Lite ahoy!

Yay – got one! A nice new BLACK DS LITE. Wow they are cool, very slick little devices, seem more high-tech than a PSP oddly, neater build quality. Read below for a tale of my non-too-thrilling journey to DS ownership (no photos sadly as my phone refuses to bluetooth to my PC):

It was quite fun getting to the shop I was after, 1 tube / 2 trains and 1 tram ride in all. I’d been to the shop a few years back with El FluffyFist so wasn’t too hard to find, you may have heard of it – Ravengames. They have been around for quite a number of years.

Now before I set off I had to re-confirm my DS reservation by phone, as they seemed to have lost by email order. No matter, they still had DS’s in stock so all was cool. Now I’d tried to get part exchange (P/E) prices out of them for individual items I wanted to bring in, but they could only give a price for a job lot – they couldn’t even give a specific rate of P/E versus sale price (like CEX do).

Well they have been around for years, so I gave them the benefit of the doubt, and got to the shop about midday. I was greeted by a friendly lady behind the till, who took my games off me into a backroom for someone to test and price up. For exchange I had the following:
Freeloader – GC . Bomberman+DuoArcadeCard+FatalFury2+FinalZone2+AlienCrush+LordsOfThunder – PC ENGINE . ChronoCross+InTheHunt – PS1 . Jackal – JAMMA.
(I had some more but this was all they would take)

After about 10 mins, the total credit in exchange? £39. Not bad, not fantastic. You can’t begrudge them wanting to make a living, it’s just that they are so vague about P/E that it must put a lot of people off doing business with them. What’s more their prices for retro stuff is sky high, between double and quadruple Ebay (my JAMMA board was listed as £35 on their site soon after I returned home). They’d do better to price things a little more reasonably, people into vintage videogames tend to be tech-savvy, and as such will know how to shop about on the web for a deal. Anyway I don’t want to bag them out too much, they seem like nice folks and are great for current gen games and also for converting old consoles to RGB / adding multiregion etc.

After leaving the shop I trammed it back to skanky Croydon for a tasty Thai lunch with an old workmate, then headed homeward. Now, I tend to have bad luck with lcd screens, my first PSP had a honking great black dead pixel in the centre of the screen, even my phone has a couple of duffers. So I opened up my DS box with trepidation, a very neatly packed bundle of DS, PSU, spare pen and some manuals. Unfolded the case carefully and flicked the ‘on’ switch and WOOAAH – goddam that’s bright. And no farked pixels!! Ahh big sigh of relief, all turned out ok in the end.

Still no new games for it yet, still pondering what to go for…