Selection was kinda awful this year, for buying and playing. The good condition games are always priced kind of high and that's to be expected and there's usually some really junky ones that are priced okay/low and you can snatch up a good deal if you're willing to put the work in but this year they were even priced WAY too high. There was that one Gottlieb Dancing Dolls with the cracked backglass, Barbie instead of the original doll, rough cabinet, and worn through to the wood in most parts of the playfield for $250 OBO and I would say that was the closest thing to a good deal you could have gotten this year on the lower end (only if you threw a lower offer of course) of the pricing spectrum. That thing wasn't worth $250 in the slightest of course BUT what I am saying is kudos to that guy for at least not putting a price tag of $600 on it. I was considering throwing a cheap offer on that but I don't have the room to be doing that kind of stuff anymore. I think the lowest price tag I even saw this year was a Flip-A-Card reduced to $400 Friday because it cooked itself and smoked and the guy cut the start switch off to prevent somebody from starting a game and doing it to something else, but it remained on. It sat like that for both days. I don't think I saw anything lower, even during that end of the show period where everything gets marked down.
Also, I put a lot of effort into tuning up my games I bring to any show (even without the intention to sell, and marked NFS accordingly) because that's what I consider it, kind of like a car show. You polish it up and make it run great. A "show". You don't show up in your barn find Edsel that runs if you use starting fluid just so you can get let in for free. Seems like a lot of the games show up in a very sorry state just to get free admission, or the others that do work half-decent are only that way because they're trying to get a sale without having real care done to the machine. Quite a shame. There were a lot of EM's this year but a lot of them just played awful or were dirty to the point of how I wondered why people even kept them like that in a daily home situation let alone at a show.
Looking forward to the York show. Smaller selection but way way better prices and all of the games seem to generally be in better condition. Sorry state when it seemed like there were probably nicer and better playing games in the flea market (which are usually not set up for a reason) compared to some games setup on the show floor! York always seems to have great deals, I always seem to pick up games there CHEAP, and they aren't even those rough examples I was talking about that should be those prices, they are fairly nice games that could even afford to be higher priced at that point. So, I guess that show not only has games for cheap but also games for cheap that are in generally better condition, too. Hoping for a nicer selection next year, both to play and to buy!
Of course some games did play really nice and were maintained nice to match and this is by no means referring to all or majority of the games, just more than a few unfortunately. I still had an absolute blast! I really enjoyed playing ForceFlow's Dyn-O-Mite and somebody's Rescue 911 even though a drop target was broken. There was an immaculate Surfer there as well, although it looks as if it might have had some incredibly well done playfield restoration on it. I enjoyed playing that many many times as well. jrpinball brought his really nice Blue Chip which was great to see too. Wedgehead row probably had some of the best playing EM's in the place, the few down towards the right end by my game were a blast to play and running great! Of course everybody had a lot of interest in that beautiful North Star that sat next to my Domino. It played beautifully.
EDIT: Yeah, the Surfer was owned by the man mentioned above. If I had the money I would have definitely bought that thing, it was beautiful. One of the nicest all around games I have seen in a long time if not ever. I had a very very short interaction with the man who owned it (Mike is his name, apparently, as stated above) towards the end of the show and it was positive one, we just joked for a minute. I've seen him around a ton between Pinfest and York just never got the chance to talk to him before Saturday. Seemed like a nice guy. Probably didn't mean whatever you thought he did, but who knows.
Will keep that in mind though!
