It’s that flop-sweat time of year: late in the Christmas shopping season—and really late in the Hanukkah shopping season—so you can’t rely on shopping sites to ship your gifts in time. Looks like you’ll have to actually go outside. Luckily, since you live in the shopping capital of the world (you do, right?), it shouldn’t be too hard to find something for your favorite poindexter. With GONY’s last-minute shopping guide, you’ll be back home playing Scrabulous and sipping store-brand egg nog in no time.

Video Games New York
202 E. 6th St., Manhattan

If a video-game fanatic moved into a dorm room in 1973 and never moved out, the present-day result would probably look like Video Games New York. Passersby can’t miss the Rock Band and Manhunt 2 promos in the store window, but if they stop and look past the first layer of cruft, they’ll see a Super NES, a Dreamcast, and even a display for the ill-fated Atari 5200. There’s a deep sense of history in this place; it’s just buried behind a bunch of other stuff.

Accumulation trumps presentation at Video Games New York (even the name is no fancier than it needs to be), but that’s not a criticism. In fact, the cluttered ambience is ideal. Browsing the bloated shelves evokes the same excitement as digging through a box of cartridges you uncovered in your closet: Who knows what treasures you’ll find? For my part, I found and purchased the NES version of Lee Trevino’s Fighting Golf, a game famous for combining Lee Trevino-endorsed golf action with a complete lack of fighting.

Of course, old-school Nintendo is in vogue right now, so it’s an easy call to dedicate store space to Duck Hunt et al. What distinguishes VGNY are the obscurities—this stock was assembled with a completist tenacity. It’s probably the only place with an entire shelf dedicated to the Atari Lynx—the Lynx, for Pete’s sake! Not to mention the Virtual Boy, the Bandai WonderSwan Color, the Twin Famicom, etc. You may not have heard of all of those, but they’re all lovingly stacked in one cranny or another with a bright orange “PAYLESS! SALE” price sticker attached.

Despite such overwhelming variety, the staff¹ know their wares. During my visit, one customer rushed in and urgently requested an AC adapter for the Atari 2600, a system that faded from popular consciousness 20 years ago. He had the part in his hand seconds later. (Try that at your local GameStop some time, and let me know how it goes.)

Another desperate soul said that he wanted to give his nephew the Japanese PlayStation 2 import Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix for Christmas, but the kid only had a run-of-the-mill American PS2 console, which won’t play Japanese games. A shrewd businessman might have tried to sell this loving uncle a brand-new Japanese PS2 unit, but instead, the shop owner gave him a crash course on the use of a “swap disc”—a $5 hack that tricks the U.S. box into playing games from the Far East.

After a couple more yuletide shoppers passed through, I asked the cashier what she found to be the most popular Christmas gifts this year. “NES games,” she replied. The NES classics are a reliable fallback, but if you want something that will excite a jaded gamer, consider bestowing one of these more eclectic options:

Nintendo Game & Watch: $50-$250. Before there was Game Boy, there was Game & Watch. These simple LCD pocket games keep you in the safe World of Nintendo, but they offer a bit more cachet due to their relative rarity. Their name stems from the fact that each game also had a built-in clock. We were easily impressed in the ’80s.

Fifty dollars will get you a cheapy game like Popeye, but go ahead and splurge on one of the dual-screen models, ancestors of the modern-day Nintendo DS. Occupying the high end is the $250 Legend of Zelda unit. One of my fifth-grade classmates brought this into school one week, a week during which he was worshipped as our new God.

Mattel Intellivision: $120. Though it was a distant also-ran to the aforementioned Atari 2600, this system is still revered by many gamers who played its NFL Football game, which was incredibly advanced for the time. The bizarre telephone-style controller lent itself well to the complex play-calling of football, and the Intellivision graphics were pretty sharp compared to its contemporaries, as demonstrated in the system’s memorable George Plimpton TV commercials. I found the pictured unit (in near-near-mint condition!) wedged between a plastic tub and some cardboard boxes. If you look closely at the picture, you can just make out a Space Invaders cocktail table underneath, which is another great gift if you can get it working.

Hello Kitty Dreamcast: $280. Of all the “dead” consoles, I have the softest spot for the Sega Dreamcast. Released in 1999, Sega’s last-gasp hardware effort enjoyed a honeymoon of about a year before being crushed by the technically superior (but charmless) Sony PS2. So while VGNY is rife with special-edition consoles, this little blue box caught my eye. Hey, I know Hello Kitty is a capitalist whore who will put her name on anything for a buck, and I know I already own a perfectly good Dreamcast, but…this one’s blue. Damn, that is cool.

So, to sum up, find out which old game system is your loved one’s favorite, and then go to VGNY and ask if they have it in a pretty color. Merry X-mas. Pass the egg nog.

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1. The employees of Video Games New York were straight out of anime central casting: an imposing foreign owner with an impossible-to-place accent; a bubbly, petite cashier who chattered without end; and in a recessed corner of the store, a spectacled guru who sat silently repairing the innards of an old PlayStation unit. I’m 99% sure that at night, they transform into their true forms and fight evil robots. (Return to text)