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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....
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