Local vidya stores

There's pretty much no non-Gamestop vidya focused stores in my town, but there's a few in the surrounding ones with less Gamestops. Most of them are neutral to "how does this place even stay in business?" tier, but there is one that goes out of its way to be pretty good.
Might also state that as far as local used vidya stores go, they're willing to recommend most other locations if none of their own stores have a game/system someone is looking for (aside from one store to the north of them, where shortly after that one opened the store I like seemed to be bombarded with fake yelp reviews; used vidya is apparently cutthroat).

Aside from them, I pretty much stick to a local used multimedia chain. Selection is a crapshoot, but while a lot of the time they ask too much for vidya, sometimes they ask way too little, so it's finds like Fire Emblem: PoR for $10 that keep me going back.

Place called Black Diamond, they apparently think their games are diamonds too, because they sell them at ebay prices. Street Fighter II? $100. Super Metroid? $100.

Ask me why I choose emulation.

Also they sell game boxes and instruction manuals seperately. Yeah. You have to pay another like $30-50 for a fucking instruction manual, and $30-50 for a fucking game box.

...

Steam

That's fucking stupid, the fuck?

The local shop is a nice walk from my house; it's a kike paradise, but I've pulled some okay deals from it every now and then.
If I had the money that Neo Geo would be mine.

Not really a dedicated game store, but i usually find really good deals on older games at my local flea market.

holy fuck, what jews, i bet the store owner's last name ends with stein

>second store has a bigger focus on comics and cards than vidya, and nothing vidya related is worth buying there now. I blame the fact that the only consoles I collect shit for are Ninty ones, since the only non nintendo console I have is an Xbox 360 which I haven't used in years.

I still can't believe that used Pokémon vidya is so sought after. Why? They sell gangbusters, so it's not like they're rare.

New Jersey here, I got a few stores here that I go to. One of them is really good as far as prices are concerned, but selection sucks cuz everyone knows about the store. At least he gets good stuff in regularly so if you go often enough you can get lucky.

If you don't mind interacting with crowds I recommend checking out dealer tables at conventions. You can usually get things cheaper, and prices are more negotiable at conventions.

This is VERY YMMV. I know at AX the prices are absolute shit. Maybe it's better at the smaller cons, but I don't know.

I will say that at AX the actual publishers have better sales, though.

I generally go to Too Many Games outside Philly every year. I keep getting great deals there, especially on Saturn games. I can usually find spare boxes and manuals at $5 each, too.

North East England, here. I have a few shops near by: Game (aka Gamestop) is rubbish, Grainger's is pretty good, CeX is cheap but mostly just sells DVDs and an independent shop. I forget what that last one was called (Super Game World or something like that) but it was… interesting. It's 99% retro games. Tons of Megadrive games and various peripherals. They had the maracas controller for Samba de Amigo at one point. It was almost £150 though. They have a cartridge only Link's Awakening for £25. The same game is about £15 on Ebay. That was the problem: tons of great stuff, but way over priced. I have no clue how they are still in business and they've been around for a couple of years. I'm mentioning it because it reminds me a lot of Chips. They sold lots of preowned stuff, some imports, game swag that wasn't the usual crap you would find at Gamestop (like statues and neat collectables like GBA retro classics. I still have my copy of Star Soldier) and really good prices. Unfortunately, Chips closed down most, if not all, of their shops in the North. It wasn't long after Game bought Gamestation (another great shop, iirc it used to be Electronic's Boutique) and I suspect the two events are related. Or maybe it was the recession, I don't really know but I'm still disappointed about it.

To answer your question: Grainger Games is okay. It's good that there's legitimate competition for Game.

I have two major game stores around me: Arch City Gaming Company and Prestige Electronics.
Arch City:

Prestige Electronics:

There's a local chain of game stores in Winnipeg called PNP Games, and they're pretty much the only dedicated vidya stores in the city that aren't EB Games and Gamestop. They're all decent stores, and I've bought some good shit from them, but since they're the only vidya stores around, you have to buy a game the minute you see it or the next time you come in, it'll be gone. It's happened to me more than once.

They're a tad pricy but they usually have what I need. Nothing special. Vita section is nice and cheap
See GAME, but the guys behind the till are a bit more enthusiastic. One of them reserved a copy of each of the new Pokemon games for me despite me missing the preorders, which is nice.
Good place to go for PS2/Xbox games, but everything else is pricy. They started getting into retro games and their prices make even less sense. Not only are they selling a NES Mini for £120, they're selling a NES for £130 as well. Next to it is a Mega Drive for £30. They started selling N64 games, but all I've bought so far is Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.
You never know what you can find there. One time I managed to get a few ZX Spectrum games.

There used to be a local vidya store, but it never really settled down. First it changed hands repeatedly, and now it's shut down. There used to be a Gamestation too, but that's owned by GAME now.

They were pretty based. They even had a good vinyl collection. I nearly nabbed the Avalanches album had it not been for a fucking re-seller.
They closed back in late 07. Just one more thing to remind me of the year when vidya died

Makes (some) sense to me. There are far more Megadrives kicking around in the UK than NESs. Also, all the hipsters want Nintendo stuff, so they're capitalizing on that.
Even though the NES wasn't very popular here, so the nostalgia doesn't really translate here the same way it does in the US. If CeX was trying to capitalize on hipster nostalgia, you'd think SEGA, Playstation or even 80s computer stuff would make more sense but Nintendo = hipster bait still for some reason.

Might be related, might not be. But here's a story.

>Primary source of income was his TCG sales because he overpriced comics as well so the only people buying comics from him were dads who didn't know any better buying them, same with the rest of the merchandise He even, for some stupid reason, sold the most insultingly designed swords
Then one day…
>He bought games for these systems to sell for full price, except he set them at the front of the store at the window where the sun shined and it sun bleached the covers of those games. He bought "retro" games as well and vastly upscaled the price on them and set them on display in the same spot, causing the same problem Gold cart OoT factory sealed in package ruined by sunbleaching
>One faggot in particular was insanely annoying because he claims to be a huge megaman fan but has never finished one of the games and only played the recently released Mega Man 9. And claimed he was part of Anonymous when 4chan was only for the SECRET COOL KIDS I knew he was full of shit because I grew up with the faggot since pre-school
>They keep trying to pry themselves into campaigns We let them play once, but they ruined the entire session by talking about inane video game shit that related to nothing and wasn't even accurate (Insanely stupid shit like "I UNLOCKED SONIC IN SMASH BROS MELEE")

There's a GameXchange in my town on the very same street as a fucking gamestop. I try to go there any time I want physical copies of vidya. It's all used shit, but they take pretty good care of it and will even throw in a disk/cartridge for you to show you it works before you buy it.
>bring it home, it works, but the tray sounds like it's scratching the disk and the fan sounds like a jet engine louder than your typical xbox, anyway
This is on top of them having the only n3ds that I could find in my entire state. The place is a great store, despite the fact that everyone that works there is a mindless nintendrone.

I swear, if that place goes out of business I'll either riot in the streets or burn down the gamestop.

Most used video game places seem to have a mindset of "if it's old, it's worth gold", at least as far as games that aren't just shovelware or sports, and especially if it's on Nintendo (and either a well known game or rare one). Still, stuff like that takes the fucking cake, especially them selling boxes and manuals separately (I assume you're talking about older games that just had cardstock boxes though).

High demand and a large consumer-base. Similar things with, say, Super Smash Bros. Melee or Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 where I live: Neither are rare at all, but demand is so high I regularly see them (when I actually see them, I mean; Melee in particular is an "in-and-out-the-door" game) they're usually $60 or so locally.

Though, as for Pokemon, I suppose HGSS is the high end of expensive, at least for the main series (I'm not counting $200 for Pokemon Box) at like $70 complete at some of the places around where I am. Gen IV mechanics/graphics/audio combined with Gen II nostalgia is a powerful thing.

What state is that in? Just curious since I've kept a text file of various states and stores anons have said good things about on the off chance I've ever out in some of them for whatever reason.

Anything vintage, yeah, NES/SNES/GEN/GB, et al. They have PS1/PS2 games, but as far as I saw, they're all in loose sleeves of a CD holder binder and don't actually have cases to them and I base this assessment on the fact that right beside said CD binder is an actual rack of like 10 PS1 games (one of which is Brave Fencer Musashi).
Typically if I am going to buy old games nowadays I'd probably just buy them on the PSN store. PS1 games are $5 each, I bought Final Fantasy Tactics and played the FUCK out of it last year while my PC was broken. I didn't bother trying to figure out how to use any of the debug exploits to try and get non-standard classes, and unfortunately the Gameshark doesn't work with PS1 classics on the PS3. C'est la vie.

>see some cheap consoles and he responds with "they're broooken geez" like i'm a fucking idiot for not knowing that

and I used to think comicbook shops were the worst fucking places on earth.

Hah, that reminds me of the Dropzone. It's a /tg/ type place where all they sell is CCGs, tabletop roleplaying game books, and strategy war game sets for way too much fucking money (I think I remember a friend telling me how he spent $150 to buy a single package of throwaway units for 40K). Anyway all the owners of the business are in their 20s and 30s, and if you're not in their clique circle of friends, then they treat you like you're a nigger about to try and shoplift. Me and two buddies went in there to buy some stuff if they had anything that caught our fancy, and they watched us like an eagle ready to grab its prey. Grabbing merchandise off the shelf to take a look at it was like a crime punishable by death or something, like they expected us to try and shove D&D game manuals in our fucking coats or something, we didn't even have backpacks or anything, so I don't know what they thought we were going to do.

Why does it seem like the only good shops are the ones owned by old men who value the amity from their customers, rather than having contempt for you to dare enter their store to spend your money?

It's unfortunate that for whatever reasons, the PSN (and VC too, for older games on Nintendo systems) fails to have everything worth playing that came out for a given system (Square has seen fit to put BFM on the Japanese PSN, but it has remained absent from the western ones), and I think somewhat more egregiously, fails to take advantage of the format of a digital rerelease to given particular regions games they missed out on the first time that are already English.

Still, tales of stores like that one out where you are make me glad for having that decent store I know of around these parts, and for when that multimedia chain fucks up (admittedly even that one is aware of the SNES being hipster gold bait these days, so I've never found anything real cheap for it; PS1 is about as far back as I've managed, like Xenogears for $5 complete).

Where I live, it's mostly the SNES and Gamecube that have been hit hard by nostalgia-bait hipster prices. DS games are also up there too, but only the complete ones, and pretty much only because Gamestop trashed the bulk of the cases and manuals, causing prices for the remaining ones to get that much higher.

Pretty much everywhere these days uses online prices as a basis for older games. The better stores are the ones that go from the lower end (and perhaps drop the price even lower to be competitive), while the worse ones will look a the high end and consider that to be a norm. I really don't get how one of the stores out here that I know of can ask $50 for a Greatest Hits copy of SotN when the best store I know of asks half that for Greatest Hits or Original label, and occasionally I've seen that multimedia chain I mentioned earlier only ask $12 complete (passed that deal onto a friend that was wanting a copy).

By the way, why was that video game store selling a fucking guitar? Assuming it wasn't a Guitar Hero guitar for $100.

Really not sure how some places stay in business, but stay they do. Either they have a small but stupidly devoted customer-base willing to drop that kind of money on even common games, or really low upkeep costs. Or maybe some other reason, I don't know.

Targets and Walmart have used sections in America?
I mean preowned shit from EB (Gamestop) is bad enough

Ah sweet, looks like the store that had the Mother 3 repros had better prices than I remembered… it was only some of the Nintendo stuff that was just ok prices. Pretty much every PS2 game they had was under $10, except for some obvious exceptions.

it was a guitar signed by a band, I can't for the life of me remember what it was I think they were called rehab or something.

Wow, that's a pretty nice find!

Sounds awesome.

And I thought GW itself was fucking Jewish, fuck
I mean at least 50% of the non GW /tg/ shops I go to that sell W40K sell them for under GW's price and the other 50% price them the same

Not a lot, but some games are marked there as being preowned. Best Buy also does that.

I might also say that of the non-Gamestop, Big Box Mart stores, Walmart's been pretty much the only thing with a sizable focus on vidya where I live, and even still stocks a little bit of past gen. Best Buy's in-store vidya section has dwindled, and Target's vidya section is fucking pathetic in my experiences there.

Yeah, I was pretty happy getting it for like 1/6th the average price. Complete black label too. Still, just a drop in my "decent finds" bucket. Got more if you or anyone else wants to hear.

Oh, so it was more a "store prop" or whatever that they were willing to part with than them actually being more of a multimedia place? Just wondering since the local multimedia place around here used to be partnered with a guitar store next to it before they moved.

Yeah, also I never bought my game books from Dropzone. The comic store is like a 3 minute walk down to the mall. They sell CCGs and gamebooks but not tactical wargame shit (but I don't play TWGs anyway), and their prices are far more reasonable.

I kind of miss the place, I don't go by there as much as I used to, not since Dan left the area (he used to be the manager, and I considered him a friend). He was a bit of an oddball though, still playing EverQuest in 2008 long after the game had turned to shit.

Yes I would lucky star!

Nice Trips
And What I meant was, the games probably being dirty and having shit tonnes of gunk on them from the last buyer seeing as the sort of people who would sell their games at a Target, not even a Gamestop for the most part are Parents with a fair amount of Children or Negros
Pretty much everything here that isn't EB Games or JB Hifi (Basically like your Best Buy I think) is in the process of stopping to sell vidya

We've got a friendly pajeet reseller with a big shop.
shit prices for nintendo games, but understandably so.
He sells repro and translated/hacked carts for a reasonable price (50).
it seems like an illegal ripoff (paying for literal roms), but I can respect it because mapper/coproccesor chips are still needed and its there for hardcore weebs.
the guys really know their stuff, but don't do mods anymore.
I'm always tempted to get the more "expensive" games, but would be a foolish waste.
about 60 for OoT, 100 for SMRPG, 80 for xenogears, 200 for conker.

Yeah, and the Nintendo stuff was still "decent" prices too. I think they had a copy of SSBM for $35? That's actually a good price for it nowadays. I think the reason I thought that the prices weren't as good as the other store near me is because they were selling Dreamcast controllers for $12 here, where at the other place they're $7.

I don't know the full story, i'm not about to go back to that shithole any time soon. I have no interest in buying another guitar, I've been using the same one for 11 years and its served me well.

That's the other one, local guitar stores have always been like playing Russian roulette. 9 times out of 10 they're goddamn terrible but sometimes you find one that's reasonable. It's still more bearable than going to guitar center and getting bugged by a flock of hungry seagulls the whole time. I just remember going to a shop and the owner started yelling at me. My crime? Picking up and trying out one of the fucking guitars, i'm just confused as to why he bothered to go through and tune them if i'm not allowed to try it out. It wasn't even a pricey one either so the whole thing made no sense to me, and like hell i'd drop 300 bucks on a guitar without playing it.

Melee for $35? Doesn't sound too bad, I guess, I got my copy for $10 back when EB was still selling it. Though when I went to buy Eternal Darkness I had to shop the fuck around to find a copy, and in the end ordered it from the other side of the continent. Glad that I did though, it was one of the games I had super fond memories of because back when I was in high school my friend and I stayed up all night playing it. That actually only cost me $20 too.

Ever since the BBT started and hipsters started flocking to gaming, I don't even bother trying to look up old games anymore unless they're on a standardized site like GOG/GMG/Steam. BAZINGA! Every time I hear someone say that shit, I want to fucking rape their face…

And now that Dark Souls is over, I have nothing I'm looking forward to. So I guess it's time to finally start working on old games I wanted to play but never did.

Fair enough if it sounds like this Dropzone is marking up already high prices
Though I wonder if you're in a "Diverse" area if the staff are paranoid about theft that much

Oh that's the funny part, this area is completely ethnically white. I live in the most monolithic location I've ever seen in my fucking life, before I moved to this area I used to go to school with all kinds of ethnic backgrounds.

The only people in the area are white people and indians (but not east indians). And I don't think I've ever seen an indian at any of the malls, I guess they know how much people despise them.

That's $35 for a complete copy. Cheapest I've seen it go on eBay is $30 for disc only, untested.

That's a good deal in today's unfortunately fucked up GameCube market.

Maybe they're afraid of White people

Is their a game other than maybe some Mario game on the NES that sold even around the same ballpark as Melee and yet is still pretty expensive

Alright.
Not all of these are from the same location (Pikmin 2 was from a yard sale, for example), but what I've managed over the last few years as really good finds compared to average prices at the time (and some of which keep moving up).

Yeah, I'm not entirely sure where they get their preowned stock from, whether people can use their refund desk as a trade-in counter or if they get it from elsewhere.

Well, considering where I live I've seen people claim to be looking for something (in this case it was a game) simply for the hipster credit they'd get for owning it, maybe he didn't expect you to actually try playing the guitar? Still, even the hipster stores around here will sometimes keep drum sets and shit in the open with the assumption letting people beat on them might get them a buyer somehow.

Heh, I got my copy of Eternal Darkness for $15 during Gamestop's "Fuck stocking for the Gamecube" clearance sale they had probably half a decade back. Was complete and in good shape too. Kick myself a bit for not having the money (or knowledge) to have dropped $30 on Gotcha Force at that time, or on the .hack games when they were doing similar markdowns on PS2 games a while afterward.

Fair enough
Honestly the best I found was Metroid Prime Trilogy and Xenoblade Chronicles for $10 each
Do they still sell for $100+ or did getting on the Wii U, and N3DS for XBC cut it's value

I really should try and buy a box for it, didn't have the original shit.

oh shit I didn't realize it went for that much now

With Prime Trilogy, it depends entirely on what print you go of it. While I suppose the regular white Wii-cased reprint dropped the price somewhat on the whole, there's still only a limited amount of the steelbook cased ones out there, especially complete and in good shape. Looking at Fucking Gamestop and Amazon's prices right now, it's $40 at the former (getting a steelbook one at that price would be a crapshoot, since they're the brick and mortar retail that got the white case reprint shipped to them), while with the latter the white cased print seems to start at $45 "Acceptable" with the Steelbook starting in the low $50s (with the cheapest "safe" buy by my estimates being in the $60 range. As for Xenoblade Wii, Gamestop has it listed at $60 preowned (more than it cost new at release, even post reprint, but cheaper than the $90 they used to want; Gamestop wanted them some of that scalper pie), while on Amazon the cheapest right now looks to be a $40 "Good" copy.

I'd say you still did very well on each.

That is one I've somehow forgotten from the list here . I got a complete copy of Chibi Robo for $7, just when prices were apparently starting to go up and that store was a bit slow on the uptake to mark it up. Now it's like $70 and goes in their display case instead of the shelves when they get one in. Honestly not sure what happened to cause the price to go up that high, beyond Zip Lash being announced (maybe a similar case as to Fire Emblem PoR skyrocketing in conjunction with Awakening releasing in the west and getting stupidly popular?).

Both from customers and my boss. It was fucking awful.
Customers treating me like trash because I cant offer them shit for their trashed gameboy color with a missing a battery holder because they saw one go for 200$ on ebay.
My Boss was just an absolute kike with a superiority complex and constantly tried to fuck over customers and employees. Dude was genuinely the worst person I have met in my life and was straight-up a registered pedophile (which was disturbing because of how many middle-school interns we had working for us). Dude constantly threatened assault and constantly bordered getting sued for sexual harrasment

Working there was something else I tell you
It got fucking surreal when kids would go up to our demo machines and start playing, then just randomly talk to no one as they are playing as if they are pretending to be a lets player.
I left that place with some weird fucking stories.

Only good thing I got from that experience is a discount so I got to add a lot of games to my collection at decent prices
I also stole a lot of games from there towards the end of my career out of spite from being treated like shit

Granted I wont deny, It was a pretty magical experience talking with customers after getting a good connection based on games.
I really enjoyed talking to people about video games, giving out some suggestions. I always felt like an advertisement from the 90s from the manner I recommended games to people. I used the word "Radical" a lot, people seemed to like that so it made me happy.

As far as legit local vidya stores around me, the shitty one I worked for is the only one close by.
They got decent prices, but such a shitty selection at a constant. And, working for them before, I am weary of all the jewish tactics they used in their business, its pretty upsetting.
Another place is a good distance away, their selection is massive and they tend to be very kind and I never feel like their trying to con me, but their base prices are through the roof.

Glad I did though.

Man those are some great grabs! I am pretty jealous!
I haven't been able to find old games at a truly decent price for some times now, its disappointing.

Thats some high-level kikery right there.
The place I worked for was just as bad, if we got an older game in-box or with manual, my boss would just strip the fucking thing of them, and just sell the cart. He would put the box or manual either in the back, on the wall, or sometimes just lying on the fucking floor. His logic was if it was valuable it shouldn't be resold for some stupid fucking reason

I'll admit that it's a crapshoot, but it happens from time to time. I did also once see a physical copy (might have been complete, it had the cardstock LE box) of Ar Nosurge Plus for the Vita at that multimedia place for $90. Might not sound like a good deal at all, until you see how much a physical copy for it goes for online. Didn't buy it though, but did try to pass on the possibility of it for other anons looking for it at that price. Shame their online storefront is kind of broken when it comes to vidya, especially games they either don't have an actual barcode to scan in (cart only games, for example) or games with no regular retail release.

Anyhow, best advice I can give is to get to know the options in your town or the surrounding ones (I suppose it depends on where you are; here there's like five or six towns that all border each other clustering SE from the state capital, and it's like a ten minute drive from one to another), study if they seem prone to fucking up on prices in a good way from time to time (it's not exactly something you're apt to see on a single visit), and have patience and persistence in searching once/if you do find a store like that. Also, holiday browsing can be very fruitful: While that means there's heightened amounts of people shopping, there's also heightened trade-ins both a bit before and after Christmas in my experiences, so if you're there at the right time, you can score well. I remember a few Christmases back, I managed to get Yakuza 2, Shadow Hearts FtNW, Suikoden V, Twilight Princess GC, and Metal Saga for maybe $80 total (technically two trips maybe a week apart), simply because I was there at the right time to benefit.

Funny how that particular place can ask $35-50 for something like Metroid Prime 2 (twice if not more than what best store sells it at) but then I'll see something else marked anywhere from 1/2 to 1/6 the average price every so often.

You should see if there's any way to figure out what happened since then, like if he's gone to prison since or something.

Customers treating me like trash because I cant offer them shit for their trashed gameboy color with a missing a battery holder because they saw one go for 200$ on ebay.
Honestly, the best store I know of seems to have found a nice balance. They're clear about why they can only offer so much (admittedly they're pretty good about it; obviously not 1:1 online prices, but if it's a good game with high demand in good condition, I think 45% of what they sell for is what they might offer). And the owner seems to have the right idea that, rather than hocking games for every last cent they're worth, they charge less than average and have good service, because a happy customer is more likely to be a repeat customer. And the employees seem to really like working there as well (at least going off the closest one I know).

More please.

lets bloo this

Reminds me to once again be thankful I'm not someone in rooland that's into video games. If it's not the fact that there's plenty of games that never see a PAL release, it would be the fucking prices like that.

Yeah. I do get occasionally lucky. A lot of times it really stings because I would find something really awesome right when I am out of funds.
Hell, all I have wanted for a while now is Eternal Darkness and Gradius V but I have had such shit luck with both.

I haven't tried Garage Sales yet, May try and see my luck with that when summer rolls around.

I was just there earlier today, he still works there. I swear he is holding that entire business back, I have no idea why the owner still has him around when he practices such greedy tactics.

Sure. I got quite a few, A lot involving homeless people, and some of my boss being a kike, kids being fucking weirdos, or just traditional shitty retail people. With some misc. encounters here and there.

This one always sticks out because I should have MegaMan X in near mint box right now and I dont and thats bullshit

On the more weird end
Heres an example:
This wasnt nearly as bad as dealing with him later on, but this was the first real encounter with him that really weirded me out
Of the four homeless people I dealt with, he was was the most consistently awful to deal with.

There's like ONE place in my area, and it's great. Good prices on everything, and deals on Tuesdays to help clean out inventory. Problem is, severe depression has killed my desire to play games, and as I have almost every console, I really have nothing else I can buy from there. Still, I refer absolutely everybody to the place, and people accept any praise I give as the law, as I apparently fucking hate everything.

That used multimedia place I mentioned had a copy last time I was at one for $30. Not the best price, but still. Sadly, there's online storefront doesn't have it as being available, but if you live in AZ or Las Vegas, that's where the actual stores are (and they do ship between them).

I used to keep a jar of loose change to turn into Amazon credit 1:1 at least. Now the coinstars here stopped offering that, probably because (((whoever))) owns that company got made everyone was taking the gift card way instead of the machine getting a 10% cut from turning coins to cash vouchers. Anyhow, these days I usually only buy stuff on the cheap, and can afford a $10-20 purchase every so often if I see something good. Might help that I don't actually buy new full price games real often (last year was a bit of an exception, admittedly).

Is the own connected to him in some way? Strikes me that if the manager is one of the oven tribe, the owner might be as well, given their proclivity toward nepotism.

How is it that your store in particular managed to attract the homeless? Usually where I am they're around the Goodwills and Savers or busy begging at the Circle Ks or freeway off ramps. If it's a matter of them wanting to get out of the climate outside, I ought to add that where I am it gets FUCKING HOT in the summer and I still never see them in game stores.

Oh for fuck's sake, what kind of logic is that? I can understand a store wanting the most benefit in a trade, but that's completely ridiculous. He wanted you to go "Oy vey, these aren't worth anything! I'll just take them off your hands though go- I mean guy!" and see if the dude objected?

...

Last time I visited one, majority of it was "gamer merch". At most a third of it was vidya.

No real idea.
If I had to guess, we do have a lot of demo consoles around for anyone to play. The first real homeless person who was a regular was a pretty alright guy, named Mike. All he really had left on him was 2-3 PS2 games on him, so he came in regularly to play em. Guess homeless had time to kill too.
He never tried to bug anyone, he just walked in and asked to play is F1 Racer/Baseball/Madden game for a few hours.
Sometimes he would buy a bag of Hershes Kisses with the few money he gathered, and just hand em out to anyone who passed by.
But I think mike showing up regularly was a bit of a slippery slope. a few saw him doing it and thought it would be okay.
And then from my understanding my boss tried to attract them so he could use them as free fucking labor.

and yeah, as I was saying my boss was a total kike.
He did a lot of stuff that was borderline illegal: clocking out employees when they were still working, jump through a lot of hoops so he didn't have to pay us for "meetings", buy peoples products without paying them.
He was so creepy to. When driving by, whether it be late at night or insanely early in the morning, his car was always there. I am almost positive he slept there.
He almost never left for break, he worked there pretty much every day in a week, never trusted anyone else to run the store for him.
Shit almost sends shivers down my spine. Just a weird, almost cultist level of commitment. Theres wanting to give it your all when you work, then there was that.

I dont think so no, the owner was a pretty cool dude when you talked to him. Clearly just a businessman wanting to make sure his kids had a solid life ahead of him and that he had a solid retirement plan.
I think if he had any reason to keep the manager around, it was likely the manager found a way to jew him out so if he gets fired a lot of the store would end up going to trash because he arranged it that way.

Yeah, fuck Gayshtup. Fucks want forty-five fucking dollars for used DS3 controllers. I pity their employees, as there is FUCK ALL for good employment for people without a dusty bachelor's degree.

Where I live, everywhere in town with an actual predominant focus on vidya got driven out of business by Gamestop. The only reason there's some in the surrounding cities is that there are less Gamestops there. For fuck's sake, at one point we had like eight or nine Gamestops in a five mile radius.

The last place to go under was a play'n'trade that got dicked over by distributors. They closed for yearly cleaning, never reopened, and are a dry cleaners now. And the kicker is that a Game Fucking Stop opened kitty corner to them after they went down.

Don't forget how they started a huge push for being current with what's hip and trendy by trashing DS cases and manuals to make shelf space for mobile phone shit.

Out here I'd suspect that any homeless not begging and looking to get out of the summer heat would just go to a library to kill time. Most stores that don't have a bent towards helping them would likely tell them to not loiter if they were coming in day after day and not buying anything. It's like how Gamestop employees get annoyed at parents using their store as a free daycare.

Well, it's not like kikes aren't prone to blackmail as well.

The worst part is the better places I know of that focus on selling games in the surrounding towns want like 2-3 years work at other video game places to really get considered for being hired. Which usually means years of working at the Gamestapo, who already get a lot of disposables from high schools to go through (plus I've heard that working there is awful anyhow).

Then again, I've seen even the Circle K's out here with signs asking for 2-3 years prior convenience store work just to be an entry level employee, so what do I know. Maybe that's just the requirement about anywhere retail or low-tier these days.

Seems like every entry-level position is pushing this bullshit, but somehow, they still hire complete fucking retards who can't count to twenty without first removing their socks. It's maddening. I only got into my completely shitty job by being left to run a fucking computer repair shop while my cunt of a boss fucked off to Narnia and paid me almost nothing to work fucking miracles with physically broken computers. Apparently that counted as customer service and management experience.

Honestly, it's no wonder why so many millenials tried to become Youtubers with how fucked entering the workplace is nowadays.

I would expect some of those people are diversity hires, both of the "minority that can't get shit right" and "quite possibly legitimately retard" types.

I mostly buy games from a local anime & manga shop. Among the obvious weeb stuff they also import games that are hard to find locally like NIER, and, Demon's/Dark Souls… Also the local chain of pawn shops sometimes has surprising finds. I've seen Atari 2600 carts, a copy of Night Trap (bit expensive though, $75) and also got a Japanese cart of DKC3 for $25.

Oh god, those guys. The first and last time I went there they were asking over $100 for Wind Waker.

That's happening to some of our bigger EB Games shops too. 1/3 of those stupid pop figs, and similar junk. Thankfully the smaller shops mostly have games.

I haven't been in a Gamestop in ages, but I'd rather have "gamer merch" than a store that sells music, movies, and av equipment as well as games.

At least piracy still exists.

REMINDER THAT GAMESTOP TRASHES/DESTROYS/CORRUPTS GAMES THAT HAVE BEEN ON THE SHELF TOO LONG INSTEAD OF DONATING IT.

Australian here. I used to have this pawn shop that had almost every game I wanted. Since I was poor, I had to save up for this two-disc collection of Grand Theft Auto Vice City and GTAIII. This was back when these games had only recently come out.
Thinking about it, maybe $100 was kind of a rip off for that collection especially after I lended it to my cousins and they never returned it back. But that pawn shop was great, since I got my original Xbox from there with Halo and Shenmue II. Place moved twice before shutting down.

These days, I usually check out my local Cash Converters and the EB Games closest to my house. Not a huge variety of rare shit anymore, considering my town is infested with Nintoddlers twenty-year olds who listen to vaporwave and synthwave because of aesthetic purposes.

Thing is, I would gladly support a local gaming store or comic store if I actually knew about it. I've always been someone who actually loves local businesses like this local computer place I frequent that helped me build my first computer.
It still runs pretty good, but I feel bad for the owners whose parts dealers suddenly vanished and left a bunch of computer cases and parts in their warehouse. Since it seems like an obvious scam. Never did any research, but the computer shop owner told me that my case is basically the only computer case that they had.

Anyway, there's not a huge point to me visiting game stores because they never have copies of games I actually want. Just want to build my full Yakuza collection and Persona collection. Just missing all the PS2 games, really.

I hate reseller scum so much. They ruined game collecting and fuck them for it.

I found a cart of GBA Fire Emblem for $3 at a pawn shop right next to a notorious reseller scum shop a few months back. I'm certain it's not a bootleg because I had to take a q-tip to get it working (Bootlegs are always in strikingly good condition) and there were save files on it with 20+ hours. It was honestly one of the best days of my life because the cunts running the store have harassed me for years because I talk a lot about how bad resellers are and how they've ruined the local hobby.

I won't name names because they'll be aware of the cheap as hell GBA games if they get the word.

WET was really fun, but I never got past one fucking boss fight because it was literally fucking broken. It's essentially just a fight with lots of infinitely spawning enemies and to beat it you gotta close off all the spawn points. Only thing is, one of them is on a platform you need to backflip off a wall to get to, but it's juuuuust too high to get on and all you do is donk your head on it.

Nope. I have around 4 or so gamestops, and there was 1 jewish store that sold old shit at top price. The only good I had was when the gamestops were getting rid of the ps2 games so I went and got a shitload.

WET got really poor scores for a reason.

I wish we had cool game stores in here, we just have pure shit in corporate form. On the upside they some times have no idea what they're stocking and you can get a damn good game for almost nothing.

At the same place I did later go in and ask where they're keeping all their copies of No Man's Buy they said "we're hoping we can sell them again after the patches fix everything". I just gave them that smile you give a 5 year old who's convinced that grandpa is going to leave the hospice any day now and said "I'm sure they will.".

Well, if you were in NA, I'd say that the PS2 SMT/Persona games probably wouldn't be an issue these days on either the availability or pricing end, but I don't think they bothered to give PAL the same reprint treatment the gave NA (Atlus reprinted every last one aside from Vanilla P3) and you guys somehow never got Raidou 2 anyhow to my knowledge.

I've heard that with Yakuza, PAL copies (Europe ones anyhow) might be cheaper than they are in NA; something about someone in Italy finding a container full of unsold copies or something. Been a while since I checked online to compare, but I think the last time I checked it was like 35 Eurobucks to $45-80 USD for Yakuza 2.

As far as sixth gen goes, the GBA has indeed slipped past scalpers reasonably well, with only a handful of games being over $20 or so.

Well, going off experiences with Fucking Gamestop around where I live, they tend to hire the dudebro and "I have boobs so I get sales" girl types, and since mainstream stuff is what sells really well that's what they push preorders of to customers and knowledge of among the employees. This results in a fair amount of ignorance about games/genres that aren't really mainstream, and even in terms of systems themselves Gamestapo employees can be really stupid (had one tell me straight to my face while I was paying for one of the few DS games they had left worth buying that "the DS is a terrible handheld just like all the rest of Nintendo's Pokemon systems have been"). Occasionally found an employee whose taste or at least knowledge went beyond the latest normalfag games, but overall it's something I've come to not expect of Gamestop. I'm rarely ever there, and when I am, it's just to get my game. If I wanted to talk to knowledgable employees, I'd go to one of the better independent stores I know of during their non-rush hours.

There's a nice place near my hometown, they had every PS2 Gundam game for $15-20 each. The checkout guy even yelled to his buddy in the back that I was buying their copy of MS Saga, so they knew what they were selling.

Their consoles were reasonable too, the most expensive ones were probably the coloured N64s, but even the green ones were only $60 maximum, the others went down to around $20-30. Tons of Atari-era shit too, saw easily a dozen different platforms included in that store. If you go to Belleville in Ontario, look downtown, you'll probably enjoy it.

Is disdain for the customer just a common Gamestop thing? We call them EB Games here, but I've been shit talked at least three times, once he told me Splatoon was a baby game as I was fucking handing him the cash for it, again when he basically called me gay for buying Rune Factory 4, and he rolled his eyes when I got Titanfall 2 and suggested I get Battlefield 1 or Battlefront instead. I heard him and his buddy hyping up Dark Souls 3 as I left, so I can confirm his absolute lack of taste.

Might be too long for anyone to bother to read but i still have shivers from the memory of this:

Ontario Canada? Or is there somewhere in the states also by that name?

I think it's more that Gamestop probably cares mostly about a few things when hiring: Can you bring in sales (having tits apparently helps more than being knowledgable), and do you keep track of the latest normalfag games to better shill at people? Knowledge and/or liking of older or more niche stuff is likely completely secondary (Gamestop's focus is primarily on newer releases anyhow), hence the apparent twats that think you mean some other, more popular game, or act as if earlier entries in a series didn't exist before it. Still, at times it seems like they hired someone straight out of Holla Forums that doesn't know whether or when it's appropriate or not to shit on your taste and purchases in real life. I mean, it's one thing to warn someone in advance against an out-and-out bad game they're looking into (might lose the store a purchase, but the customer may very well buy games from your location more often if you help them avoid poor purchases), and another to just decry, say, a Japanese game like Rune Factory as ">buying weebshit >playing weebshit" to their faces as they're handing you money. I'd also guess that a fair amount of people working at Gamestops either aren't actually interested in vidya (or perhaps aren't interested anymore; I've heard working there is a good way to kill your interest in video games), and just see it as something to get paid for.

I will say though that as annoyed as customers seem to get with the employees, I've heard the employees at times have good reason to be annoyed with the management, who likely care about games even less than the employees do at times.

The intention is pure, but it's a surefire way to get your store shut down. The law sees them as counterfeit games. A shame, sure, but that's how the law do.

On topic though:
Now it's a hairdressers.

Man fuck CeX, place is full of straight up bustas.

Also went out after dinner to do some looking for vidya. Saw a copy of Wild Arms ACF for $70 used at Bookmans. Ridiculous that they want that much, even with it not being an easy game to find, and I am glad I found my copy as cheaply as I did a while back.

Doesn't stop one of the places out here charging $50 for repros of fan translated SFC games like Star Ocean. I'd laugh if I ever found out that the patch roms still have a "if you paid money for this you got scammed" screen like various games see added by the translators.

Yeah, the old Play'n'trade down here used to be like that. I wish I'd found it sooner, but one day I saw them packing stuff up. Asked them what was up, they said they were getting the place cleaned and would open again the following week. That week turned into two, which turned into a month, and they never reopened. The guy that owned the corner they were on was a dick to them as well; their store could only be seen driving east, and while roadside advertising would have helped the corner owner refused to let them do so.

Still have my copies of Paper Mario TTYD and Tales of Symphonia I got there.

I once convinced a guy to not buy Final Fantasy XIII, but he then got Crackdown 2 instead so I'm not sure if it was an upgrade.

I've only noticed the black man in the background of that scene. You can tell he's even less polite than he of the waning hope. He's like "Mmhmm, bitch, I'm a fat-ass too, and you're fucking crazy."

With Persona/SMT. I was finding the games for $20-30 online for PAL versions on a certain site. Except FES is sold out and I can only get Persona 4. They're way too expensive on places like Ebay or in stores though. Seems my country has a fuckload of hidden weebs, considering the Take Your Heart Edition of Persona 5 was sold out in less than a day in Australia.
And yeah, I don't recall ever seeing Raidou 2 in stores on release whatsoever. Raidou 2, maybe. Wasn't really big on turn-based RPGs as a kid until just a couple of years ago. Too much of a dumbass.

I'll hunt a little further with Yakuza. But I just recall finding fuckall that wasn't something ridiculous like $200 ages ago. So this change in price with Yakuza 2 sounds rather recent.

Crackdown 2 is good, fuck yourself.

Strikes me that it could easily just be that much lower an amount gets shipped. I mean, PAL in general sadly gets fucked over a lot when it comes to JRPGs anyhow, so it wouldn't shock me if for what you do get, not all that many copies are made for the region. And then of course there's the issue that Atlus doesn't even have a PAL branch anyhow, and even in NA is prone to doing rather small initial prints of games, only reprinting them if prices get too high and/or get badgered about low availability.

Could just as well be scalpers. I'm just saying.

I wasn't real familiar with JRPGs of any sort until maybe five years back when a friend gave me a copy of Golden Sun. Thankfully, I live in NA and have had pretty decent luck finding stuff at reasonable prices, at least to a degree.

I think it may have been sometime last year. Though checking on some of the PAL Amazons, it seems like any cheap ones they had have been sold. Not seeing any cheap copies on ebay either. I don't think Sega bothered to make it all that available to begin with anyhow, being released in the west like two or three years after the PS3 was already out, so of the four main games with physical copies, it's been the most expensive. I have seen Yakuza 4 creeping up a bit at some places locally, but it's still outliers asking like $35-60 for it. Bit hard for them to actually compete at those prices when Fucking Gamestop is only asking $20 (up $5 from last year).

Theres a vidya store nearby that rents out vidya for a dollar a day. So when new game releases come out, I rent it for 3-4 days and just beat it and return it. It's nice.

Good things never last.

I work at one, repairing things, preparing stuff to be displayed on the sales floor, etc.

I think one of the stores in the surrounding towns actually makes more money renting out use of their console arcade in the back room than they do actually selling games.

Companies hate it though. Hurts their bottom line, like selling second hand vidya.

Well all they pretty much have there anyhow is preowned stuff and a few shelves on the wall behind the counter of actually new releases, both categories of which are usually overpriced and the former can get pretty beat up. The handful of times I've been there there was pretty much no one actually browsing the shelves for games to buy, they just find something and fork over $5 an hour to play it in the back room. When I've been there on Friday or Saturday nights (when they're open until midnight), that back room is really loud. I think most people opt to use them for fighting tournaments or something, provided they have the game people want to play in.

Do you ever go during the weekend to check it out?

Occasionally. It's kind of on the really far end of where I'm willing to make a trek to due to where I'm living now (moved some miles further east of where I used to be). But when I've been out that way anyhow I'll stop in from time to time. Never really bothered going into the backroom, but from what I've seen from the front room when it's not real busy, they have a variety of different consoles and TVs set up in there, and people that pay can play anything in the store on them. They also sell (overpriced) snacks and soda. They're one of the few stores that are kind of crap on the "buying games" end that I can actually understand how they're actually making a good profit still.

Can't say the same about one of the other stores around here; selection remains pretty much the same every time I've been there, prices can be pretty ridiculous (though rarely I find something good; $12 AoS was from there), and they never seem to have any customers in there, yet they keep staying in business somehow. Also, while they advertise a "Buy two, get third half off on the same system" constant sale outside, they're prices are so high it still averages out to paying full price or so. Best store I know of has been considering buying them out and opening a new branch at that location, which I'd welcome since their prices and selection are a good bit better.

CAN'T WAKE UP

the retro gaming market is cancer
autists are so fucking stupid they'll blow their money despite the ridiculous prices.
I remember when Shenmue 3 got announced the price of Shenmue got jacked up like $30

CT

There is a few game stores around my house that aren't fucking gamestop. Disc Traders and TGW, "The Gaming Warehouse". Both stock older games and shit.

Tgw started going downhill when they converted half the store for magic/board games ect. To make space they shoved all the vidya stuff to the front of the store, in front of the window.

Anyway me and a buddy go there one day to trade in some shit. Get down to Guitar Hero 3

So I say,

So I take the money for the other games. On the way out I decided to check their dumpster. They would've just thrown away a perfectly good game what else would they waste?

Those stupid fucks couldn't figure out simple troubleshooting.

game resellers are typically pieces of shit

Disc Traders is better, but still do stupid shit like having pic related printed out on the wall in their store, but basically have the same prices for trade-ins.
Given they do keep lots of older games in stock, they also have other shit like e-readers, laptops, and TI calculators.

You'd think they'd at least make a policy of being better than fucking Gamestop if they've actually made a poster of that image, rather than just being another flavor of similar shit. The best place I know of makes a habit of being better than Gamestop, both selling current and directly past gen (so right now, Gen 7 and 8) games at lower prices than Gamestop, and offering a lot better in store credit if you trade stuff in. Hell, they even have a "preorder" system of their own where they'll shave $5 off the total game price and have an employee pick up the game from somewhere that isn't Fucking Gamestop and give it to you the day it releases (only downside is they don't give you preorder bonuses), as the idea is to deny Gamestop sales. I suppose the fact that most of the employees there are former Gamestop employees that got disgusted with that chain helps some on that end.

I miss it, anons. They held monthly tournaments in just about everything. The owner was a total bro, was a huge SMT fan. I ended up getting a ton of great games from there. Then some assholes decide to ruin the store by swatting it when they were streaming one night, and then throwing bricks through the windows.

I miss having a good game store in town. All that's left is a decent at best record store that sells preowned games. Only good deals I've gotten there are .Hack Infection for $15, and the Zelda Collection for GC for $30. They weren't even amazing deals. Just slightly below ebay.

My best advice is to start searching neighboring towns, depending on if you've got any within decent range, and exploring possibilities there. It's what I had to do once the local Play'n'trade shut down and we were just left with Gamestops all over the fucking place.

I'm not going to defend the swatters, but maybe streaming from your place of business (even if said business is vidya) isn't a good idea.

If I had a car, sure. I walk everywhere.

As for the streaming, it was something they were just starting up, they were trying to promote this business.

Here it's so hot in the summer that you really need some sort of air conditioned transport if you don't want to sweat like crazy for the next hour after you get somewhere.

I suppose it might also depend on where you are, but here you can take buses straight from one town to another (provided they're on the same road and not parallel; couldn't get to the town to the east just taking a bus north).

Only towns near me are half an hour away, buses go there, but I'm too busy with seasonal work to go or do anything in the next town over. I know there's nothing there too, except a higher crime rate.

If I had a car, sure. I walk everywhere.
I have a truck, but it's absolute shit when it comes to gas. The only reason I have it at all was because my parents gave it to me for free, because neither of them wanted it.

Ah, that's a shame then. Hopefully in the future something better comes your way. If it's a Gamestop problem like my town's suffered from (where they choke everywhere else out), perhaps some of them will close as the company realizes there's no point in having eight or nine in close proximity to each other (for fuck's sake, for years there was one in the local mall and another right across the street from them), and other used video game places might set up shop again. Though I suppose it's up to chance if said new places will be any good or just overpriced hipster bait scalper shops.

Well, apparently the store has several branches in another state - so they've been fine so far?

Sadly no, we don't have anything like that in irrelevant east-eurostan unless you live in the capital.
Everyone plays on PC and pirates as well.

Question, does the owner have a precious metal or stone and/or any of the following in their name: -stein, -sky, -berg?

Reminded me I need to finish steins;gate

We used to have local pirate market. It was used to be a book market. But internet killed it. We used to go there during college days.

I highly doubt we'll get a store like that any time soon.

This town is filled with conservative Christians and meth heads. Only businesses that stay afloat are supermarkets, car lots, and restaurants.

Why is the UK so shit for vidya?

Don't forget UK (and PAL overall) not even getting certain games that NA got in the first place.

...

Gamestop sadly has a lot more money to toss into name recognition and marketing than the average independant store. Combine that with it apparently being easy to open new locations, and they readily choke out whatever they can if they get the numbers built up to do so (at one point I honestly didn't even know of anywhere else to buy vidya from, though that was before I started exploring surrounding towns more). Also doesn't help matters that when video rental places went under, they took places like Game Crazy with them.

Not sure how easy it is to find a 3.55 or lower PS3 at random in a store these days, but I'd say you got lucky on that. Kind of wish I had one for Vesperia PS3's fan translation, but my 160 GB slim was one of the later ones that had factory firmware above the limit.

Because nobody's reported them? $20 for translated mother seems alright to me.
If you wanna be a dick though, you can be the one to do it.

nah they're cool, gonna keep going back to buy shit from them

I bought mine about 5 years ago; best move ever. The previous owner kept it up to date, but there was a well-trusted guy on PS3hax that lived near me, so turnaround time was insanely fast (about a week) and grand total costing an extra $30. Now that the Cobra payload has been further refined, my PS3 does double duty as a region-free Blu-ray player (still haven't got the DVD portion worked out yet, I think it has something to do with the fact that my display doesn't support anything PAL).

I own a CECH-1000 it was updatd to 4.5 software firmware and I had no idea what to do with it. Aside from the case cracking my fault I placed it on an angle on a box, it slid off. Still functions but I gotta take it apart and double check it. I was gonna clean it anyways.

I suppose I ought to look for one in the future, but right now most PS3 games are pretty cheap (depending on where you look), and the fan translation scene is still limited to Vesperia PS3 as far as finished stuff. Though I'll admit being able to get complete games and not have to pay extra for DLC would be nice.

Yeah; I been shopping, PS3 games are ridiculously cheap. I found quite a few in thrift shops. When you do go shopping though, look for a 120 GB slim. Those are guaranteed to be downgradeable. Looks like they're going for around $70 on JewBay and $100 on Amazon.

Went to the local gaming store and it had only like 5 3ds games and the guy was watching tv, could have snatched those 5 and walked out the place without him even noticing. Seemed comfy but still there's no point in buying local when the prices are the same as gamestop and they typically have a bigger selection.

Good thing for me I still techincally work at best buy but get no hours so I have a full time job somewhere else and get to order all my games online for like 30% off

I will say that that multimedia place I like is NOT the place to go for PS3. I mean, occasionally I see something decent cheap there (not going to mention easy to find AAA shit), like Tales of Xillia, Xillia 2, and Zestiria for $12 each (got the latter there for $6 after discounts), but I've noticed they have a trend towards not even trying to match Gamestop, for as much as that's worth. I mean, from what I've seen there, they ask like $35 for Resonance of Fate, $33 for Folklore, $28 for Trinity: Souls of Zil O'll, $35 for Yakuza 4, $35 for Ar Tonelico Qoga, etc as stand out highs. All of which Gamestop (and even most of the other stores around here) have much cheaper if you can find them. Not defending Gamestop's shit, but if part of your business is to be an alternative vidya shop to them, it's silly to not try to be competitive price-wise. Really not sure what the deal there is with their vidya prices in both ways anyhow.

That actually sounds pretty nice, but I have to question how many games you can actually fit on there at once. I mean, I've done my best to do physical discs where possible with my 160gb, but it's still annoying to put a disc in and see that it still has to eat up anywhere from 3-10 gigabytes of the limited storage space to even play through forced disc installs (and it makes me wonder just how big the filesizes for those games are anyhow; I mean, did the actual games for those exceed the bluray limits and thus part of them are compressed and have to be unloaded onto the system itself and decompressed to be usable?)

Depends on how you store them. Each standalone "AAA" game averages anywhere from 9 to 18 GB, GTA V being the exception (after installing game data, it took up about 28 GB counting the disc and updates). Compilations and series packs (God of War, the Ass Creed collection) always run over 30 GB. You'll run out of space very quick if you just run off the internal drive.

Fortunately there are options. The method I used to use was just putting a 2 TB hard drive in the console and loading up everything there, leaving space for game data, saves, etc. When I ran out of space, I moved on to storing PSX and PS3 games on an external drive, since launching from there has been supported for a while by then. This worked out great because it allowed for the giant drive inside to be used for game data and more PS2 and PSP games (those can't be launched from an external drive). I now run PS3netsrv on my home server and launch ISOs from that, works really well and requires zero effort; plus I can keep the Blu-ray drive in European mode in case I want to put in a European Blu-ray.

Might elaborate further that I have no clue why they price things the way they do. Talking with family about it, they suspect the employees are just high (the store does sell incense and shit too), but given my past experiences I'd think that maybe someone there's known that niche games have less of an audience and at full price might rot on the shelves. However, other things I've seen like the prices here , them asking $100 for Baten Kaitos Origins (and apparently managing to sell it at that price) makes me think otherwise.

Does playing from an external drive cause loading issues or anything for PS3 games?

Damn son, that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. $100 for that goes beyond "collector convention" prices though (I freaking hate that concept, though going to them with friends is a grand time), I've seen it average for about $60.

As for PS3 loading issues, not really. USB setup is kind of tricky though as it relies on an NTFS prepping utility found in webman (if you want to use ISO files, which you do). It's actually easier (if you ask me anyway) to set up PS3netsrv on a computer, then you don't have to care about drive formats or worry about your hard drive not being detected by the PS3.

Found a place a couple towns over that sells some cool stuff. Bought some Mega Man figures there, and they fixed my old DS Lite pretty cheap. Nice being able to use my flashcart again.

Yeah, I got a complete copy a few years back for $25 and really hadn't seen it locally since. Doing some research myself, $50 seemed average online at that time I saw it next at that store (I blame Gamecube price hikes, the game selling like shit anyhow, and Monolith Soft's popularity increasing as of Xenoblade, perhaps resulting in more demand for their older Nintendo games), and yet they were wanting twice that for it. I saw it there for a couple of treks out to trawl for cheap vidya, and then it was gone the next time, so I'm left to assume it sold (it wasn't there long enough for them to give it a clearance price either). Not the only time they've asked completely bonkers amounts for games, both on the "double or more than reality" end (like Metroid Prime 2 for $35-50; goes for like $10-15 at the best store I know), or just the "average price is ridiculous anyhow" end (IE: $140 for Kuon as of last year).

Maybe my family is right, and they're just high on their own incense and the prices reflect it at times.

I have a hard enough time just trying to get a friend to go look for vidya occasionally with me, let alone actually leave his house. Really can't imagine trying to get anyone to hit a convention or anything with me if I ever went.