The following is our third Chicago-Style Drunksaling post to the old Drunkgamers.com forums. If you're unfamiliar with Drunkgamers.com, occasionally they would go out drinking and go garage saling for video games and then post about it. Unitdaisy and I were inspired to do the same and posted the bulk of our first year finds in their forums, and in fact if it weren't for drunksaling you probably wouldn't be reading this site right now.

We'll be posting one from the archives every other week or until the weather turns spring-like in Chicago which means that yes, we have quite a few of them. Even a few that I lost and recently recovered on an old hard drive. Some of the early posts were pretty technically inept - this one features some poorly sized images as well as rough captions (which we later ditched in favor of laziness). The below article is from June 8th, 2002.

peccaui: Because it's moving season, there was an absurd amount of garage sales available this week. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there that think if they put five items out on their lawn they can call it a garage sale. These people are no better than the idiots out there that refuse to take down their expired signs, and they will all reap my wraith!

We may be geeks, but we're not this hard up.

peccaui: Our first sale was a major disappointment. After about 45 minutes of travel, we were stuck staring at about 12 items, all ranging from bad to worse (who wants Magic cards?) and being grilled as to whether we needed bar stools. Bar stools from Crate and Barrel. The only plus: well, there was none. It was sheer pain.

While we wait for the bus, we play kitchy games such as who can get sunburned first.

peccaui: Next on the list was getting lost. And unfortunately, this happened on our way to the garage sale that looked promising - the one garage sale that listed comics in their item list. Where there are comic books, there are almost assuredly video gamess to accompany them. And we could not find it.

unitdaisy: Even the bus driver had seemingly never heard of the street and told us to get on some mystical (probably nonexistent) 49"A" bus...

peccaui: So, we hit up a garage sale that we saw listed on a telephone pole. And when we arrived, it looked like this

It's the anti-garage sale.

unitdaisy: complete with sunbathing hippie chicks...

peccaui: See it? No? That's becauuse there were about five items scattered on the grass. Back on the search for the comic book garage sale.

There's a whole lotta Ron Lim goin' on.

peccaui: Half an hour later, we found the sale - and we were glad we did. This was by far the best garage sale we've ever hit up. My initial feeling was correct - it was a gold mine of geekdom. See below for pics.

This box used to contain a Donkey Kong Game & Watch. Guess whose pants it's in now?

You have to stand by the classics. Or loop them.

An old Coleco! Just holding it gave me shivers of glee.

peccaui: Also not pictured is the official Iron Chef book (for $1 - I nearly trampled unitdaisy trying to get at it), a video on mastering your Theremin and a fashion of the 40's book that unitdaisy swears Lucas used to rip off an outfit for Amidala. Btw, the Coleco has no cables, rendering it unusable until I find a power adapter for it. Time to go digging!

unitdaisy: Yeah, peccaui may have beaten me (to the punch) and bought the Iron Chef book, but we'll see who ends up owning it, heh heh...

peccaui: That's crazy talk. Of course I own it.

We'll buy any rhythm game.

Now I can get my monkey on in public!

I think this has something to do with Lost In Space. Or not.

peccaui: Intermission: We're lost again. We wandered into a very large, stinky thrift store that refused to sell us a bag of old Nintendo accessories for $3.

Where's Exploitation Now when you need them?

peccaui: An hour later, we stumbled upon a garage sale run by an artist's collective. Say what you will about then, but they have some strange stuff. The oddest find being a collection of Playboy magazines stacked next to a collection of wedding cake figurines. They also had a copy of Virtual Springfield that they wanted $5 for. I quietly passed on that.

unitdaisy: They say they are moving (also going to europe, strange mass migration phenomenon) and will have new stuff out every week until they sell it all, if that's the case i think they should have just let us walk through the house to pick what we wanted...

Learn about gambling through a variety of mexican board games and chinese writings - all in their original language!

The strangest dichotomy we've seen yet.

peccaui: On our way to our last sale, we found a Gamecube! I must say, that was easier to find than trying to rent a Gamecube in this city - the closest thing we could find to rent was a PS2. And the cardboard Gamecube was much more interesting than anything we found at the last sale. So we hit up another thrift store - which was demanding $55 for a Sega CD. Unless the two fives stood for five-finger discount, I'm not interested. However, we did find a copy of Grandia for the Playstation for $8, which a strategy guide! Something to prep me for Grandia X (I refuse to ever acknowledge that the proper title is Grandia Xtreme).

We found a Gamecube lying on the sidewalk! No we didn't - we fooled you!

One of these games were worth spending $8 on. Guess which one?

Find of the Week: Erg, this is a hard one. But, for reasons I refuse to elaborate on, I deem the Game and Watch to be the Find of the Week!

Find of the Week! This was the last thing I expected to fall upon. Next week: a portable color Q-Bert game.

Lesson of the Week: I learned a lot this week. Such as: If you think you'll be out in the sun for more than an hour in chicago on a sunny day, and you spend 90% of your time in front of a monitor in a dark room, you really should put sunblock on. I also learned that you should inspect the merchandise before purchasing it. When I got home, I realized that my Masters of the Theremin video's case was busted and that I will have to exert more than a dollar's worth of time to repair it. And next week, I'm going to drag along a barrage of batteries with me to test portable equipment, just to make sure that it works.

Lastly, I learned that I need to bring a flask with me for these endeavors. Belligerance will help me haggle!