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I'm a pretty cheap guy. I always have been, probably because I started working part time when I was 12 and from then on mostly had to spend my own money on things.

Anyway! Because I've been cheap I have a tendency to follow the "one man's trash is another's treasure" rule. And since I moved into my current house, I've had access to my town's "swap shed," which is pretty much like a yard sale where everything's free. If you have stuff that's in good shape but you don't want any more, you toss it in this shed and someone else can have it; perfect for a cheapskate like me.

Anyway, in the two and a half years, I've found some stuff of dubious quality:

• A Dreamcast with no controller or power cable, so I've yet to be able to test it.
• An Xbox 360 that is in RROD mode
• A laptop with a horribly disfigured screen

So, I dunno. That Dreamcast is neat to have around whether it works or not; I mean, how many of those do you even see nowadays anyway? The Xbox is a waste, it would cost way too much to get it running again even though I'd like to have a second one laying around. The laptop was okay, I managed to part out everything inside and ended up making about forty bucks on the thing (plus I kept the hard drive for myself).

Today, though, I was genuinely excited about my gaming find. In a stack of recent game guidebooks, including Bioshock 2 and Uncharted 3, I found this, looking like it had never been opened:



I never knew this because I didn't buy FF13 until way later, but apparently this was a 200k-copy limited edition. The one I found is number ~12,500. Is it actually WORTH anything? Not that much, it looks like, but for someone who really, really likes FF13, it was a pretty good stroke of dumpster diving luck!

Anyone else out there have any stories of lucking into something cool at a flea market or box of free stuff found on Craigslist, or anything else?




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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

Not having a lot of cash growing up, my friends and I would spend our saturday nights looking through dumpsters outside of electronic stores and pawn shops. We'd find DVD players, VCRs, speakers, TVs, random cables etc. Sometimes we'd get lucky and find computer parts and even a working laptop once. Nothing that cool, but it was always exciting to find stuff that someone threw away.

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"You know that feeling you get when you're on a merry go 'round, and you want to jump off to make the spinning stop, but you know it'll suck when you land? I feel like that all the time"- Keno

"I stab my girl until I fall down"
-Yukari
Do you like Horny Bunnies?

Not really a dumpster dive, but I did just manage to get my hands on a Final Fantasy VI Super Famicom cartridge last weekend at PAX. Had to pay for it, of course, and it was an impulse buy for which I probably spent too much, but such is life.

Hopefully I'll be able to test it out in the next couple weeks and see if I got shafted on it.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

There was once a swap pile in a dorm that contained Diablo II.

I'm still wondering whether I should have picked that up.

Meanwhile, I did pick up some D&D books from another swap pile once. Though they're AD&D 2e, which I've never played and probably never will. Also a few other odds and ends.

This post has been edited by Glenn Magus Harvey on 12th March 2015 23:57

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Check the "What games are you playing at the moment?" thread for updates on what I've been playing.

You can find me on the Fediverse! I use Mastodon, where I am @[email protected] ( https://sakurajima.moe/@glennmagusharvey )