used games Archives - Intensive Gaming Diary

What Kind of a Video Game Shopper I Am?

Posted on July 31, 2026 by Viljami

In this blog post I am going to describe what kind of a video game shopper I am. What games, devices and/or consoles I do buy? I make purchases often from different web shops and also sometimes from actual physically existing stores and I also sometimes buy games from flea markets that are located near where I live.

I got some inspiration from a recent purchase of some PS2 games. You can see the titles that I purchased in the featured image of this blog post. I did buy seven PS2 games and also one PS1 game that was a bit cheaper one since it was in a mediocre condition. It didn’t have the front cover and also the box was a bit damaged. Although the disc was in a good condition. That game is not visible in the image but I can tell you that the game was Ridge Racer Revolution. That game alone cost me nine euros.

I buy sometimes used PS2 and PS1 games. I currently don’t have a working PS2 in my setup. I do have a PSOne console that works just fine. I mainly use it when I do want to play something on a real hardware. It is nice to play some games that need several discs with it. After I have bought a PS1 or PS2 game I rip it with an external DVD drive to an ISO file and then transfer it to my retro computer. I have a Batocera setup and also Recalbox for Raspberry Pi 5. I use Recalbox for PS1 games and a bit more powerful PC for Batocera with which I play my PS2 games.

I have a medium sized collection of Sega Mega Drive games. I have only some tens of games that many of are the ones I already owned back in my youth. I did have also some PS1 games and a console that I unfortunately sold just before getting into studying into high school. I am still a bit confused about selling all that stuff. Back then I though I wouldn’t play games and I was thinking more towards my studying. I was thinking very differently back then because now I seem to still love playing video games and also retro games.

To describe me as a video game shopper a bit more thoroughly I should tell you that I do buy new games also. I have also a PS4 for which I own maybe one hundred games. I really haven’t properly counted them. I also have a collection of games for PS3. The newest consoles I own are Switch 2 and Xbox Series X. I also play some games on my Windows PC. Sometimes I play DOS games and I do have a small collection of big box games. So, I do buy new games and also PC big box games. Sometimes I even buy a game that is in its CD case only.

I bought a GameCube some years ago. I have some tens of games for it. I really actually play GameCube games today on an emulator. That goes with Xbox and Xbox 360 games also. I have owned an original Xbox and also a Xbox 360 but they eventually broke down and I decided to remove them from my setup. Luckily today there are good emulators for these consoles on a Windows PC that you can play many good games on.

Flea markets are fun places where you can find almost anything. I just recently found for example Need for Speed Payback for Xbox One for a cheap price of about six or five euros. Aside of being a video game shopper I also buy movies as DVDs, Blurays and 4K discs. I also like buying books from flea markets for a cheap price.

I like to buy some cheap games. As prices of retro games are going up I am going to try to keep the games that I own to myself and buy some more cheap games. I am not a person that would buy games that cost hundreds of euros. There is also a place in my hearth for emulation and game roms. If you are somewhat like me I can recommend to you a good website that holds many game roms and that site is called “Vimm’s Lair”. You can probably find it from your favorite search engine online.

Latest Purchase From Flea Market – Rage for PS3

Posted on March 17, 2025 by Viljami

Yesterday was a sunny day. It was Sunday. There was a new flea market opened recently and I decided to test it out. I took a bus and ended up at the door of this building. There were loads of tables to investigate around and try to find something interesting to buy.

I really like going to flea markets. You never know beforehand what you will find. Of course the prices are very low. You mainly do find used stuff. I usually look for books, movies and games. I rarely find any clothes from places like this. Sometimes I have bough a glass for whiskey for me or for a friend.

The weather was great outside. The flea market was huge. Since it was a common day without work you can think that there were lots of customers around. Everything went nice. I got some pretty good finds. I bought a Bluray of Die Hard 2. I also bought a Finnish book that was written by Stephen King. It was the “Dark Tower” or in Finnish “Musta Torni”. The books price was only 1,5 euros. I also found a Tiesto concert DVD. I also found one game and that was Rage for PS3.

Rage was the first game I found that Sunday from that flea market. It was also the only game I ended up buying. What I love about flea markets is that you find some very unique goods at a very low price. I ended up paying a bit over 12 euros for everything I mentioned in the last paragraph.

I didn’t have Rage for PS3 yet. So, it was a good find. It cost 5 euros. The disc was in perfect condition. I think that today people know how to handle these optical discs properly so they rarely have any scratches. I haven’t had time to play this game yet. It seems promising since it is produced by Id and Bethesda which are also makers of Doom and Quake.

If there has to be some sort of a lesson formed about this visit I would say that you definitely should go around all of the tables while visiting a flea market. I am considering to visit this particular place again maybe on a week day so that I can make some better and more finds.

My PS3 is doing so far fine. I haven’t had any issues yet. The dust seems to be my biggest enemy when it comes to old retro gaming hardware. I have had issues with some of my older consoles and especially the ones that utilize some sort of an optical disc drive. I have broken already two PS2s, an original Xbox and also Xbox 360. I am waiting to get a more powerful PC so that I could also play also PS3 and Xbox 360 games using emulation.

Rage has received good reviews. I checked Metacritic and found out that Rage has a score of 81 out of 100. The genre of this game is a shooter. When it comes to first-person-shooters I think Id and Bethesda are very big names. Bethesda also has a history of some Elder Scrolls games like Oblivion and Skyrim.

Its fun to visit flea markets. Yesterday there were so many customers out there trying to find something they would value that I think I have to make another visit some day soon and maybe on a week day. Who knows what kinds of treasures may I find there. The flea market was called Bella. They have also another store in Helsinki and this one was here at Vantaa. That’s everything from me this time. See you again soon!

How Does The Business of Selling Used Video Games Work?

Posted on June 26, 2023 by Viljami

If you have been involved in gaming or playing or collecting video games for several years you might have faced the issue of not getting your money back from a game that you bought just some months ago. You are trying to trade the game and get a good price, right? Obviously this doesn’t work this way. Because the game shop you are dealing with has to make a living. You can get maybe 20 percentage of the money you paid for the game…if you buy a new game…with that money. Does this seem complicated or unfair? Let me explain this to you so we all can understand this issue better.

Of course if you are willing to sell the game yourself and directly to another collector or player you can get a decent amount of money out of the game. Game shops are facing the fact that they have to be profitable. There are lots of expenses. Shipping of products that are coming into the store, rent of the premise and or web services for a web shop and of course the subsistence of all of the workers. Now this is a business right here. You can make a living out of this. Easy it isn’t but possible it is (did that sound like Yoda from Star Wars?).

There are several companies here in my home land, Finland, that operate this type of business that I have described right here. They might have a shop, maybe even two or three shops, and of course a web shop. There are also many smaller shops that sell games here. You can also find some people that are interested in selling some of their game collections and we have platforms like Huuto dot net and Tori dot fi for someone who wants to sell any used stuff. And I must mention also re-use centers and flee markets whose prices are usually lower since they get the stuff they sell mainly for free. And this is where we get to people that take advantage of this and…it isn’t very nice as you can figure.

Where do you get games for a low price that you can sell to some collector? I know some people that have received an estate that has contained games. Usually there is a huge collection to be sold. And if you buy the whole stack you get it in a fair price, right? Now we are starting to figure this out. You can sell these games piece by piece. A game collector is someone that needs maybe one game or two or three games that he or she is missing from his/her collection. So you can sell a few game for a decent price and make a profit a bit by bit. This is the magic of selling used games. You buy a large batch and check the unique games prices and you will get a profit out of this.

What makes the used game’s price high or low? One important thing is the condition of the game. It can be a sealed copy. It can have a manual and all of the covers. Or maybe its a loose game with generic cover or no packaging at all. PC games can be packaged in so called “big boxes” that make them more valuable. And the condition of the box matters. It matters also how the labels look like and does the CD/DVD disc have scratches on it. Sometimes the condition of the game can be enhanced quite easily. I am not going into that so deeply.

Some games can also be rare ones. They might be so good that no one just wants to sell them. They can be rare in a way that they weren’t even so popular when they first got released. These types of games are just uncommon. Some games gained popularity and valuation only when some retro hobbyists noticed their true value. Some games are so amazing that they seem to define a whole gaming system. These types of games can be something like Super Mario for NES or Sonic for Mega Drive or something similar.

Should you sell your old games? This is a tough question. I regret selling my old PS1 back in the beginning of the 2000s. The system and all the games I had for it would have been so much more valuable for me today compared to the price that I got from them then. Like, I sold all of them for under 200 euros. If you consider only the money this is clearly a financial loss for me. And I would have liked to play these games still. I just didn’t seem to have such an interest for retro games back then. You have to consider how I got back into playing video games in 2006 when I got my original Xbox. And…it was 2017 when I started my plans for starting to collect older and retro gaming systems again.

For some years already I have been writing to this blog. It is very interesting. However this is only a way for me to express my thoughts. I am not currently getting anything financially from this. And so is the way also that game collectors necessarily don’t get anything from collecting games when it comes to money. Game shops do make profit. That is a good thing. Without them we wouldn’t have a place to trade and buy games.

What is it like to work in a game shop? Sometimes it is busy and sometimes there’s only a few customers. It can be a place to build your dreams and fantasies. It is definitely a technical job. I also got to write, of course, blog posts for the game shop that I worked in for six months. The biggest parts of my job were handling and shipping orders, responding to customer feedback and being a customers servant face-to-face and also in some other ways. It was a fun job. It was a busy job. And ultimately…it was barely profitable.