I spent about £5 on wizardry 8 but got the anthologies for 99pence

Pleasantly surprised? No. I only buy from the bargain bin if I know what it is that I'm buying. And I'm generally not interested in those kind of puzzle/casual games you describe, no matter how good they are.

I found a lot of treasures in bargain bins over the years but I knew each time that it was indeed a treasure before I bought it. For example

Games:
System Shock 2 - 5€
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - 3€
Sam & Max Season One - 2.50€

Music:
Dredg - El Cielo - 3€
Jimmy Eat World - 2€
Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes Limited Edition - 2€
Dan Auerbach - Keep It Hid - 2€

I tend to be like this or more that I tend to rate some games as bargin buys which means I'm unlikely to jump on them new, but wouldn't pass up playing them when they become very cheap. Sometimes those turn into utterly fantastic purchases and I regret not playing them sooner.


That said best deal I ever got on something more "pot luck" with was Kohan 2 - for £2!
Loads and loads of fun!

I got The Simpsons: Hit and Run (that's the GTA one, not the Crazy Taxi one, right?) for less than £1 and loved it, played it to the end in no time and was then sad it had ended

I also got Aitken's Artifact second hand from a pawn shop (Cash Converters) and, having never heard of it, thought it was quite good, really, Diablo-like only near-future superhero themed, finished that one too
Ooh, I actually got given NOLF, Sacrifice and Aquanox for free from someone I did my HND with who got them with his computer but wasn't a gamer!

Hmm games ive goten for less then 4 bucks in bargain bins:
-Colonization (though i lost it in latter times)
-Dark colony (very mediocre rts if you haven't heard of it)
-Rise of legends (rather good rts actually)
warcraft3&expansion (looong looong after it came out though, got it because i lost my original :\ )

PS: i should add this is normally in supermarkets or general stores who don't "really" deal in games if you know what i mean. So they have no idea how to tell a classic game from, let's say call of duty 3 or other spit-out-sell-once-and-never-sell-again-garbage

I got System Shock 2, Dungeon Keeper 2, Wing Commander Prophecy Gold (a cricket game and some WW2 fighter simulator with a name so generic that I can't remember it) in a pack deal for 5€, boxed & unopened.
*edit* It was called World war 2 fighter. Go figure.
I got an unopened boxed copy of System Shock 1 (CD version) for 2€ back in 2001 or 2002
I got Wizardry Ultimate Archive for 1€ (+ postage)
I got Mr. Gimmick (a 200€ NES game!) for Ice Climber.
Now it is your turn to envy me :P



As for the real bargain bin games, most have actually been utter garbage.
Robert D. Andersen & the Legacy of Cthulhu had nice cutscenes, but the game was really bad.
History Channel's Crusades: Quest for Power was both historically inaccurate and incredibly bad.
Tortuga Two Treasures was actually alright
Frontlines: Fuels of War was... well, a game. Utterly generic.
Global domination was not only bad but disappointing and had a misleading text on the back of the box (I expected a grand strategy game, but got a simplistic arcadey action game.
Spellcross was a rather average turnbased strategy game. Not bad, but not great either.
Warzone 2100 was great! It is free now, so give it a shot.

Ahhh, bargain bins... my father used to buy compilations for my sister and me when we got our first computer. Even when I tried to explain to my parents that those games just weren't good they kept buying this stuff. It really sucks when you know your parents wanted to do something nice for you but eventually you got just crap. For my father there was no real reason why anyone should pay full price for one game when you could just pay 10€ (or whatever) for a hundred games. After all, a game is game, right? It's just flashing graphics and sounds, so what's the difference? Of course that's like saying "a book's a book, it's just words printed on paper, so what's the difference?", but he didn't know. Almost all of the games were just crap and usually they were just a hundred demos printed on one CD (of course the package never said it was just demos, and even if it did my father wouldn't know what demo or shareware meant), so even if a game was good, like Sonic 3, it was just a demo with the first two levels. I think I must have played the Sonic demo about a hundred times, I didn't really have much else to play.

There is one good game he bought, it was called "Swing", a puzzle game where you stack sphere and try to clear rows to get score, one out of a billion Tetris clones, but it was really good and had splitscreen multiplayer. I also remember a pretty decent Snake clone named Snake Arena on one of the CDs, but it runs too fast on modern processors, it's unplayable. But yeah, that’s my early PC gaming experience in a nutshell, hundreds of bargain bin games that were a complete waste of the plastic they were printed on. I had more fun playing with the paperclip from Microsoft Word. Anyone still remember clippy?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Assistant

Funnily enough, I picked up Wizardry 8 off a magazine cover CD. Still got it to this day.

I once picked up the album "Hotel California" from a bargain bin for $2. I took it home, listened to it, and immediatly brought it back insisting they ripped me off and should have given me $20 to remove that piece of shit from their store. :P

I don't know what qualifies for a bargain bin, but I bought Deus Ex in the early 2000s for $8. Best value for money ever. Until I discovered GOG, that is. ;)

Don't get many "bargain" bins in Japan. But over the years I have managed to get several brand new GameCube games for less than $5 (because the store was no longer stocking games, so sold all their stock off) and several PS2 games for about the same (for nearly the same reason).

But general "bargain" bins in Japan consist of 5 or 6 year old games still at original retail price. The funniest of which was Halo 2 (PC) for near $95. To my knowledge, it's still rotting in that "bargain" bin.

On the other hand, you can often find really cheap crappy DVDs. My gem of crappiness award going to "The Mummy Theme Park". A movie so crap, you have to suffer it to believe it.

I got a $5 pack long ago that had Duke Nukem 3d, Tomb Raider, Total Annihilation, Civilization 2 and Heavy Gear in it. I had Duke already and knew of Tomb Raider, but the rest I never played. That was the same transaction I bought Daikatana for $3. I was far happier with the money spent for the 5 pack.

I got many Playstation 1 games when EB Games was clearing them out for $1-$3 each.

Also got Castlevania Symphony of the Night new for $6 in a clearance bin.

heh - I'm sure I got that exact same compilation - it was an EA one that was made to look like a soap powder box and all the disks were day-glo pink!

Also, your nic seems to take inspiration from a similar place to mine, so all hail Eris and that!

Yep, it was that one.

Hail Discordia!