Car Boot Gaming

Practical advise for anyone wanting to pick up retro game bargains, as long as you don’t mind the great British tradition of the car boot sale. Retrobear explains how to survive.

Originally Posted to GameFancier.com on June 17th 2010

Theres alot to get through..

Firstly at the risk of sounding like I am blowing my own trumpet, I took my own advice this past weekend and picked up a whole load of C64 and Amiga games from the local car boot. So there you go there are riches to be found out there – you just got to look in the right places.

On to this week’s blog which comes to you from the nerve centre here at Bear Towers. Surrounded by games and systems; the good, the bad, the forgotten and the downright awful, I always say to people if you saw the collection of 700-800 games and about 20+ systems you might never want to leave. A lot of the time I am right, then we start talking rent and they quickly head for the door.

So this week I am going to be talking about a few things at the forefront my thinking. Firstly the ongoing juggernaught that is the Street Fighter franchise. I spied a copy of version IV for PS3 at the car boot on Saturday and was trying to remember how a game I loathed as a teenager was still going. I hated that game to pieces, yet it still sells in bucket loads, despite the fact the fighting game has moved on to Virtua Fighter and beyond with the likes of SoulCalibur. Do I hate beat’em ups? Yes I do, so that makes this pretty biased. Do I own any Street Fighter games? Yes – the SNES version of World Warrior and the MD version of Championship Edition. Do I play them? No – don’t be daft. 3 minutes with the SNES version and the old feelings of resentment surfaced.

At least nowadays games come in handy well packaged boxes that are easy to slot away like DVD’s and CD’s. Not like the 3 tonne of cardboard that the Amiga games I got came with. Also why did Nintendo persevere with cardboard for so long? No wonder there are so many loose carts for sale out there, and there is no excuse on that count for any SMS and MD games to be sold loose. Their packaging was brilliant!

A good starting point for playing retro games is through emulation. Now you can have all the old classics on your PC for the cost of a couple of blank CD’s. Emulators are great and I have so many games that I play through my modded Xbox that it makes up for not owning the actual game. However some games cannot run correctly and a lot of N64 titles suffer this way. Also showing someone your collection of emulator discs isn’t as impressive as showing off a whole load of games and systems.

What really rubs me up the wrong way most of all is “fanboy-ism”, where people are quite happy to criticise a certain brand simply because they own the other major competitor. They believe their machine is better, no matter what. Never was this rifer in the early 1990′s when Sega vs. Nintendo was the talk of the playground. It existed even back in the days of Spectrum, Commodore and Amstrad. I personally like to find the best in all machines. I’m not a fan of the NES but it has its place in history as the saviour of the home video games market. I own a Dreamcast that is so noisy it’s untrue, but some of the games are a delight. People shun it the same way they shun the Saturn, Gamecube and original Xbox because they weren’t successful. Sorry that’s a load of bollocks – each machine has its own merit, it just might not be yours and that’s no reason to slag it off.

Of course feel free to slag off the Game.com, The Barcode Battler and the Nokia Ngage, because they were and are truly shite.

Till the next time – let’s go Mr Driver !