First, from a couple weeks ago, the reason hoarding doesn’t make you feel so good sometimes. Like, when you pop in to a charity shop that *never* has games, suddenly has 20, and they’re still all priced at the “we never sell DVDs so we’ve priced them all at £1 anyway just so they dissapear quick on the off chance we do encounter the demon shiny devil worship ornament” value. Worse, when the owner knows even less and just counts the games up, “8..10…14…15… oh we’ll just take a tenner”. Which is less than Manhunt just sold for. So I’m gonna be donating every time I’m in there, then…

Second, why I love hoarding. Finding Saturn games in the wild may not be as good as finding a boxed Stadium Events NES in the wild, but it’s as retro as you’re getting round here. Where? Blockbuster Acomb, York, where else Plus plenty of disc only games from GameStation for 50p each (yes, even the £7.50 Motown), and one of the US’s most expensive xbox games - Jurassic Park Operation Genesis. Not worth quite so much here though.

And third, todays lucky find. Another Pokemon rucksack. From the same place, and in even better condition, than the JigglyPuff one a month back, plus a Pokemon filofax for luck. Then the first time I’ve seen a new, sealed PS1 mem card outside the 90s, and something else I bought in the 90s, the original Formula One PS1 game. In fact, that would be the first game I ever purchased, before I even owned a PS1. Ah, the memories, the mail order, the 3 months wait for FF VII to turn up…

Oh and, iGPC updated today. With only just a small hand holding of the server to get it through. Next Saturday, it may even have done it before I wake up .

Version History:

0.9.1 - 12/02/10
* Remove unsold count of goods. Now totals from any amount of sales will be included. All items without any sales will have price entry skipped.
* Price calculations for all items now include all Auctions, BiNs and Best Offers.
* Added filter for debug text.
* Ebaysearch now checks to see if login page is displayed after generating search result, attempting re-login and re-searching if it is.

0.9 - 24/01/10

FRONTEND:
Set frontend display of min profit to 0 when minus.
Add price calculations for ebay and non-ebay postage.
Change price calcs to use .5 when < 1, .10 when 1+ for insertion fee.
Fix custom postage calcs to ignore non-rm options.
Add frontend output to seperate boxed & unboxed items.
Add boxed/unboxed auto exclude text in search.

Winning answers should begin with I, end with N. Somewhere inbetween there’s a whole lot of work though. eBay, good bye, good riddance. Not for a while, though.

But never have I made quite the expensive mistake as the lovely blokes at TheGameCollection just have. Much to my benefit I must add, but I can assume the only Mass Effect this is having down at GC HQ is the panic enveloping the packer who just realised he sent me 9 x Mass Effect 2 (currently retailing there @ £19.95) for the knock down price of 9 x Mass Effect 1 (I won’t go in to details as I was actually planning on selling some, but lets just say it’s over 3 times cheaper ).

So, GC, if you want them back, they’re still boxed up over here Otherwise, cheap ME 2 copies coming to iG’s eBay sales very soon . Speaking of which, 100 UP. I’d do some kind of happy dance but I’ve 200 for next week to be getting on with.

Go check it out for yourself: igpc.inaudible.co.uk .

Price are current. All of em! Well, except for anything without sold listings. And there’s probably the odd eronous entry if the search string brought up a load of different stuff from when I first made the item entry, but otherwise… 1775! 20 minutes! Quick stats:

Most expensive game: Space Channel 5 Part 2 (£60 min)

Most expensive console: ….oh cack there’s a parsing error. Damn ebay and their template changes… Erm… yeah… don’t tell JJ… oh this is embarrasing… brb….

Oooaakay. That was simple enough. One C&P later and we’re back. Just 1775 prices to update again. This shouldn’t take long…

Most expensive console: Philips CD-i 450 (£48 min)

Most expensive accessory: Rock Band Drum Set (£29.21 min)

UPDATE: And again. All prices updated 06/02/10. And the time count worked this time This is for 1811 product entries:

Start Time: Sat, 06 Feb 10 17:24:01 +0000
End Time: Sat, 06 Feb 10 17:44:20 +0000
Prices updated in 1219.56763 seconds.

Still, I recon I have an up to 50 times head start. Bonus points to JJ if he figures out how/why. Or even reads this. So, I went about cleaning up some code, removing debug scripts, changing the price grabbing to include the total for all BiNs, Best Offers and Auctions (it previously would only do Auctions unless there were none). And then running some automated updates.

Nice to see a new game at the top of the PS2 price charts. FWIW, it hasn’t updated today as no sold listings were found. Unsold ones may have been, but they’re now completely ignored for a few technical reasons. Anyway, code wise, iGPC is now about one cron job and 18,000 game entries away from VGPC’s crown Anyone fancy a data entry job? You can start with this lot:

http://inaudible.co.uk/games/files/psprices0810.ods

My gift to the hoarding world. Around 1266 PS2 games, 433 PS1 games, and related accessories (give or take the odd multiple entry) with eBay UK auction sale prices hand compiled since 2008. Still roughly accurate, although some are over two years old. It’s in OpenOffice.org spreadsheet format; it’s free, so get downloading Description of fields:

* Date of last price update (anything without one is *real* old).
* Name.
* Minimum observed sold auction.
* Maximum observed sold auction (older entries won’t have one).
* Minimum profit to be made on eBay if selling at min value (it dose a rough job at calculating and deducting postage/fees from the min price).
* Computer Exchange trade in value.
* Calculated average price from min and max prices.
* Rough stamp cost (anything that’s not 0.76p probably isn’t accurate).
* Calculation of eBay fees for each item, based on the average value and stamp cost plus paypal and ebay percentages and insertion. Again, a rough guess at what gets taken off the final price.

So much to do… where to start… ah yes. Pikmin 2! From my newly crowned best store manager in the world. Sorry Jo. Apparently I’m now not only worthy of purchasing the PS1 games they otherwise keep hidden away back store, he’s now taken to offering me all their Nintendo ones too, in fact, everything you see in that first pic is undisplayed stashed stock from GameStation that no one else would ever see. I took the lot, mostly. Geez, you see Pikmin 2 and you just say yes, whatever they’re asking. Although it does seem to have dropped in price lately…

Anyway, to the gateway to hell that is Cross Green’s sorry excuse for a car boot. Makes Rufforth look like hoarding heaven. Here’s some broken half working mostly not working gaming related likely stolen goods then. Only highlight is Call Of Duty World @ War PS3, limited tin edition with flask. I can’t seem to open it though… £15. Too much, but what the hell, it’s that or a Legend Of Dragoon PS1 with only 3 out of 4 discs. Will I ever go back? Err…

* WoW Trading Card pack. Excellent condition. £1.00. Gotta be good…
* Jurassic Park Operation Genesis PC. This sells well on the PS2, and even better on the Xbox (it’s in the top 10 most expensive US Xbox list), I had doubts about it’s value on the PC though, until I checked eBay. £15 people! For a 7 year old PC game!
* Hogs Of War PS1. The cult classic. I just store these in a draw for, I dunno, the sequel to be released?
* Sains Row 2 in a fancy looking card sleeve. If it weren’t for that, I doubt I’d have noticed it. £6.00. Who knows what it’s worth. Well, iGPC does, but other than that…

Not so cool things (ie. my work):

All individually cleaned, tested, catalogued, photographed, listed… And that’s excluding the 50 odd I just purchased. I swear I just spent £1000 in the last 24 hours. I’d post more but I’ve that work to be getting back to…

Bonus points to whoever can tell me what’s contained in the “Qty/q’te 10″ boxes. Only 1337 game dealers need apply

Ignore anything I said about forgiving GAME.

See image 1, shots taken from product pages linked to from my order. One single order, purchased together, two of each, all six of which arrived together this morning. Note the quite obvious “New” text. They’re still for sale as such if you wanna look. Also note Pre Owned games are listed seperately (with Yellowy Orange purchase links / text) so you don’t get them mixed up.

And image 2. What the wonderful team in Basingstoke actually send you, as they arrived other than the removal of a couple preowned stickers to open two cases. So that kinda gives away where this is going… To be fair, they’re not terrible condition, but far from what I’m sure most people would expect. And yes, that is a rubber band holding one disc inside a manual, for reasons I feel best remain unkown.

Reasons not to CC this to pr@game.co.uk, Peter Lewis, Lisa Morgan, whoever the hell’s in charge at Basingstoke and every consumer group going? Not many, right now… I think I’ll start with Alex. I’m sure he’s seen worse.

EDIT: Though I should add a few points as there’s already interest in this.

1. Previous to this, most “New” stock I’ve ever received from GAME online (aka GameStation / GamePlay) has been factory sealed in original plastic wrapping.

2. Although every game in this order was purchased at the same time, each was packed and shipped individually. Which means six seperate times at which someone decided the above was suitable to send out as “New” stock.

3. GAME’s definition of New may vary, with ex store display stock (stuff you would buy “New” instore) being an obvious inclusion. The above could all come under this, but could just as easily be returns, or pre-owned stock. Regardless, it’s not what they normally send when you purchase “New” (or never used to be anyway).

4. Some interesting tidbits from GAME’s T&Cs:

Under “Cancellations and Returns Policy”:
… you may only cancel your order if:
(i) in the case of new software the items are as new, in a saleable condition, unused, undamaged and still in the original sealed packaging;

So, erm, if it’s not OK for me to return them to you like this, why is it OK for you to send them to me as such?

And, just thought I’d bring this up again, under “Pre-owned Items”:

Most pre-owned software … is fully tested.

I will personally write a £250 cheque to the first GAME employee who can prove to me that even 10% of software (and I’m doubting any) is “Fully Tested”. By this I mean, all “software” - that is digital files on the media - is tested to be 100% readable. Preferably on destination hardware, though it’s not a requirement, TBH even I read-error test on a PC where I can. In my experience, they’d at best just examine scratches by eye, but possibly (at lease in store, and from my own experience purchasing used optical media) don’t even do this.

And before anyone bothers, no, booting default.xbe / a menu screen and one WAV file for loading music by putting a disc in to a console and turning it on does not constitute fully - “adverb 1 completely or entirely. 2 no less or fewer than: fully 65 per cent”. Go figure. OK, 65% of the game can be readable. I never made it to disc 3 of FFVII anyway. Well, not for 6 years at least.

Anyways. GAME Plc. Also owners of high street branches of GameStation. Buy too much there, they single handedly take it upon themselves to remember your face, then land you with… a heads up on the almost new copy of Final Fantasy VI they just got in, and a “Do you collect PS1 games too? I’ve seen you around. I think it’s £10.00… thought you might like to see… ” which is handy as they rarely display anything pre-2002 anymore on the shop floor. And doubly handy as yes thankyou please I’ll take that FF VI and raise you and your employees 10 HP and 50 MP above that of your sister store.

Worst thing is, I’ve only been in that GS store a few times, and at most bought 7 buzz buzzer sets in one go (£2.00 each people!). How you get from that to “Here’s a guy that’s gonna love this pretty rare 90s RPG” is beyond me. Still, I guess it’s better than “Here’s a guy who’s buying all these legitimate copies of games to pirate them”. Yes, yes I am. All 2000+, £8,000 worth of them. BitTorrent is just for the lazy ones.

Ok anyways. Make that £8,013.50. Including:
* Two sleeveless PS3 games. I actually got loads more, £2 each in a big store clearout. Another reason not to remove your discs from cases, put them and their manuals in a big container where they inevitably get scratched and torn, then loose the original cases…
* A funky GBA style pencil case. Yes, it’ll never sell, just like the Rayman one, but who cares…
* A Super Mario Bros Super Show VCR. I got the DVD a while back, sold OK, and jesus it was just about the most tripping thing I’ve ever seen on film.
* Pandemonium! Speaking of tripping… I think it was £1.00. And it’s not worth much more, alas, Fargus and Nikki are worthy of much greater things…
* Wario Ware Inc. Proof that the random-things-that-people-decided-not-to-buy shelves next to the checkout is the best place to look for anything in CeX. If you’re thinking of actually finding GameCube games on the GameCube shelves, think again.
* And my favourie. Big pink JigglyPuff rucksack. Half price at £2.00. FTW!

Oh, and this lot. iG’s patented super cool open-everything (console related) tool kit. Well, not quite. But close enough. 50 kits up for grabs sometime soon. Tri-wings, hex, gamebit.. that’s about it actually. Hey, it’s not rocket science.