I'm older, wiser, and have money.  So I can pretty much buy whatever I want, without really risking much.  Back in the day, before the internet handed everything piece of info you ever wanted, it was more risky to buy games.   When I buy a game now, I don't get that rush of excitement I would when I was a kid. 

I'm not sure of the year, but I remember one day I had a butt load of cash.  It was either after my birthday or Christmas.  I went into K-mart, expecting to unload my cash.  Back then, they had a bin full of SNES and Genesis games.   This bin is a lot like the bins you will find in Wal-mart today with $5 DVDs. 

Each game in the bin was marked down from $10 to $20.  While my parents were shopping, I was digging through that bin looking for anything that looked cool.  I remember, for some odd reason, there were  a bunch of copies of Shaq Fu.  Luckily, I never bought Shaq Fu.  I did rent it, but that's a completely different story.

The three games I bought that day was Sunset Riders, Zombies Ate My Neighbors and TMNT: Turtles in Time.



Zombies Ate My Neighbors was a given for me because I was a total Zombie freak at this point in my life.  I rented every zombie movie I could find, and even bought a bunch.  I didn't know anything about Zombies Ate My Neighbors, other than it had zombies in it.  This happened to be one of my favorite games for the SNES.  My cousin and I would play the heck out of it, and it had like 80 or so freaking levels.  The game was massive, the animations were nice and the game was just fun.  I never beat it though.  It just got extremely difficult at the end.



Sunset Riders was an arcade game, but I honestly don't remember it in the arcades.  Even if I would have seen it in an arcade, I probably would have skipped over it for Samuari Showdown or Virtua Fighter.  Anyways, I was shocked how good this game was.  I was never a huge fan of Contra style games, but Sunset Riders was a game with great music, tight action, impressive graphics.  I actually beat this game on my own.  That's pretty crazy just thinking about that now.



TMNT: Turtles in Time was weird for me.  I was a huge TMNT fan when I was young, but by the time Turtles in Time came out, there was Power Rangers and a bunch of other shows that usurped TMNT's popularity.  While TMNT might be retro now, at the time, they were pretty lame to like.  Especially at my age (probably).  I took the risk and bought this "kids game".  Overall, this is probably my favorite TMNT game in the series. 

While I bought these "budget" games on a whim, this turned out to be my favorite gaming purchase I ever made.