I can’t believe I somehow missed the original NeoGAF thread where Chris Kohler lays down the 1,000 Yen challenge to any members of J-GAF who would participate — although the mid-October posting date puts me somewhere around the launch of UNCHARTED 2 and a haze of jetlag from two weeks in Europe, so I guess that’s somewhat of a good excuse.

No matter as Chris recently posted on Game|Life the results of that challenge and the resulting thread, where I happened to catch it. I think it was an awesome idea and challenge. For the tl;dr crowd, Chris challenged the J-GAF crew to hit up Japan’s amazing used game shops and see how much quality gaming they could get for under 1,000 Yen (just a hair under $11 as of right now).

WhiteAce, cvxfreak and BudokaiMR2 all came back with some pretty interesting results, even using some self-imposed guidelines and ratings analysis!

Over here in the US, Kyle Orland tried out the challenge over in Pittsburgh, with his set of rules and some pretty decent results! Kyle raised the spending cap to $20 to account for the fact that he felt that $10 wouldn’t really net you anything over here in the US. He also didn’t count sales tax (good move).

There’s also a Twitter hash tag (#1kyengamer) if you’re so inclined.

Of course, now I want to try this for myself over here on the West Coast sometime soon. I need to do some research first on where to go, as it would make for a much more interesting adventure to hit up as few corporate owned stores (GameStop and Game Crazy, et al.) as possible. There was a “Game Club” over on Western and 18th Street at some point that sounds like it would have been a prime spot, but it no longer exists.

Anybody from the LA metro area want to provide any good suggestions?

Anywhere LA Metro, but within the SFV/SGV boundaries and north of South Bay and OC — I don’t want to spend more on gas than I do in games right?

I’ll post my guidelines and results sometime later this month.