Hey it’s only been two months since my last entry! Well, things have been hectic due to the holidays and the whole family has been a level of busy that I have never encountered before. In a word, phew… I’m glad that (for the most part) it’s over.
I’m going to keep this short. Champaign-Urbana has a new game store in town. It’s called Valhalla Games and is located on Neil Street, just above a couple of barber shops and a glass company. I like this store a lot for a number of reasons. The owners are friendly and knowledgeable, and if they don’t stock something, they’ll gladly get it for you. Mostly though, I now buy my game-related wants from Valhalla exclusively for some things that they don’t do/have that has become core parts of the other local store (which I’ll call “Store B”).
Valhalla doesn’t have cats. I hate the animals and my wife is highly allergic to many breeds of them. Store B has a cat (which my wife is allergic to) in at least three days a week because (and I quote the owner) “she gets lonely at home”.
Valhalla, despite currently going through a remodel, doesn’t feel as cramped and claustrophobic as Store B. Stuff is nicely displayed and nothing feels like it is piled on other stuff.
Valhalla is not cluttered. There are no seemingly random piles of merchandise lying on the floor just waiting to be stepped on. Store B has a plethora of these piles lying about. I can’t count the number of times I have almost fallen in Store B by nearly tripping on a huge penny box of Magic cards or some foam sword lying around.
The owners/staff of Valhalla are never too busy to take my money. A couple of times in Store B I have had to wait for the owner to find a convenient break point in his City of Heroes/World of Warcraft/Toontown/(insert MMORPG name) game so he could free up the register/computer and ring me up.
Before Valhalla Games opened up, I was seriously looking at taking all my game-buying business online because I had grown that disenfranchised with Store B. Now I don’t have to. Plus, I have met some really cool folks while hanging around there, and that’s just icing on the cake for me…
peace…RHManiac
