The outlet store rides again!

After having a miserable time with a pair of purchases from an online site that's name may rhyme with cramathon, I decided the cure for extremely long shipping waits and one product coming in broken was to hit the outlet store. After four hours of bin diving, book tossing and cheerful banter with some fellow outlet shoppers I walked away $3 poorer, but richer for the experience. Although the outlet store is always hit or miss, it's nice to at least have new things to occupy my mind.

The items I found were, from the bottom right: three Nintendo DS games (My Word Coach, Flash Focus and MLB 2k12), as well as some weird little Megaman Battle Chip thing, Space Spartans for the Intellivision, an Atari 2600 power adapter, a small Sonic LCD game from a happy meal, a Playstation 2 DVD remote, a Nintendo Wii wheel, a Link AR card, 2 Nyko Rechargeable Wii battery packs, a PSOne style Playstation controller extension cable, two Nintendo DS Lite charging adapters, a TNT and Iron ore Minecraft blocks, a seemingly complete (minus the game) Pokemon Emerald box, two replacement Wii cases, Pokemon Blue manual, and finally the charger for the Nyko battery packs.

Everything seemed cheery until things started falling apart. I had my suspicions that the Wii wheel and the Pokemon Emerald box were both fakes, which I later confirms. The wheel feels ever so slightly cheaper than the official one, but looks almost dead on. The Pokemon Emerald box and manual just aren't up to the same standards as an official GBA game box, of which I have a handful to officially compare. What I found weirdest about the Pokemon box was that it was brand new, I mean it was literally brand new and never even folded up to hold the cartridge. Still a nice little conversation piece.

The two DS Lite chargers seemed to work fine when I tested them, so that's all well and good. The DS games are pretty lackluster, but it's always good to find DS games at the outlet store. After cleaning up everything I sat back and figured I may as well test the Wii rechargeable batteries. I pushed it into a controller, popped it on the recharging station and hoped for the best.

At first there was no response at all, none. After I jiggled the controller a little bit the blue light came on. Good, at least this thing is doing something! Suddenly the light turned to green. What!? It's charged already? No no no, let me test this. The Wii remote lit up with all four lights flashing blue. Then three. Then two. Then one. Within a matter of 30 seconds the Wii remote had sucked all the life out of the battery pack that the charging station just told me was full.

After checking with a multimeter one battery was still holding 2.7 volts, but the Wii remote was too power hungry and that wasn't enough. The other battery refused to give any sort of reading at all, even though it did the exact same as the previous one; blue light quickly turned to green. I cleaned the contacts on the batteries recharging ports, the battery contacts for the charging station as well as the ones that go inside the controller. After testing again I found that both batteries charge, slightly, but don't go above 2.8 volts, which clearly both of my (Officially mind you) Wii Remotes just won't accept.

It was only $3, and I had a great time digging through the bins. Sometimes it's not necessarily about the treasures at the end of the journey, it was the fun you had along said journey. Missing the outlet store as much as I had for the past few years has really made me appreciate the little things I find at the outlet store much more. They're not solid gold scores, but they're absolute brilliant finds to me.