Charity Shop Gaming

You know that a console has well and truly gone retro when you see its games turning up in Oxfam. Mega Drive and SNES games have been in such shops for years but PS1 and PS2 games have started turning up, in my local Oxfam at least, at pretty much the same time.

My local Oxfam only sells books/music/DVDs/games and the type of knick-knacks that you get for Christmas and before you've got the wrapping off you're wondering what the charity store holiday opening times are. No clothes are sold, meaning it is sorely lacking in the fusty 'old clothes and cabbage' smell that you often get in charity stores (and pre-GAME takeover branches of Gamestation).

I often pop in there to have a look at the books and I generally also cast my eyes over the games. Most of the games for  sale are PC games, which do not interest me (I 'only' have a Mac) but earlier this year I did pick up an unboxed (but with instructions) copy of Starwing on SNES for a couple of quid.  I'd seen a couple of 'supermarket' PS2 games in there in the past  - the type of low-cost shovelware that never gets coverage from magazines and websites but are heavily featured in your local Budgen's (or similar store), for kids to pester their (non-gaming, presumably) parents into buying.  I often wonder if there are any hidden gems in these types of games and wish a magazine or website would  get a batch of them to playtest.  After all, Global Defense Force/Earth Defense Force 2017 were both ultra low budget games in Japan and they are both excellent.  I have a sneaking suspicion that the UK supermarket games are irretrievably crap though.  Anyway, I digress.


I popped into my local Oxfam while on a turkey hunt on 23 December.  We'd not been  able to get out to the shops before then due to the snow  and were facing the possibility of Turkey Twizzlers (with all the trimmings) for Christmas lunch, so I'd ventured out in snow shoes to bag me a bird.  Before tackling the horrors of Waitrose two days before Christmas I thought I'd have a browse in Oxfam and found that they'd had a game donation.  I picked up mint copies of Rollcage  and Anna Kournikova's Smash Court Tennis on PS1, both well-received back in the day, for £1.99 and 99p respectively.  I probably had GAME's policy of not accepting part-exchange on imported games to thank for also picking up a US copy of Wipeout Pure on PSP for a fiver. 


They had other decent games there too, including the superb Sniper Elite on PS2 for a couple of quid (I have it on Xbox).


So, it seems that the charity-store-donation definition of  'retro' (as good a definition as I can think of)  currently has retro starting at least at PS1 and possibly at PS2.  Cheap gaming and charitable works - what's not to like?