June's Garage Sale Finds
June has been an interesting month for gamers. There have been plenty of great announcements from E3 and with summer getting into full swing the yard sales should be plenty. Surprisingly, June has been a little on the slow side this year. This doesn’t mean there haven't been some diamonds in the rough. Join Erik as he shares some of the great garage sale finds he picked up in the month of June.
The weekend of June 11 had a few sales listed. I had just gotten back from the big Lake Tapps yard sale and I was kinda of disappointed in what I had found. The first sale I went to was a few miles away and was listed as moving sale. When I arrived, I saw a driveway packed with stuff, but only a few people were there looking through the goods. One of the owners of the house was putting video games down on a tarp. I wandered over and saw a 250 GB 360 with a few controllers, and a couple of PSP systems with games. One of the PSPs was the lilac Hannah Montana model. The stack of games included some gems, such as Puzzle Quest and both Metal Gear Solid games. The other PSP was black and it looked like someone spilled something on it. I started talking to the guy and I asked about the PSP and he mentioned they were $20. I snatched the lilac PSP and several games. Unfortunately, he had traded most of the PSP games and the cases for the Metal Gear Solid games; Lumines as well as several others, were empty. He threw in a case and a 2gb memory card with a car charger.
I walked away with these games: Toy Story 3, Ghostbusters, Ghost Rider, Lego Star Wars Complete, Puzzle Quest, Jax and Daxter, and Burnout. I asked about the 360 and he said it worked. The 360 came with 3 wireless controllers, and a working Kinect. I was thinking he would ask $100 and I would try to get him down to $75. Nope he said $40 and I couldn’t get my money out fast enough. $60 for a PSP with games and a 250gb 360, that is a fantastic deal.
I went to one more sale on the way home that promised Wii games. They had a system with 7-8 crummy games for $80. No one wants Wii Fit. I cherry picked Goldeneye and Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games for $7. Both were complete.
I didn't get a chance to go out again until the weekend of June 25th. I went to a sale about 20 minutes away that advertised Wii, PS3, and 360 games. When I arrived, I noticed all of the 360 and PS3 games were over priced by garage sale standards. I remember seeing $15 for Black Ops. I did grab White Knight Chronicles II for PS3 and Lego Star Wars III for Wii for $10. On the way home, I stopped at one more around the corner from my house. The sale was pretty empty, but there were a lot of Assassin's Creed Books. The kid running the sale had a small collection of DS/GBA games. He let me have Super Mario Advance 2 for $1. I was looking through a stack of DVDs and I found one of the games I had been looking to acquire for a few years. At the bottom of the stack was a disc only copy of Tomba for PS1. The kid let me have it for free since he didn't have a way to test it and the game was in terrible shape.
But I took Tomba home and tested in the PS2 and it works. I’ll need to find a case and get the game resurfaced. I guess my tip of the week is check cases before you buy games and make sure you look through stacks of DVDs.