Ultimate Collector Review

Richard “Lord British” Garriott is The Man. His games have defined and re-defined RPGs and MMORPGs. He’s been to space. There is a widely-distributed picture of him sitting, stone-faced, with a crown on his head. Plus, he adores collecting weird stuff. Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale is Garriott’s Facebook-based love letter to swap meets, gar(b)age sales, and humankind’s love for pawing through other people’s trash like starving raccoons. It’s a unique experience that collectors will love, and it’s proof that despite Garriott’s accolades, he’s just a slob like one of us. And that’s awesome.

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Put on your tackiest hat, it’s time to go shopping for junk with Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale

Richard “Lord British” Garriott is The Man. His games have defined and re-defined RPGs and MMORPGs. He’s been to space. There is a widely-distributed picture of him sitting, stone-faced, with a crown on his head. Plus, he adores collecting weird stuff. Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale is Garriott’s Facebook-based love letter to swap meets, gar(b)age sales, and humankind’s love for pawing through other people’s trash like starving raccoons. It’s a unique experience that collectors will love, and it’s proof that despite Garriott’s accolades, he’s just a slob like one of us. And that’s awesome.

 

Ultimate Collector: Garage Sale is a game about buying, selling, and collecting. You earn your first coin by selling some tchotchkes at a dinky yard sale. The real shopping begins after you build up sufficient funds. Ideally, you want to hunt for some cool bargains, mark them up, and sell them in your own ever-expanding backyard retail empire.

To find sellable material, you need to visit your pals and/or look through the newspaper for neighboring garage sales. You can expect to find some decent stuff at Bubba’s Backyard Extravaganza, but to access the really cool stuff, you need to pay an admission fee with the game’s hard currency. Regardless of where you acquire your goods, however, your mission remains the same: Appraise that baby, take ‘er home, and wait for an offer.

Every item that you pick up can be appraised on several levels. The more you appraise an object (each appraisal costs one unit of energy, though you get freebies from time to time), the more you learn about its worth. If an item is damaged in any way, its asking price goes down—but so does its resale value. As you play Ultimate Collector, you occasionally earn parts that can go towards repairing your stuff. You can also recycle unwanted items for parts, or bug your friends for some.

Ultimate Collector

You can buy and sell toys, gadgets, furniture, and lots more. Everything you find is based on a real-world antique, so at least you won’t be expected to sell a stack of waterlogged Archie comics. Your yard comes equipped with tables, buckets, and stands that are ideal for moving specific items (for instance, you get a sale bonus if you sell your toys out of a toy chest instead of simply putting them on the gadget table).

If you can’t shake your hoarder tendencies, you can set up item collections in your house. Perfect for attracting mates!

The premise behind Ultimate Collector isn’t unlike what’s already been done in Pawn Stars: The Game, but Ultimate Collector is admittedly a much deeper experience. You don’t sit back and wait for the bargains to come in. You need to read the papers, get out there, and see what’s what.

Granted, Ultimate Collector looks pretty ugly, and it comes with the usual social game trappings like a limited energy supply and long waits between offers. Still, if you love hunting for yard sales and running your hands over a sun-warmed G1 Transformer that’s been discolored by another person’s cigarette smoke, there’s no question that you’ll get a kick out of Ultimate Collector.

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      90 out of 100
      In the early aughts, Nadia fell into writing with the grace of a brain-dead bison stumbling into a chasm. Over the years, she's written for Nerve, GamePro, 1UP.com, USGamer, Pocket Gamer, Just Labs Magazine, and many other sites and magazines of fine repute. She's currently About.com's Guide to the Nintendo 3DS at ds.about.com.