PixlBit

One of my best friends is another 1UP alumnus, who is a park ranger in Maine. I was there visiting a couple of months ago, and we went to a store in Topsham called Game Box. They had physical copies of the FF Pixel Remasters, the Dragon Quest trilogy, SaGa Frontier, and a lot of other stuff I've never seen in the wild. I loaded up while I was there.

In my neck of the woods we have Fallout Games, and there, I've found such oddities as the Gamecube and Wii Fire Emblem games, Skies of Arcadia Legends, and some rare consoles. Among the ones I've seen there are the Fairchild Channel F and the Bally Professional Arcade, which was also known as the Astrocade.

Best Buy has had some cool stuff from time to time. I was able to snag a Fire Emblem Three Houses Seasons of Warfare edition from them at the last moment, and they had physical copies of Ys Origins.

Cage Match:

I had to look up I Am Bread. Super Meat Boy I knew about since it was pretty well known a decade and a half ago,. I think I'm going to go with I Am Bread, since it seems to take the spirit of games like Goat Simulator and Untitled Goose Game to the realm of inanimate objects.

So as you may or may not know, I'm a huge Pac-Man fan.  I always have been, ever since I was a little kid.  I was a child of the 80s, so Pac-Man back then was like today's Pokemon.  Anyway,  every kids' dream was to own a full size arcade machine, but that would never happen.  But in my case, it did!  One day when I was in third grade or so, my dad and I were at our church.  Someone just donated a couple of arcade machines, but the church didn't want them so they said, "If you have a truck, you can take them."  Well we were there and we had a truck, and one of the machines was Pac-Man so we took that home and I was the happiest kid in the world.  I still have that Pac-Man machine to this day.  It used to be in the garage where I used to live, but I had to put it in storage since now I live in a small third floor apartment.  I hope I can keep that arcade machine as long as I can! 

STAGE SELECT: Personally?  Probably nothing really, all the rareish stuff I have (like Tron Bonne and Mega Man legends PC complete with box, I think that's worth >$100 at least) I actually purchased brand new.  Even like the NES garage sale games I got as a teen were never worth much I believe.  A lot of the retro games I really, really like I found as an adult and never had as a physical cartridge or anything.

But, hmmm, maybe I can share this if I'm vague.  I found a rare video game on eBay, the kinda that goes for hundreds of dollars the few times it pops on auction sites, for about $50.  I sent it off to a preservation site to see if they could do anything with it but unfortunately the methods just aren't there yet for the thing as it used some newer components, and really it's not popular enough to have anybody working on it since they can work on more popular stuff.  I did get some cool pics out of it lol but afaik it's just in somebody's closet right now.  I still check auction sites looking for another copy that I could own personally, but it's been many, many years and I've only seen it pop up, at it's expensive prices, a few times!  At least I got to play it a little before I shipped it off which is kinda cool too.

CAGE MATCH: What do you get when you cross the protagonist of Super Meat Boy with the protagonist of I Am Bread?  A real hero.  A real hero.  Like a hero sandwich.  Fuck you.  Super Meat Boy wins!