For the July 4th weekend, I went down to Florida to visit one on my "highschool" friends who enlisted in the United States Armed Forces. In hind-sight, if I remembered the amount of thunderstorms, flooding, and weather havoc that occurred on my visit last year, I probably would've scheduled another weekend. But! As luck would have it, this whole weekend it didn't rain once!
The weather was actually perfect. ^_^ We walked around the base a little bit. We took a look at the memorial near the eastern entrance.
The memorial had a brick for every soldier stationed at the base who had died in war.
There were also a couple of airplanes.
One place that I must visit on every trip is the base's PX.
The PX is a department store much like Sears or K-mart. They carry clothes, toys, movies and, of course, video games. In fact, the PX is a gold mine for video games. The PX has many games that time forgot. And since the general populous cannot shop at the PX, it keeps the riff-raff out and the supply high.
What's really weird is the huge surplus of games published by Atlus. Atlus is a North American publisher that spends a lot of time and attention on presentation and limited edition releases of their games. They generally publish a lot of RPGs, including their own super-popular RPG series, Shin Megami Tensei. SMT has been getting a lot of buzz over here thanks to Persona.
This surplus includes recent releases, such as Dark Spire, Knights of the Nightmare, Devil Summoner 2, Hammerin' Hero, Crimson Gem Saga...
Some not-so recent releases, such as Super Robot Taisen, Legacy of Y's, Arcana Heart..
And some releases from a while ago that are actually difficult to find... such as Stella Deus, Digital Devil Saga 2, Persona 3 LE, and Growlanser Heritage of War.
Actually, I think it's pretty amazing they have these old games there, especially Digital Devil Saga 2. I would buy every single one of these games, except the PX sells them for MSRP. Every PS2 game is $50, every PSP game $40, and every NDS game $35. It's a treasure trove, but at a cost!
So that's probably why they still have so many copies of these games. Why buy a $50 PS2 game that full of pussy Japanese bullshit, when I can buy a badass FPS for the Xbox 360 for only $10 more?! Riddle me that, civilian!
Anyways, as you can see in these pictures, they don't have just a few copies of these games in stock. They have a whole bunch of copies. And it's not just this PX too. When Justin was stationed in North Carolina, I picked up copies of Devil Summoner 1 and Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. Both of which are Atlus published (and developed) games.
I find it really odd that these military posts have such a huge surplus of these games. And! That no one on-base buys any of them. You'd think the rules of Supply and Demand would be enforced here, but they aren't. The next time I return to Florida to visit Justin, there will be just as many Atlus games as there were on this trip. It's really odd.
They need to put all their Atlus titles on sale or clearance or something. Hopefully when they do, it'll be the same weekend I'm down there. My half.com store will have a glut of fantastic games, again!
Atlus is the most prominently published games, but there are plenty of other unappreciated titles on those shelves.
There were copies of Okami, God Hand, Soul Nomad, and Rhapsody. There were copies of other NIS games, too.
If you happen to know someone in our Armed Forces, visit them and take a look at the video game stock at their PX. You might find some spiffy treasure!
I ended up buying a copy of Knights of the Nightmare (which is a nightmare), and 2 copies of DDR Ultramix 3 which were $3 each. Also, the local Best Buy had some sweet deals on poorly selling games, so I bought a copy of Eat Lead: Matt Hazard for $15.
