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Sometimes life is funny. For the last 18 months or so my wife and I have been far more busy than ever before. I like to tell the story of how there was a day a few months ago when the busyness was at it's height were I was able to sit down without anything to do for 45 seconds and that was the longest break I had had for a few weeks. I think things are slowing down, I occasionally come home now and have an hour or two were I can think about the work I should be doing, heh heh. The only reason I've had time to put this together is I've had a cold and only worked a few hours today, so if my prose is all wonky, remember, I'm sick and tired....
Somehow I managed to pick up a few things during all that time being busy. It's been so long since I've posted in the small scores, this is going to look like a lot of stuff, like, Zagnorch and GamerNick levels of stuff, so be prepared.
Lets start with the Cowlitz Gamers for Kids show. This was all the way back in April and is about were I left off posting my finds.
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A smaller show but with lots of vendors that go to PRGE (which we'll get to in a bit). The highlights of this show is the more laid back atmosphere and the chance to hang out with Fokakis all day. We meet up here pretty much every year and wander about, chatting up the other people we know from past shows. There is a pretty good selection of stuff, fun people to talk to and things to look at.
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I made out with these Laser Discs, the middle row was from Fokakis and I was super excited about The Killer and Hard Boiled. Criterion Hard Boiled. That movie is all but impossible to find in the original aspect ratio outside of this version.
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Also from Cowlitz, games! Your going to notice a little bit of a trend with picking up common Xbox titles. Not that it's set up yet, but I've got all the bits for two complete Xbox lan stations. (I keep forgetting I can also do this with GameCube and PS2 now as well, and maybe xbox360....hmmm)
Now for more normal finds:
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There were so many random pickups this year I forgot everything, this is just what I found as I was wrapping up taking all the pictures for this. Wife was really excited to find the Minecraft book set, the 7 year old that hangs around with us is really into them. She studies the books and builds what she sees in the game.
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For awhile now I've really been thinking of the best way, which includes being cheap, of hooking up lots of consoles at once. We all probably have those av selectors which let you plug 4 things into 1 but I'm looking for more, lots more. I finally came across a decent AV receiver for a good price. Rarely do I see used receivers around here other than beat up entry models. Craigslist has $100+ mid-level ones but that's about it. This one is pretty good for my needs, I'm still on the lookout for one of those awesome Denon, top of the line, things from 10 years ago, but this Sony will hold me over for a bit. The matrix switcher was at the thrift next to it. Got them both for ~$25
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Look at those inputs! And outputs too for the switcher. This is a early 90's high end switcher. Something really rich people had at home or small local tv stations might use. I can't find much on it, but saw something saying it was $1000 new and one guy was using it in his quarter million dollar home theater. What I really wonder is if it can run more than one thing at once. It's 7 in and 7 out plus 2 monitors, so can you have 7 consoles hooked up to it and one person on one tv play one of them and another person on a 2nd tv be playing a different console all through this box? It even has a remote, so I could just sit back and switch from console to console without ever leaving my seat!
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You might remember I got to meet techwizard this summer. Knowing he was going to visit Crabmaster shortly before me, we set it up for him to get me free shipping from Canada. It worked out great and I was super happy to get more lan worthy games for fun xbox nights with friends. You'll all have to visit some day so I can show you how to play Halo 
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Some random stuff. Cart is for GBA and is a mp3 device called Advanced Musicplayer. Lets you use your GBA as a portable mp3 machine. Hooks up to a pc via usb. Hard to pass up a plug and play from Avatar the Last Airbender. I'm not one for tv series' or cartoon/anime but Avatar is really good, you should check it out.
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Most of this was from a garage sale. A guy was selling a huge collection of pc games for $1 each. I only bought a few of them though because it was raining really hard and although it was under a tarp, the games were all wet. I thought I was getting ones that were somewhat dry and leaving the soaked ones but most of these were pretty wet too. I didn't see how wet until I got home, they dried out surprisingly well though. Guy had an interesting collection though. 90% war games, flight sims and grand strat, from the early 90's to current.
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More laser discs. Wife has told me several times she thinks it's weird I picked up Harold and Maude, I don't even know what the movie is about, I've heard it was good?
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When techwizard and co. were here, we all went to a Toys r Us. They were closing out on Skylanders stuff so we jumped on that. I'm totally new to the series. This was $20ish I think for all of it.
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I wanted to be able to use the 3DS for Skylanders, needed a portal though. Zagnorch the rescue! I owe him now, big time.
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A pawn shop in town that normally prices things very much in line with ebay actually had some Intellivision games. They had them all under one sku though, named for a common INTV game that only sells for a couple dollars. I think the lot of these was less than $11 and some of those are $15-30 on ebay  I think I have fewer than 40 left in the library now. Not that I ever plan on finishing the whole collection, a few of them are super expensive.
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A new used game shop opened up in town. I've gone in twice now and felt I should buy something even if it pains me to pay what the now expected prices are for NES games. Oh well, support your local game store and all that. At least I've added new NES games to the collection, don't do that as much anymore. Oh, and since we moved sometime in all that busyness, I'm going to try and work in different backgrounds to my posts going forward. We'll see if I follow through with that.
Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2017
PRGE is by all accounts the big retro game show. That's what I hear anyway. Something like 10,000 people showed up last year. Lots of vendors, huge arcade, tons of panels, Tetris World Championships....I've written at least something about it every year for several years now.
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Caught someone doing some filming for his youtube channel.
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When you go to these kind of shows, got to bring the 3DS to get those streetpasses!
Did I say I got to hang out with russlyman? He was there two years ago too, fun times for sure.
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Wife is really into watching the Tetris world championships. This was during qualifying. Really hard to make out but the guy on the top left has a score of 999,999 which he did a second time right after this. These guys are really good. The guy on the top right, Jonas, won it in the end. World champ 7 times now. The guy in the bottom left, Harry, has won it all before and along with Jonas was in that Tetris movie. A few hundred people watch the finals and it's kinda funny but the contestants sit in the crowd with everyone else. My wife was sitting next to Harry and talked to him some about the Twitch stream he was looking at on his phone. I think I was streamed on Twitch, I'm famous now.
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There was a museum at the show.
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Dollar bin games I think.
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Exercise while playing games? What do you know about this crabby? I think this is the one they sold at the auction later on.
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Some "Sony-Nintendo" thing they had out to play. A cheap knock off for sure.
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https://flic.kr/p/21CkHiW
The lighting in the vendor area is really bad for taking pictures and I've pretty much given up on that. I did manage this though. I can't say it's typical of anything one way or the other, but if you like looking at this sort of thing....click the link to see it bigger.
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I love riding escalators because it makes me feel lazy for a few seconds. This sign though. If the escalators are off, aren't they stairs?
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What did I actually buy at the show though? Lots of mainstream games. I've been so slack on keeping track of my collection I mostly concentrated on important, popular, games I've missed out on. Prices weren't awesome but a little less than what you'd see in a game store. Eagles laser disc was free because my wife picked it up and the seller said she was the only person to ever show interest in it.
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Two more INTV games, yay. Brett Weiss book, he's a member of this site. He was at the show and my wife saw the book and was like, "we need that" He signed the front of it for us. Nintendogs and Cats is for my nephew.
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I have all the US Odyssey2 games, plus a few from other regions. Ed Aerett was the developer/programmer for about half the library. He was at the show. Got him to sign our program and later decided to just pick up a loose O2 game for him to sign too. Really nice guy. Full of laughs and smiles. Signs his name with "KC's dad".
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Homebrew games are awesome. I love that they exist and am happy for people to get them that want them. I only have a couple though since they're normally priced the same as any new game and I don't normally buy games at 'new game' prices. Near the end of the show I was walking around and came across this. The guy how made it told me all about it, and let me play a bit. It's unique. A homebrew game for the NES Powerpad. Apparently this is only the 3rd homebrew-powerpad game. One of the others wasn't released and the other was similar to the Track and Field gameplay. Tailgate Party is played like that yard party game Cornhole. You have to supply your own beanbags, pick a distance away to stand and toss them at your powerpad. It's not a simple score keeper either, there is interesting gameplay involved. The dev was really thoughtful with the whole game package, lots of good design went into the layouts, characters, 'easter eggs', manual, logos, everything. I recommend looking into it just because it is so interesting of an idea and so well thought out.
A video of Tailgate Party
https://www.facebook.com/orabgames/
A facebook (whatever that is) page for the game.
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Told a new guy at work I had moved and was hoping to set up a game room sometime soon. He gave me this.
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Bally Lost World. All the parts seem to be there but it needs a lot of work, not the least of which is corrosion on the circuit boards. Supposedly this game is really loved for it's art, not so much for the gameplay which is simple and straight forward. My wife loves pinball and I surprised her by coming home with it, actually I only showed her the backglass first and told her a guy at work gave it to me for my game room, she thought that was awesome. I let it sink in before telling her I had the rest of the machine too
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The backglass is awesome for sure. The guy gave it to me.
I think that wraps it up for now, I know I missed some things. Didn't even show the Gamecube and Xbox consoles along with all the main Resident Evil games for GC that someone gave me because it's in a box somewhere since the move. Didn't show all the PC hardware I picked up for new and old PCs. There will be a pc centric post coming at some point, maybe after life slows down a bit.
I nearly put all this in a single post in small scores, that would have been a fun page....
This last week I added another Odyssey^2 game to my collection. Monkeyshines!
I paid a buy it now price on ebay of $8.30 plus $3.50 shipping. It's CIB and in fairly nice condition.
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This game leaves me with 6 to go for the complete US set. How many did I have left before this Monkeyshines!? I had been telling everyone 7, which makes sense right? In actuality it was 6. So I went from having 6 left to 6 left.
In my odyssey to get a complete set I had figured I should keep track of what games there were, what games I had and which ones there were left to go. Makes sense right? Fortunately there is some website on the internets helping me out with that. What was its name again....
More than half of my Odyssey^2 collection is loose but not much more than half. I've been kinda lucky getting as many boxed games as I have. Even my O^2 console came with the box. Collecting cardboard isn't super exciting to me, sure, I have my fair share of boxed game stuff but I collect to play and boxes aren't required.
So I had printed off this neat checklist of O^2 games to help me keep track of the games I needed. Adding new games to that one website I do with all games that come in but for quick reference I kept the printed O^2 checklist nearby. As time went on I would add games in by hand to the list as well as notes on how much I saw other games sell for and how much I paid for games I got. At one point I highlighted the games I didn't yet own. This piece of paper has been well used over the last year.
Somewhere along the line I bought a lot of several boxes and manuals. Now you're calling me out on whether I collect CIB or loose. Well, yeah, maybe I was confused with what I was doing but this lot was too good of a deal to pass up. It was, for the most part, boxes and manuals for games I only had loose and a couple I had yet to get. And was super cheap to boot. One of the manuals was for Monkeyshines! (remember this was earlier than the Monkeyshines! I just got) so I marked down on that checklist for one manual on Monkeyshines!
I think that catches us up to a week ago.
So I had it in my mind and on the checklist paper as still needing Monkeyshines! although the manual was in my possession. I saw one on ebay for a nice CIB one and did the buy it now thing. Then I checked that one website (RFGen of course). The website said I owned Monkeyshines!, game and manual though my head and checklist did not. So then I had to go to the source, the Odyssey^2 collection. Fortunately with the US collection only being 49 games it doesn't take long to go through. Sure enough, I already owned Monkeyshines!! How did this happen? I think I just bought it with several other games and forgot to mark it down on my sheet.
So now we are caught up on that story.
I guess the lesson is to keep track of your collection to avoid buying the same game twice. But I was doing that! See, I have a list! Clear as mud, right?
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Were do I go from here? There are now (as there had been, haha) 6 games left for me to get. Here is a quick rundown:
Atlantis and Power Lords! - These two are the spendy ones. The O^2 doesn't really have rare games, but we call these two "rare" compared to the rest. These two come up several times a year on ebay and other places. They range in price from $60 loose for Atlantis to ambitious $150 buy-it-now's for CIB Power Lords! I'm not going to spend that much, so unless there is a garage sale find, I'm content with not owning these two. The other option is to get these games from a different region then the US, they don't show up as often but are a little cheaper.
Killer Bees! - This one is all over the place on price. I've seen it for $9 loose and about $60 for a boxed copy. It's regularly available for $30ish CIB on ebay. I'm just waiting on a good deal.
The Great Wall Street Fortune Hunt! - Also regularly available, but for more than I want to spend. This game is only a couple of dollars loose but is one of three O^2 games you need to get CIB because it is also played in conjunction with a board game. I've seen a very nice copy sell for $10 plus $4 shipping. I'm waiting for that sort of price again.
PT Barnum's Acrobats! and Keyboard Creations! - These two are only worth a couple of dollars. Even CIB they don't sell for much. Less than $10 or even around $5. The weird thing is they are just not showing up lately unless it's exorbitant buy it now prices. Actually, Keyboard Creations! hasn't come up much at all. I see it in lots on ebay and picture-less on amazon for too much $. Keyboard Creations! is one of the least valuable games, loose I wouldn't be surprised to see it for $1.
So those six games are what I have left. I'll probably try to get the cheaper four CIB, just because the price won't be that much difference. In the case of Keyboard Creations! I don't really want to pay $4 shipping on a $1 game. So now it's really just a waiting game.
Here is a picture of nearly all the Odyssey^2 games I own (four more are waiting to be scanned and entered into the DB). They are stacked two deep and there are some O^2 games from other regions as well:
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Why collect for the Odyssey^2 instead of putting that time and effort into a more prestigious system like the NES, Vectrex or Casio Loopy?
Price. This could be the cheapest console to acquire all the games for. Nearly all the games are only worth a couple of dollars loose. Even if you want to go CIB the cost isn't too bad as long as you have patience.
It's unusual. Everyone that reads this is already in that small fraction of the population who considers themselves "game collectors" Why not be part of an even smaller group as well? You could imagine having conversations like this:
O^2 collector - "Nice to meet you. What do you like to do?"
Regular person - "Oh, you know, watch TV, play with the dog. How about you?"
O^2 - "Well, I like to collect old video games."
RP - "I used to have a Nintendo Cube. I gave it to my nephews."
O^2 - "Yeah that's a good system."
RP - "So you collect old games? Like for the Nintendo and Playstation?"
O^2 - "Well, yeah, but I also like collecting for the Odyssey 2."
RP - "Odyssey 2? Never heard of it"
O^2 - "It's pretty old, it came out in the late 70's"
RP - "We had an Atari when I was a kid."
O^2 - "Oh yeah? The Odyssey 2 was a contemporary of the Atari"
RP - "....was it called Intellivision?"
O^2 - ".....yes.....it was called the Intellivision."
I told my wife as I was opening the latest box of Odyssey^2 games, "It would be better if I could say, 'I was only 12 games away from having the complete, regular US released set of arcade cabs.'"
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Continue reading Meanwhile back at the world of Odyssey 2 collecting...
For the most part this is just some stuff I've found in the last few weeks. All of it could just go into the "small scores" thread but I figured if it was in my blog I could feel free to post a bunch of big pictures and blabber on endlessly.
Continue reading After 20 years, I found it!
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