headlock grimacing up at me from a plastic bucket in a Salvation Army.
And at only two bucks, totally worth it. If just barely. I guess $2 is my impulse-buy price for Master System. At $3, I'd have to consider it and I'd take into account whether or not it's worth anything. But $2, I'll buy whatever.
More interesting finds after the jump.
Okay, there's everything. To start, I headed down to the Haight, where I immediately noticed something very wrong. The bus stop by the park was giving me a really eerie feeling, and I soon figured out why: all the drug dealers were gone. I was freaked out by this. The bus stop by the McDonald's is usually filled with at least three dudes repeating the mantra "Green bud, green bud," in really low tones so as to not alert the authorities, as if there was anyone within visual range who couldn't tell just by looking at them.
At any rate, all I could see were clean-cut people and families. I thought I was maybe in the wrong place, but no. So I went into the McDonald's for lunch -- this is a rare treat for me, since there's no McDonald's near my apartment -- and when I came out, the guys who were in front of me in line were now out there sipping their small milkshakes and selling pot. "Thank goodness," I thought.
Things being back to normal, I headed into the Goodwill and turned up a whole lot of nothing. The glass showcase where they put their video games had Japanese Dreamcast games like Virtua Fighter 3tb and Sonic Adventure, but I knew whatever they were charging was way more than I'd consider paying for dirt-common DC stuff. They had Baseball Stars NES and Super Scope 6 for SNES. Garbage. I'd given up hope, but found a complete DeCap Attack for Genesis on the way out. $3.49.
Hopped the bus over to the Mission. Thrift Town, where I got a Japanese copy of Shinobi II and a Super Mega Key the first time I went there, and it was totally barren. Actually, if you were into old PC games, you'd have thought differently; they had mint condition 5 1/2-inch floppy versions of Prince of Persia andNight Shift, among others. I passed.
The Goodwill wasn't much better, although I did get a copy of Japan Unbound for $4.50. When did they freakin' jack up the prices on books at Goodwill stores, anyway? I remember when hardback books were 50 cents and everything else was a quarter.
The bus wasn't coming, so I went to the pawn shop across the street. They had the same old pile of crap they've always had, but now they were $3 instead of $5, so I bought a sealed copy of Eternal Eyes for PS1. The guy told me not to look for any new stuff in there, because they don't take back old games anymore. "If you want that stuff, go to the Laney College flea market in Oakland," he said. "Whole boxes of 'em." The thing is, I don't know if this guy knows from collectible. By "whole boxes of 'em" he might mean bootlegged PS1 games.
Speaking of which, that's precisely what I found at the next Goodwill. I thought I'd totally lucked out and found a complete copy of Buster Bros. Collection for PS1, until closer inspection revealed it to be a very, very good bootleg. With a screen-printed disc and everything. In fact, their CD rack was full of bootleg PS1 games. It looked like this store was going to be a total bust, until I found a complete copy of Enduro Racer for Master System in with the VHS tapes, and priced as if it were a VHS tape -- $1. Score one for ignorance!
Then it was off to the Salvation Army where I found the aforementioned Pro Wrestling -- again in the VHS tapes, again priced accordingly. The Goodwill around the corner had nothing, but the one further down the street turned up a couple more books -- I'd been looking for a hardcover copy of Silence of the Lambs for a while, and Modern Manners is one of my favorite humor books ever, so having a hardcover edition of that is not bad either.
Last Goodwill of the day was the one closest to my house, and was looking pretty dead until I found something in the VHS section that was not a Sega Master System game. No, it was an actual VHS tape -- with Lords of Thunder on the front cover. "Lords of Thunder?" I thought. "What the hell is this?" As it turns out, it's a promotional video tape that NEC sent out in 1993 to promote the Turbo Duo! I can't imagine they mailed out too many of these, or that very many have survived this nicely. $1.
And just for the hell of it, I bought a copy of Full Throttle for $3 before I left. I hope SCUMMVM supports it.
