What was your worst game shopping experience EVER?

[racketboy]

I know there are lots of horror stories out there for buying games and game-related stuff -- both online and off.
Details please!

Luckly I haven't personally had too much trouble.

The worst would have to be the "Game Recyclery" (I think that's what it's called)
I found them through Amazon's site a long time ago and saw they had some fairly cheap prices on Genesis games.
I ordered a whole bunch along with a Genesis fighting joystick and some other controllers.

I was really ticked to find out most of the games were carts only and quite beat up.
Also, the joystick was a cheap, beatup 3rd party controller instead of the 1st party controller they had listed.
Most of the other controllers had sticky buttons.

If my memory serves me correctly, I tried sending back the joystick for a refund and never got anything back.

Boy that sucked...


Anybody else?

[halosoul]

I bought an american copy of King of Fighters 99 Dreamatch on DC off ebay, it was reasonably pricey but was told it was in excellent condition. I'd never played King of Fighters before, and eagerly awaited the package...it took some time to arrive.

On receiving the game, I was disappointed to find the condition was far from excellent and in fact quite poor, the disc looked to have a few scratches but I couldn't see anything major, boy was I wrong...
I booted the game up using my newly aquired DC-X import disc and wow, King of Fighters...albeit with a horrible sound problem, every couple of seconds the sound would cut out temporlilly, I put up with it for a while but was soon tearing my hair out in frustration. It had to be something on the disc, and there was a pretty deep scratch, but so small.

I e-mailed the seller to complain, meanwhile I continued to play the game, I really did love it, and found sometimes the sound was okay...hmm I thought, I e-mailed the guy back to apoligise, stupidy putting the problem down to that there must be something wrong with my boot disc. How stupid was I. I'd just thrown away my only chance of returning the game. I got several Japanese imports after that, that worked perfectly and here I was with my crappy scratched King of Fighters.

I tried to remedy the problem. While at work at GAME, I sneaklily borrowd a disc scratch repair kit, unfortunatly I ended up knackering the disc with it. It was now totally unplayable.

I ened up buying another copy of the game eventually, this was how much I liked it. While the first set me back about £25 pounds or so, this new Japanese copy was far far cheaper and in mint condition, I switched the language to english and had the same game...

The whole experience made much wiser about importing, opting to buy less from oversees, and finding some really reliable Japanese import sellers. I now have a fully working collection of great 2D fighting games from Japan. I still have the destroyed copy of my original King of Fighters in a drawer...but what to do with it, a coaster perhaps?

[grittykitty]

a few months after buying my saturn, marvel vs. street fighter got released and an anime store downtown was selling the game for a hefty price (like 70 bucks). i bought it anyway, being young i didn't have anything else to spend money on. i found that it didn't work with my saturn like i thought i would. i called the store and asked what i could do and they told me i could do the dangerous swap trick or buy the converter cart they sold that had ram capability. so, a week later my dad drove me downtown again and i bought the cart and returned home as eager to play... only to find out this cart didn't work with capcom games (why the store waited to tell me until i called to complain i will never know) - so my dad, pissed, drove me back to the store to get a refund. since we didn't have internet or any other ways of getting another action replay i had to put up with doing the swap trick and the game working only 1/6 of the time...

on ebay, i bought a copy of sonic adventure in mint condition that the seller said he bought in bulk and i won the bid for about 3 dollars. unfortunately, the game just flat out didn't work! i read online that there was a batch of bad discs that got sold to the public and it looks like i got one of them. seller was nice and gave me a refund and let me keep the disc which i still have to this day

[Mozgus]

Probably the 6 times I bought Dreamcast games from ebgames.com and they arrive unbootable. Then I have to drive out to the nearest EB, which is like 30 miles, and get in an argument with the clerk. They always say they don't accept Dreamcast games, and I always have to make the moron read the fine print on my shipping invoice.

[bawitback]

Wow, what tragedies. Mines no where being as bad but...

A couple years ago I've came across Evil Zone in circuit city that looked good. A day later I went on vacation with my family and did some research on the game online. I've checked online for availability in location, 1 in stock. When I returned to purchase the game, the store was closed. The next day I went to look for the game at circut city, it was gone. So I went searching around, I went to 2 local gameshops and asked; they never heard of the game. And finally I went to a EBgames and they had one copy left.

Another story was when I was trying to buy Bangai-O for Dreamcast. First I made an account with paypal to order the game, but found out the seller was fraud (before I bought, lucky me). Then I came across Anti-Paypal (http://www.anti-paypal.com/) which was against paypal service. After reading the whole site, I decided to cancel my paypal account. So I went searching for a mint condition Bangai-O that supported money orders. I found one seller. When I sent my money order and waited 8 days, it returned. I forgot to sign a part of it. So I sent it again. waited another 8 days, hoping for a reply (the seller got my money order and was ready to send off the game) but... It returned again. This time he replied stating the game was already sold. =___=

[whupthewickedwurm]

This one time I bought Robo Aleste on eBay from this guy in Canada. After I didn't recieve the game for a reallly long time, I e-mailed the guy to see if there were any problems or whatever. So the guy tells me it should've arrived a long time ago and says he's gonna go check at the post office to see if they lost it or something. The story he got at the post office was, that they had trouble reading the address on the package and kept it at the PO in case the guy came back and after awhile the postal workers decided to re-write the address and finally sent it off.(Like the day before the guy went to check) Well, the guy didn't believe the post office's story so he told me to send him a picture of the package when I recieved it so that he could see if they really did re-write the address. Well the game finally arrived only it wasn't in the condition the auction stated it was in - the case was a little beat up and had a rental sticker on it and the entire middle portion of the manula was MISSING! So I told the guy about it and sent him pictures of it... turns out it WASN'T the game he sent me! I guess the people at the post office broke it or something and decided to replace it instead of telling anyone...

[racketboy]

Anybody else have some good (I mean bad) stories?

[All Hail The New Flesh]

I bought a Sega Saturn on eBay with 12 games and one of the games was Fighters Megamix, so I got it, look through all the games to see if its still there, there still there, when I was testing the games, I was going to play Fighters Megamix, I put the disk in the machine without looking and turn it on, eagerly anticipated I was getting excited because I was going to play Fighters Megamix, then I found out that I put a copy of Virtua Cop, I thought I made a mistake so I searched my pile of games to find the game...it wasn't there! I end up having Fighters Megamix box with a second copy of Virtua Cop, I was pissed, I was going to email to the seller, then I was "f**k it, deal with it" because I don't feel like dealing with it.

[wyatt]

Got my SNES, way later than everyone else as usual, and sent off for Super Mario All Stars. Forgot to include photocopy of reciept, so Nintendo sent back what I had mailed them, but minus the cut out UPC from the box that was also required. They swore they had included it, without it I was never able to get my copy.

[nightwalker]

When KB Toys was selling genesis games for $5 maximum $20 I went every weekend on bus to buy some games. I used to work in a gas station washing cars in the afternoon so you can imagine all the hard work for a couple of bucks to buy video games. Anyways I go with a friend of mine to the store we usually go to I found rocket knight adventures, cyborg justice and comix zone, so what happened I asked the clerk if they had Xmen 2 Clone Wars he said we dont have it but I can call the other store and check if they got it. He calls the other store and the guy said the had a copy left that he was gona hold it for me until I get there.

Ok heres the interesting part by car the store is 30 minutes away in CAR we had the money exactly for the game and the bus to get home. Forgot to mention I needed to get in two buses to get to the store from my town. So we went walking to the other store it took us almost two hours to get there. When we got there the guy that was reserving the copy of the game for us had left and you know what they sold the game. So we had to walk again to the bus stop almost running because it was late and we were gona take the last bus. As you can imagine we missed the bus too. Luckily at that same time my neighbor was passing by there and he gave us a lift home.

The worst part of all this imgine walking all that way there in the temperatures here that day was like 96 or 98F. And couldnt get the game