No, actually, I think we need a 'where to get games from' forum. (Note the lack of 'buy')

Half-Price Books, especially the clearance shelves
Locations at http://www.halfpricebooks.com/

For the most part, ignore the on-line prices. The majority of their software is used and is not cataloged. Pricing is almost random (Obviously they are guessing at the software's value)

Electronics Boutique Specifically their used-games section (Pre-Owned) in the PC area.
http://www.ebgames.com for locations.

Your local Pawn Shop. Once in a great while...something worthwhile shows up.

Yeah, I found Fade to Black and Mystic Towers at EB in that very bin.
It's worth noting that every once-and-a-while, liquidation shops such as Petter's Warehouse (dunno if it's a national thing or not) have some real rarities. I found Alien Virus and Defcon 5 there for extremely low prices, and from what I've heard AV is an extremely hard game to come by. Of course, I didn't know it at the time. It just so happened. 😜 If I'd known, I would've bought up the whole inventory of Alien Virus and sell it on eBay for mucho dinero. 😀
Hmm... where else?
Goodness, I can't think of anywhere that might have old games. I mean, there is a local place called "Phoenix Games" that has an extension (I can't remember the name, something like "Games Universe") that has TONNES of old games. (That's all they do -- buy and sell used software.) I found Psychic Detective there, and managed to pawn off a few bits of crap as well. Too bad it's in such a crappy neighbourhood or I'd go there more often. (For anyone that comes to Minneapolis: stay away from Chicago & Lake Street. It's bad news down there.)

i actually buy most of my old games from ebay, although, i do have to admit... half price books is another *great* place to buy old games 😀
although most of what half price books carries is pretty scratched up, but oh well... atleast they have it 😀

Yeah, I ordered Deus Ex from them (I had an illegitimate version for a while, but I wanted to pay for it, since it is a really good game) and there was a nice hole in the reflective label that prevented it from installing fully. Thank goodness the 'backup' copy I have is 'full' -- that is, it has all the sound, speech, and music. What a pain in the arse. Don't they ever check for that kind of stuff?

Snover wrote:

Yeah, I found Fade to Black and Mystic Towers at EB in that very bin.

Don't tell me you bought Fade to Black, that game is so bad that I can't find words for how bad it is.

heh, what's so bad about it? I mean, sure, it's a little unorthodox, but isn't that good?

Originally posted by [vEX] Don't tell me you bought Fade to Black,...

Comments like this tend to reveal your age. You think something like "Fade to Black" is bad...you don't know bad until you find that the only way to open a certain (unlocked) door in a text/graphic adventure is to type "CLIMB DOOR"... Now THAT is bad...

If you think "Fade to Black" is bad, consider yourself lucky.

Ahahaha! Never actually played that one. Remind me of the name? I know it's on HotU.

Originally posted by Snover Ahahaha! Never actually played that one. Remind me of the name? I know it's on HotU.

Actually, I'd be surprised if it was at HoTU(it would have to be a "Real Dog" if so...). Going purely on memory, I think it was "The Asylum". Realize this is going back to the Apple II days (IIRC however, it was multi-platform).

Several similar examples exist in other titles. Even some modern titles have glaringly obvious "dumb" things in them. IIRC, the final "foozle" from "Sin" had broken AI and would do absolutely nothing to defend itself from you.

Yeah, it was a 'real dog'. 😀
These are the kinds of things that happen when you rush developers.

VLAD! RELEASE THE MT-32 EMULATION TOMORROW! 😉;)

Nicht Sehr Gut wrote:

Comments like this tend to reveal your age. You think something like "Fade to Black" is bad...you don't know bad until you find that the only way to open a certain (unlocked) door in a text/graphic adventure is to type "CLIMB DOOR"... Now THAT is bad...

If you think "Fade to Black" is bad, consider yourself lucky.

Those old adventure games where you have to type what the charachter should do are WAY better that Fade to Black.
Hell, even Gorilla (the QBasic game) is better.
Regarding my age, it's 18, soon 19 for that matter.

Gorilla Rules!

I remember modifying the Sun so that it would frown all of the time and Smile every time you hit it with the Banana!

Muahaha.

I was also playing it with a friend during a DNS class. The teacher had left Nibbles & Qbasic on the NT4 machines he was using. Unfortunately I had to spend a bit of time going through the code to disable the PC speaker but it was well worth it. (and yes I was paying attention the class absolutely sucked it's DNS for cryin' out loud)

How exactly is it possible to have an entire class dedicated to DNS? That's rediculous. I can sum up most of DNS in a short paragraph:
DNS maps domain names to IP addresses. DNS servers refresh their information on each domain as specified in the domain's TTL records. Lookups for tier-2 DNS servers are done through 12(?) decentralized InterNIC servers (more with OpenNIC and any other system that might exist). There are five types of DNS records: Address (A) records, Mail Exchange (MX) records, Name Server (NS) records, Reverse DNS (PTR) records, and Alias (CNAME) records.
Of course, that's a very basic outline of DNS, and I could get much more specific, but why the hell would I bother? 😜

Originally posted by [vEX] Those old adventure games where you have to type what the character should do are WAY better

Some were, some weren't. There were things considered acceptable back then that people wouldn't tolerate nowadays. Text games with a limited parser were a massive pain due to the amount of time you wasted because you knew what to do...but you had to find the right combination of words that the computer would accept.

People tend to remember the good ones, but there were plenty of ghastly ones as well...

Hell, even Gorilla (the QBasic game) is better.

Bah. I'll take the 2600 Combat cart over any old PC basic program (especially Tank Pong).

Regarding my age...

So I think I can safely say you probably never saw a commercial PC title that required you to (manually) make a custom boot disk mixing bits of your OS, BASIC, and various files from their floppy just so you can run their card game (notice that I didn't mention a hard drive?).

Originally posted by Snover How exactly is it possible to have an entire class dedicated to DNS?

Wait a minute...you mean they have classes about computers in school now?!

Ok, I'm kidding...mostly.

Hah. Yeah. Right.

My school has a whopping one computer class, and the stupid fuckers teach PYTHON -- as a PROGRAM LANGUAGE! I didn't even think that you could DO OOP with Python. Oh yeah, they're all fucking Macs with fucking OS9. It's terrible. Python is for preprocessing, not for creating games.

Originally posted by Snover Python is for preprocessing, not for creating games.

And revealing comments like that probably guarantee it will stay there. Heh.

Python is a crappy language to begin with, so I hope it does stay there. It uses indentation to open and close functions, not brackets. What a crappy idea!