I had some OK yard sale finds today. Once again, my best find came early in the day — Zelda Collector’s Edition for Gamecube for $3. I found this at around 8:30 (sales start around 8 in this area) at community sale at a car wash. The games belonged to a kid. He had a bin of Gamecube games (mostly kids’ games) marked $5.00 each, but took my $3 offer without hesitation. As I was leaving, he was getting ready to mark the games down from $5 to who knows what, and his mother scolded him, telling him to wait. I thought it was amusing that he was so anxious to sell them after only a half hour.

• Jet black Gamecube, with nice case, 2 controllers, 3 memory cards — $10
• Microsoft Works Suite 2001 — $0.25
• Spryo the Dragon, PS1 — $0.50
• Star Wars: Masters of Teras Kasi PS1 — $0.50
• Beyond Good and Evil, Xbox — Asking $5, offered $3 (one of the better finds of the day)
• Zelda Collector’s Edition, Gamecube — Asking $5, offered $3
• Pokemon Red (cart only) and Blue (complete) — Asking $7 ea (!), offered $2.50 ea

Today was one of my best ’saling days of the year to date. The weather was perfect — the day started out at 59° at 8 am and only moved up to around 80° for most of the day. (I’m glad sales start at 8 am around here rather than the 6 am in other regions.) Lots more people were out today than recent weeks, but the finds were still good.

I should add that I saw a pretty large number of games today, but nothing rare or desirable. In fact, one sale had a big stack of PSP games ($15 each, ack!), which is probably the first time I’ve seen PSP games at a yard sale. They were mostly puzzle and poker titles.

I haven’t had any good actual game scores lately. I’m praying to the yard sale dieties for a big RPG trove soon.

• NES, complete and working, with Super Mario/Duck Hunt — $12 (not the cheapest NES ever, but these are remarkably easy to flip)
• Jet black Gamecube, complete and working, with Rampage and Naruto and 2 controllers — $15
• 2 pack new DV tapes — $0.25
• a lovely sake set — asking $5, offered $2 (has around 5 cups, but the seller wrapped them up and I didn’t feel like unwrapping them all)
• single NES controller — asking $1, offered $0.50
• Flexible silicone USB keyboard — asking $2, offered $1
• USB mini CompactFlash reader — $0.50 (The above photo is brought to you courtesy of the new reader. It’s especially nifty since my previous CF reader required a power supply, making it not very good for travel.)

  and the Find of the Day:

• 250gb Western Digital Passport portable USB hard drive, new in blister pack — asking $10, offered $5 (Wow! This came at the perfect time, since my laptop is constantly giving me low storage warnings.)

I wrote just a few weeks ago that Gamestop has been jacking up the prices of Fire Emblem and Pikmin games due to their “posthumous” popularity via Super Smash Bros. Brawl. They’ve done it again; the original Pikmin just went from $19.99 to $24.99. (This game was $9.99 or less a year and a half ago.)

Gamestop just got wise to the fact that Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance is becoming one of the most sought-after Gamecube titles, perhaps due to the recent Wii sequel, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn. They just raised the used price by 50%, from $19.99 to $29.99.

The fact that Fire Emblem is becoming such a hot collectible is especially interesting if you remember that Nintendo cut the retail MSRP to $14.99 just before it went out of print. In the past year, Gamestop’s used price has jumped from $12.99 to $17.99, then to $19.99, and finally to $30.

This isn’t the only ascending price at your local Gamestop — they recently jacked Pikmin up to $19.99 and Pikmin 2 up to $39.99, due almost soley to Captain Olimar’s newfound popularity in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

eStarland is having their semi-recurring “buy 1, get 1 70% off” sale on all used Playstation 2, Gamecube, Xbox, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance games, accessories, and hardware.

Of special interest to collectors: they have a large selection of Game Boy Advance games that are complete with the boxes and manuals.

The promo code is: STARSALEPXG. Enter it at the top of the checkout page. This is a special advance code, as the sale has not yet been announced for the general public. The sale runs until June 15, 2008, so don’t miss it.

One of my local (franchise) Blockbusters cleared out a ton of their Gamecube games, including a bunch of first-party goodies. I got all of the following under a buy 2, get 1 free sale, making them roughly $6.67 a piece. You really can’t do much better than that for quality Gamecube titles.

Not to mention, I personally think the dominance of the Wii and its backwards compatibility is going to give the Gamecube a much more favorable retroactive “legacy” than the N64 had.

• Pokemon Colosseum
• Disney Sports Basketball
• Paper Mario
• Disney Extreme Skate
• Luigi’s Mansion (I really want to play this one someday)
• Mario Party 4
• Mario Golf
• Animal Crossing
• Star Wars: Bounty Hunter

Pikmin 2 prices are hitting an all-time high on eBay, with used copies hitting the $60-$70 without breaking a sweat. Sets of Pikmin 1 and 2 are easily topping the $100 mark. Over at Amazon, the lowest price is currently $69.77 and goes all the way up to $199 for a new copy.

Why now? Well, Pikmin hero Captain Olimar was included a main character in Smash Bros. Brawl. Given that said game has been selling gobloads of copies, no doubt many Wii gamers are being introduced for the first time to Miyamoto’s greenthumb niche title.

Oh, how I regret selling the sealed non-PC Pikmin 2 I had a year ago.