I'm heading to london in the morning, does anyone know of any good game shops which sell imports/old consoles or something of the like?
There used to be one near tottingham court road, had a load of imports and even some arcade units downstairs (SNK vs Capcom was one I believe) many many years ago, can't really remember where it was and unsure if it's still there.
That import shop is called Game focus but to be honest London is pretty shit for import gaming shops thats the only one thats still left & their selection is poor at best.
Aren't Raven Games still around? That is in Beckenham so it's a bit of a train journey... but as been said London is a bit shit for imports now. CEX who 15 years ago were fantastic for imports ceased imports and retro a few years ago, others that dotted Tottenham Court Road have gone as have Ace Consoles who were off carnaby street... so you have Game Focus and they barely had anything when I went in there earlier in the year.
Is it just London that's been left like this? Last time I was in Brighton (a couple of eyars ago) it seemed quite dead import wise too. Oh for the good old days of CEX Retro and that crazy shop in Shepard Bush.....
That's CEX Retro in Rathbone Place. By the time they had the arcade machines, it had gone downhill, now it's nothing. They do (or did) have a store in Tottenham Court Road, too. Shepherd's Bush would have been RetroX, if I'm not mistaken. They closed many years ago. No, there's nothing really decent left. You'll find a few Game and Gamestation stores, that's about it. And yes, this is the situation in many places. Unless there's a decent indie that has managed to survive, you won't find a lot of shops catering for old consoles - and certainly not imports. It's all online, now. And to be honest, even if you had found a shop, you wouldn't have wanted to pay their prices!
As someone who used to work for Gamefocus, I think the reasons for the lack of stores in London in particular are twofold - 1) The fact that almost everyone in possession of retro items generally know their value, so they're reluctant to sell them to stores for usually 50% of their value for cash and about 66% for exchange (usually it's cash because the kind of people getting rid of the kind of stuff retro collectors are after selling purely because they're in dire need of some quick money). When I was working there, we'd usually base our prices on what things were going for on eBay and sell them in store for approximately the same price, so when we did get stuff in, it would generally sell pretty quickly. Only very rarely would we get people coming in who were just clearing out the attic or something like that and had no idea of the value of their items. 2) Rent. It's not economically viable to run what would have to essentially be a hobbyist store in the centre of London. Retail premises on Goodge Street are about £45,000 a year and about £90,000 on Tottenham Court Road. Raven Games can't really be classified as being in London, as it would take just as long to get to, say, Cambridge if you were around Kings Cross or Liverpool Street. I wish Gamestation still had some retro stuff, but it's really megre pickings since Game bought them out, although even Gamestation only have maybe Bayswater (I seem to remember there being one round there) and Mornington Crescent that could be called central.
From memory only CEX near Tottenham Court Road www.cex.co.uk Will give you locations Otherwise they are a dying breed Raven Games is in Beckenham which is a way out of town and not near a station :-( It`s such a shame there aren`t more :-(
Last time I visited CEX (last year) they had roughly 3 Dreamcast games and 25PSone games (divided over three different games). The rest of the basement was filled with DVDs. Quite painful to see compared to the basement ca. 2002.
in soho there's this comic shop but it has no name, it still has the "DRY CLEANING" from the previous tennant i guess. They have a small selection of snes, ps1&2 and N64 games. All japanese. its and odd little shop. Also for nicely over priced snes games the "buy sell exchange" in notting hill (its the one you can see from the entrance of the tube) still stocks stuff.
Last I heard (about two years ago) CEX transferred all their remaining retro stuff to their massive Coventry store. They then removed what was left on their website (a few Dreamcast games), so I don't know if they dumped it or left what they had in Coventry until it eventually sold. Such a pity - even as recently as 2007, I managed to score Evolution 2 for the Dreamcast for the princely sum of £1.70, but I think this may be part of the issue. Although it would've been great to still have Rathbone as a one-off retro store, all CEX stores get their prices off a central system which is updated by only a few guys in the pricing department in Watford. Given that they now have 40+ stores and franchises, it wouldn't make sense for the guys in pricing to learn about retro game values just for the one store. What this does mean though is that when they do get nice stuff in nowadays, it's usually really cheap - I bought a LE Yellow Simpsons XBox 360 at the Watford store (by pure chance the first and only time I've been to Watford) for about £190 I recall
