Hey, Anybody know of any good/cool game shops in Bejing worth checking out? I'm going to china on the 28th for 4 weeks (shenyang) to visit my wife's family but 1 of the 4 weeks will be spent in bejing as well as half a week to a week in shenzhen (if i'm lucky i might get to go over to HK for a few days). Yes yes I will be doing lots of site seeing but there will be a few days for shopping and i'm just currious if there is any places I should try checking out. :dance:
Look for the pearl market. I've forgotten the name of it specifically but it's advertised as the biggest in asia. On the second floor are a lot of game stores. Behind the building is a toy store which also has a few stores worth checking out. I was in Beijing for a week and I searched everywhere...this was the only place I found games.
Ah here we go: http://www.virtualtourist.com/trave...eijing-Hongqiao_Market_Pearl_Market-BR-1.html I also remember to the left of the main entrance was a small game store down the stairs with some very cool stuff (nearly every boxed Megadrive variant in mint condition) and a lot of Saturn VCD cards made by various chinese manufacturers.
I found same game stores in Xidan shopping mall (center?). Nothing fancy, some asian and some Japanese releases ranging from old to new.
I picked up an iQue DS here but it was a big journey from town and I didn't think there was much there although in beijing things can be easily missed.
Thanks alot man. I will make sure to check that place out. I'm just currious to see what all they have and to see if maybe I might find a few older games. =) Actualy I have an iQue (the n64 system), I need to take mine with me back to china to get the firmware updated and get some more games on it. The 3 demos on it were expired and the only games it had were zelda & dr mario. I hope to throw sin & punishment on it and few others. Any chance did you see game manuals for the iQue? Since the games were digital the manuals were sold seperately and nobody has them online (I want to grab a few to collect).
Be sure to take your wife with you and ask them for their behind the counter items. Then play the cat and mouse game that is Chinese bartering. It is quite a stage show :lol:
I'm guessing you mean piracy things for behind the counter? Either way my wife will be there to haggle for me. She is pure breed chinese so I think she will be able to get results. :thumbsup:
Heh, well keep out of sight while she haggles. As soon as they see anyone who looks forign, she'll start getting charged forign prices since they know its for you. Case in point, I went to get a Chinese name chop for myself and some coworkers. Cost per seal was 38RMB. While the shopkeep was working on carving out the names he told us a Japanese couple came in the morning. Sold them 2 seals for over 900RMB. But then again, my significant other is crazy good at bargaining so it might not be a completely fair comparison. As an example, we went to purchase some Famicom games from a seller and in addition to a really low price per cart, she got a pair of free socks, and a battery charger (lord knows why she needed one). The next day we went back to the same guy and she made him lower the price again (For being good customers) and made him give us 2 more pairs of socks. Actually the store clerks wife was beating him over the head for giving away everything for free and not making money from us. Quite a funny sight! In the end, I asked her "Whats with all the strange stuff?". She was like "Well, you wanted games, I wanted socks so I made him give me some. I mean, your going to get your games anyway. Might as well get some of my socks at the same time". LOL.
Knowing my wife, she'll probably send me off to go look at the shop by my self while she checks out something else. (she's not into games or going into game shops) =P So I'll probably go check it out first and report back to her what I want and to have fun. =) Actualy I wouldn't be suprised if my wife doesn't send her mom in insted since she tends to haggle even more. :lol:
That should be good. Less anoying for her to keep looking over you as you ponder two carts that look identical, yet are worth totally diffrent amounts I just hope you can discribe clearly to her what you want. The last time I tried to do something similar, I got "junk" instead. The reason? "Both look the same, so I got one at the other store that was closer". Doh!
Well i came back from beijing (still in china though). I was somewhat disapointed. Eletronics were all on the first floor and it was mostly cameras, iphones, psp units, ds units, and offers for moding my psp. Actualy it was pretty funny when one lady was showing me a paper (with pictures) of the PSP iso she had that she could copy and one of the games on the list was the one I worked on (lol). I sadly didn't have time to try finding the other place you mention nor check out the toy store (hotel had no wifi, so ipod touch was useless and I had to go off from memory about the place). Oh well, atleast I'm going to hong kong at the end of next week for a day or two. I'll bound to find a few places over there (plus getting the address to the local shop of one of my favorite import sites, buygame2). Also the wife promissed to take me to a few places in her city that are simular to the pearl market (in terms of finding eletronics & games). Oh on a minor point. I found a little interesting small shop on the 8th floor of joycity mall (i think thats the name). They had a few PS3 & PSP game (like 10 each) and they were more recent things like Re5, SF4,Striker 1942 (psp), ...
If you want Hong Kong information theres a thread where i posted a few places. If you cant find it PM me i know at least two very good places.
Sweet, I'll go hunting it down soon. I'm hoping to at bare minimum make it to my favorite import site to get a few games comming out next week. Still it would be cool to check out some other ones. It would be nice to see if I can find some sega pc saturn sticks for cheap. Do shops haggle in hk or are they dead set on their price?
Depends there are very few stores. What you get is like a malls with 2-3 floors of little stall shops that all sell games. So there is lots of competition going on already. Your going to be hard pressed to find anything too old though there is one shop that had lots of older items inc lots of dreamcast arcade sticks cheap when i was there. I would really tell you to head out to those places as they have all the latest releases relatively cheap. 95% of the items are latest psp, xbox, ps3, ds games so you dont need to go anywhere special for those. PM me where you are staying and i might be able to get you a few addresses close by/few points on google maps. Edit: Forgot to say yeah you can haggle at these places but not very much. I did haggle with a couple items like my DS cases and some R4 cards i got there couple years ago. There is haggling to do in the computer malls and other places though.
Unlucky you didn't find what you were looking for but to be honest you haven't missed out, I went to all of the places recommended to me with the sole purpose of buying anything I thought was rare or unusual and I came back pretty empty handed. Even the smallest most hidden game stores just had wall to wall PS2 titles. There was a huge crack down on piracy in Beijing just before the Olympics and apparently pirate games were the biggest victims, a good thing yes but this included all of the interesting famicom multicarts. There was a photo somewhere of a big pile of them that had been confiscated. I nearly cried.
I was in Hong Kong for about 4 months and generally there wasn't a great deal to be found, a lot of the older stuff is far and few between and a lot of the time, especially in the computer markets, they generally won't be bother to sell you things in the display cases if they are busy, one shop had a arcade pcb I wanted and was cheap but they couldn't be arsed to get it for me... a lot of the older stuff isn't (or at least wasn't when I was there) as cheap as it was in Japan... chinese made stuff can be cheap and most new games you will find will be Chinese origin rather then Japanese (can mean English, Chinese or Japanese language or a mixture of them...). I found that having someone who could speak cantonese meant that haggaling was more possible, although most of the time you were talking $5 or $10hkd off... the most I got off was $25 off a Hong Kong PS2 (240V - Japanese region) Pity you didn't go to Shanghai as there are a few decent games shops out there.
Hmm, I'm not too sad anymore. My wife's mom took me to a huge eletronics mall here in sheynyang. While they didn't have any old things, they did have a far better selection of games. One small shop also had two dsi units but I desided to pass for now since the price was a little high and I could probably get a better deal in hk. Since I went in the morning it was kind of funny. Since there wasn't really anybody else there in the game area, as soon as I walk up and start looking at PSP games the people there started unpacking psp system boxes to try selling me one. Paulo, I'm not actualy staing directly in HK. I'm staying over the boarder in shenzen (sp?) to visit my wife's uncle but he is planning to take us over into hong kong to do some shopping. =) Jamtex, Sadly no reason for me to go to shanghai this time around. I only went to beijing since my wife's parents wanted to take me around to see all the monuments there plus it was only a simple 4 hour train ride over (staying in sheynyang). I'm only going to hk since my wife's uncle lives next to the boarder and he keeps telling us that when we visit he will take us over to go see hk.
Ok, well the two places i would send you to are in the main shopping areas so it shouldnt be too much of a problem to walk to them from main train stations. Ill try find the thread as they are all on there.
h: Back from Shenzhen and Hong Kong. I only got to go to 188 Centre but god that place was amazing. I was going nuts running around the place while my wife & family waited at the stairs for the 2nd floor. Sadly I was only able to pick up one thing while I was there since my wife's mom only converted enough cash for 1500HK. My wife also went balistic when I wanted the DSi Lime green (which came out on friday in japan) but ultimately caved and on our way out was offering to let me buy some PSP games also but sadly we didn't have enough converted cash nor time to run off to get some more. :crying: Man the prices were awsome but they seriously wont haggle at all. Hell my wife's aunt speaks cantonese and they still wouldn't budge but luckly there were two sellers selling lime green DSi for 1450 which is still cheaper then most places online (best I found online was 1599, play asia is just insanly more expensive). On a side note, what a world of difference when you go hunting for games in china. Nobody ****ing has anything. In shenzhen (which is across the border from HK), you'll find a small hand full of stores with PSP units or DSi unit but I found only 3 freaking stores that had games and they were all really old. I was atleast able to haggle 40RMB off a copy of Initial D for PSP (been meaning to pick this one up). It took walking away two times to get the guy to crack. All in all, I dout I will be going to HK again for a really long time but when ever I do go back, I HAVE TO HAVE TO go back to 188 centre.
