Very strange and very shady store. I found Game Gurus on Yelp, the same site that helped me discover Another Castle. But unlike Game Gurus, Another Castle is actually GOOD. Game Gurus is like a nerd's dream for a video game store turned into a horrifying, endless nightmare. Walking into this store for me was about as painful as it would be for George Orwell to set foot into modern day North Korea.
Probably the most obvious thing about the store when you first step in is that it absolutely stinks of cigarette smoke. That reminds me of how Kim Jong-un is a heavy smoker. It's like they let people light up in here, or they even do it themselves. Anyway, that to me was the first red flag signaling that I shouldn't stay here any longer than I needed to. If the shock of the useless game selection here wasn't going to kill me first, then just breathing the air would.
The second thing that stood out to me was how the balding clerk seemed to be clueless about his own merchandise. He tautologously explained to me that the DS memory expansion pak expands the memory of the Nintendo DS, but when I asked him whether that meant I could store another save file in a Pokemon game, he had no idea. Thanks a lot for the help, Steven M. [the rest of his last name withheld]
Next, this store actually has a lot of games in such a limited space. But the problem is that they very much take a quantity-over-quality approach. It may be deceptive at first glance; I mean, they do have a stunning number of video games for sale. Now take a closer look and you'll see that at least 95% of them are shovelware/licensed crap. Don't be fooled. Their selection of games SUCKS and they have very few games of value.
This last point is the most important: they also sell counterfeited, bootleg, ILLEGAL video games in addition to their terrible selection. And they're blatantly obvious about it, too; they don't even try to hide it. I saw a real copy of Wario Land 4 right next to a fake one. I saw a real copy of Contra Advance right next to a fake one. There are more for which I have furnished pictoral evidence; I could not make this stuff up. The difference is extremely obvious, yet they flaunt it shamelessly. They just assume you'll be too preoccupied with the massive selection to notice or care.
Well, I picked out all the games that I saw that I cared to buy. That's two of them out of hundreds. They did have two used copies of Final Fantasy VI Advance, but I could tell that they were both fake. You can't trust anything from this store anymore, but I could at least discern that their copies of Wario Ware, Inc. ($13.95) as well as Mega Man Zero ($14.95) were authentic.
So the damage came to $34.94 after tax according to good ol' Steven. I paid for this with two twenty-dollar bills, and I received $5.06 in change. That would be good if the receipt didn't have Mega Man Zero somehow becoming $17.95 before tax. Good thing I noticed this because I was starting to wonder whether there was any way this store could scam me despite the fact that I had actually found genuine copies of two decent GBA games.
It turns out that there was. When I called Steven out on this three-dollar error, he said he wondered how that had happened and quickly pulled out three dollar bills from the cash register to hand to me. And since I wanted to test this guy even further, I accepted his three, gave back the five he had handed me earlier, and walked out the store.
I waited a while to see whether he would notice and chase after me to return the money. Spoiler alert: he didn't. So after bamboozling me out of three dollars, he then knowingly proceeded to hornswoggle two more dollars out of me. Sure, five dollars gets stolen, so what's the big deal? Well, there's a French proverb that goes: "he that will steal an egg will steal an ox." It doesn't sound as cool in English because it actually rhymes in French! "Qui vole un oeuf vole un boeuf."
I got fed up with waiting and just went back in to ask for my five dollars back. The moral of the story is that you can never trust what you buy at Game Gurus. These guys will pass off cheap homebrewed cartridges and expect you to treat them like they're the real deal. I know that there's no remorse in business, but this one has no integrity, either. And even if you do find a game here that's decent and bona fide, good luck with not falling victim to their swindling schemes once or twice along the way. read more