So, Newbie, you want to know where you can get the stuff? Well, there are several answers to that question. No matter where you go, it will always be hit or miss. I guess that the life of an 8-bit gamer is like a box of chocolates: you always want more! Here's the breakdown:

Flea Markets:

These can be a gold mine, or a dry well. I love cruising flea markets, because you can find all kinds of great old junk, not all of it Nintendo related. If you don't know what a flea market is, it's like the biggest yardsale in the world. All you have to do is look, and you can find weird games, and you can usually haggle!

K-Mart:

K-mart and other stores sell a few Nintendo games all shrinkwrapped and priced at $10. It's a ripoff! You should never be expected to pay that much for a game. (Unless it's Tengen Tetris, but that's another story)

Funcoland:

This is the other great white satan, but unfortunatly, it's a necessary evil. You see, they tend to be staffed by inept employees who couldn't help their way out of a paper bag, and they base their prices on whatever they think that they can sell. For example, when Star Wars was reissued, the price on the Star Wars Nintendo game jumped $15! All of the old-time arcade hits are over $20, and you can't go into there looking for anything specific. On the plus side (you didn't think that there was one, did you?) in some parts of the country, there are no flea markets or specialty stores. It is also possible to special order games from them, however, if you have a store nearby, it's nearly impossible to explain the concept of mailorder to the slack-jawed jokel behind the counter. You see, some of the stores aren't stores, but are really just depots for mailordering, and if you've got one of them, you're lucky, because you've just removed the 'miss' from 'hit or miss'. The other advantage is that because they don't know what they've got, you can often get some great gems for real cheap.

Specialty Stores:

I've saved the best for last. Here's the single greatest thing to happen to Nintendo since a bunch of drunken MIT students in the 50's invented the video game. You see, these stores were started by people who love the games, and therefore know them very well. Sometimes, they are even collectors themselves. They tend to set their prices more fairly than Funcoland, but you can sometimes find better deals that the GWS. Each store is different, however, so you have to check them out. Also, a lot of communities don't have a used game store of their own, so you may need to resort to Funcosatan. Of course, the best part is that even if it sucks, you can still talk games the way that you did back in the day.

Go forth, young newbie, and don't despair! Whatever you didn't find here is out there, for you to learn out there, on your own! And remember, there are more than a thousand games out there, and most of them are less than five bucks! It's a great big gaming world out there, so if a game you pick up sucks, just go back and get ten more!

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