My wife and I just got back from China. It was a great trip, got to see some old friends and new places. Learnt some new things, not the sort of things I was expecting to be surprised by but odd, small things. Breakfast is really hard for me to eat in China, the kinds of food they have are what I would expect to eat for dinner. Early in the morning my stomach isn't awake enough for thick sauces and bold flavors.
Mostly I want to tell you about the video game related stuff I found in China, so that's in here, but as I didn't find too much I'm going to pad this blog with other things you may find interesting. Lots of anecdotal evidence ya' know. Don't worry, there are lots of pictures and media, this is going to be long, don't feel like you have to read it all.
Were we went - Our trip was to Chongqing, Chengdu and Guilin. Sort of just southeast of central China. Chongqing, where our friends live and where we spent most of our time, is one of the most populated cities in the world. According to wiki the population is just about 29 million, but it really depends on were you decide the city ends, I have seen population numbers higher and lower. I would believe higher numbers after going there. Chongqing and Chengdu are both very important economic cities to China, highly built up, lots of fancy buildings and such. Chengdu is also were the Pandas are. If you've seen a Panda in real life it is probably on loan from the Panda center in Chengdu. Guilin, the third city, is a place I'm sure most all of you have seen paintings of even if you didn't know it. There are lots of traditional paintings of very steep cone shaped hills with scraggly trees hanging off, that's Guilin. The hills there are even represented on their money.
[img width=700 height=525]http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8444/8010613240_2fdfffdfec_c.jpg[/img]The first day in China was in our friends' home city of Chongqing. We stayed in this awesome hotel right in the heart of the big commercial district. Our friend isn't a gamer of any sort but I had let it slip beforehand I wanted to look for game stuff. This helped out because she was able to ask some friends where to look for games. My first big surprise, in this city with tens of millions of people, in the center of a big shopping district, there was only one store. To be fair, there may have been more but we didn't see any and the guy at the store didn't offer any clues to more places.
So anyways, this one store. You're expecting something big right? The store was maybe 8 feet by 15 feet, maybe. Packed to the rafters with stuff? Hardly. I have a bigger collection than this store did. But I was excited, what cool stuff would they have? Right away you could see they had Xbox 360 stuff, Kinects and everything. Of course I was looking for older things. I only speak English, the guy behind the counter only Chinese, our friend both languages (very well) but knows nothing of gaming. I ask the guy, through my friend, if he has anything "older". He points out some 360 stuff. I try to rephrase, you know things made before the 360. He says they have PS2 and PSP stuff. I try dropping words such as, "Dreamcast", "Sega", "Famicom" and "Nintendo". At this point I had been trying to talk to him for 2 minutes and it is getting face-palmingly funny to me. Finally we must have gotten him to understand because he starts pulling out Famicom knockoffs. "Yes!" I think to myself, but then I realize there are hardly any of them. He had all of about a dozen games older then the PS2. All Famicom pirates. Sigh, well okay, I'll look through them.
Up until this point, I don't think I had anything but legit games in my collection. It's a topic I don't get much excited over, I'm only interested in the real stuff. I think of the fakes as a completely separate category of thing, they simply have no appeal to me. That being said, once a cart based game reaches a certain age, I start to think of it as being part of gaming history. I wouldn't think this way about disks but carts take a bit more effort to manufacture. It's all subjective (my argument) but fake cartridge games, especially if they are more then 15-20 years old, I'm open to acquiring. (At the risk of getting even more off topic, having a fake game would in no way keep me from buying the real version).
So I ask "how much?" He says 10 yuan each (about $1.75). Suddenly I'm not so interested, "Ick! You have to pay money for these?!" After getting a look at them and realizing it's going to cost more than $20 to buy all these games, I find out I really am not all that interested. Well here I am, all the way in China, I don't know if there will be any more games. I decide to buy one. Maybe I should have offered 100 yaun (about $17.50) for all of them. But the girls (wife, friend, and friends' friend) aren't overly excited about being there and another guy has come in and is watching us at this point. So I pay the man behind the counter, weirdly, he hands the money to the second guy who walked in, who pockets it, and we leave with one game.
[img width=700 height=525]http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8314/8025080444_46db6027ae_c.jpg[/img]We do a bit more walking around, my wife asks if there is a bookstore nearby. The area we are in is like the NY Times Square of Chongqing, huge buildings, huge video screens, lots of shiny lights, monuments and tons of people walking about.
We go to a six story "bookstore", our friends insist it is a bookstore but the place is only about 30% books. Most of the place is taken up by things like music, art, toys and electronics. We pass one whole floor on the way up to the top, the electronics floor. I'll be back to that one.
The top floor is toys and kids' books, and what must be free daycare as there are about 30 kids running around and maybe 5 parent-like people. While the girls are off looking at something, I step into the area which looks like it could have Legos (I was looking for some for a friend). There is, in a little case, iQue stuff! I approach the case, it contains an iQue and several different Game Boy iQue handhelds. I start looking at the prices....and suddenly a sales lady appears and begins talking to me. Remember that, I speak English and am in China, thing? She says something to me. I apologetically and hopefully say "English?" She says the same thing again. I say I don't understand and begin looking for my friend for help. The sales lady says the same thing one more time, because you know, after three times, I'll suddenly know Chinese. At this time I turn around and notice that there are two other sales ladies standing right there and a couple others looking in my direction. 6'3", brown hair, reddish/orange beard, obviously a westerner, let's just say I stand out in the toy section of a Chinese bookstore amongst all the kids and female sales clerks.
Time to scurry away, after all, this is the second store I've been to and the electronics floor is still ahead. At the time it seemed as if I was going to have good luck in this country.
2nd floor electronics - Games are on this one right? They have cameras, weird laptops and tablets with brand names I've never heard of, a music section, which included....cassette tapes? Weird. I find, off in a corner, a small game section. Were any of them honest releases? I can't say. There were maybe 20 games, some of them had pretty good looking boxes but were of a very different style then normal. I think they were mostly PC games as I didn't see any PS3 or 360 logos. There were a couple boxes which looked like DS system boxes, picking one up it was way too light to have a DS in it. Calling over my awesome friend and interpreter, we decide it is a box with DVD's which you somehow put on your PC and then transfer to your DS. It says it contains 160 games, obviously legit right? I buy it. After being put off by the Famicom fakes why did I buy it? I don't know. The box looks neat? It was 40 yuan or about $7.
And I made an unboxing video for y'all:
So, the first day was good, and since I thought we would be sort of calling this place our home base I figured I could go back to those stores later.
The next place we saw was an arcade....as we were driving by, fearing for our lives, in one of the many crazy taxi cab rides, we didn't have a chance to stop in. As much as I can write about the hunt for games in China, there are several times more words to be written about the driving. Let me just say, if you want to start a business, think about starting a brake repair chain in that country.
As a group we kept going to these touristy shopping areas, because when there are 3 girls and 1 guy in the group, where else are you going to go? As far as I can tell, China is entirely made up of small shops selling all sorts of junk and things they might call food. One of these shops, the only one out of literally thousands I saw, had toy figurines. This place was a hit with all of us, the two other girls bought Plants vs Zombies toys. My wife got something for her sister. I made out too, getting a Mario figure ($1.75ish) I somehow don't think you would find in the states.
[img width=700 height=525]http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8455/8010749000_df415f6b30_c.jpg[/img][img width=700 height=525]http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8456/8010531162_a1ae188c13_c.jpg[/img]The last video game related thing I found was just some game magazine at a magazine stand. Nearly everything is in Chinese characters. It does say, "Ultra Console Game" on the front, I'm pretty sure that's the name of it. The mag came with a demo CD and a New Super Mario Bros 2 poster in it.
[img width=700 height=525]http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8038/8025081305_9e4ef58539_c.jpg[/img]We did go into a music (CD/DVD) store. Of course it was all pirated stuff. They did have a small selection of games, maybe 50 altogether. Most of them were PS2, with a couple Wii and 360 games. What interested me the most was two PSP items. All the games were in plastic bags about the size of a DVD case, printed on the outside so you couldn't see through them. The 2 PSP bags I saw each contained around 15 games, but whatever was inside was about 3" x 3" x 1/2" and relatively heavy. I kind of wanted to buy one just to see what was in there. It was too heavy to be regular UMD discs and seemed to be too big for SD cards to make sense. I suppose it could have been several UMD discs without the case, do you think you could play a case-less disc in a PSP? I left them there.
That's as far as it goes for gaming finds in China. I wish I had the chance to go back to those first two stores. I would have bought an iQue Game boy of some sort and taken some pictures. And if the situation had been less rushed and less funny I would have looked around a bit more in the store with the Famicom games. I even had a list of 360 games to look for in my pocket I forgot to pull out. I doubt they were there though, as they had so few games.
What can we take away from this? Gaming (not counting online) is just not as popular in China as in the Americas, Europe and Japan. They don't have used stuff. I asked our friends if they had any used/thrift stores. They said, at one time a few of them were around but in the last few years China's people have become very disinterested in used items. I asked about garage/yard-like sales, and was told sometimes people come out to the street at night to sell used stuff but the police may chase them off. Going beyond game stuff, they don't have used car sales either. I don't know what they do with secondhand cars but the people in that area don't buy them. Our friend said they don't have any used car dealerships, she knows about how big of a deal old cars are in the US, so she knows what to compare it to.
Other than the hard luck finding games, we had a great time. Honestly, looking for games was such a small part of what we did, there was all sorts of neat stuff to see and do. If you made it to this point in my blog, I hope this was helpful on the state of game collecting in China. I'm sure it exists, but I didn't see much of it.
Here are some bonus pictures from our trip:
[img width=700 height=525]http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8182/8010656675_194ae4574e_c.jpg[/img][img width=700 height=525]http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8169/8010646431_08d38eb548_c.jpg[/img][img width=700 height=525]http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8171/8010582233_37cd98e7d0_c.jpg[/img][img width=700 height=525]http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8435/8010583160_0278edc424_c.jpg[/img]
