World's Greatest Independent Game Stores: GameBuzz (Montreal, Quebec)

If you happen to find yourself in Montreal in November, I have two pieces of advice for you. One, stay indoors. Man alive, it's cold here. And two, visit GameBuzz at 705 Rue St. Catherine. "Rue" means "street" in French. "Rue" is also a name of one of the actresses on "The Golden Girls" (Rue McClanahan).

There are a number of GameBuzz locations around Montreal. I stumbled across this particular location after making an emergency visit to a local EB Games while traveling. Boy, nothing angers me quite like realizing that I've just given $100 to the EB/GameStop empire that I could have given to the local "Rebel Alliance." A thousand rat farts!

(FYI: This store is also located close to the famous Club Super Sexe, should you find yourself in the mood to see breasts, behinds, etc.)

Any store that has a R.O.B. the Robot in the front window can't be all bad, right? And this particular branch of GameBuzz is très, très bon.

First impression: I absolutely love the series of glass cases that greet you upon entering the store. The first glass case, which you can't miss because it's directly in your footpath, has vintage systems on display. There's an NES, a Sega Genesis and a Dreamcast, among others. And they're all in pristine condition. Clearly, there's reverence here, a sense of history. For gamers, this is a holy place.

There is a pair of long, skinny glass cases running the length of the store, behind which the employees stand. Inside these glass cases I spotted an avalanche of Donkey Kong plush dolls, a stuffed Slime and one very impressive Blinky doll from Pac-Man. I also noticed several Final Fantasy discs from the PlayStation era, all under glass and displayed as if they were rare, priceless artifacts that Indiana Jones was about to plunder from a tomb.

I really love the half-game-store/half-museum quality of GameBuzz. After the smudged, disorganized chaos of the EB Games down the street, GameBuzz was as refreshing as a dish of ice-cold sorbet after a meal at Burger King. Even the Xbox section at the rear of the store, which I can't imagine draws a large number of customers, was organized in a logical fashion.

The employees behind the counters -- two guys, and one girl wearing some weird-ass eyeglass frames -- appeared to be very sensitive to each customer's particular needs. And though they were largely speaking in French, of which I understand almost nothing, I'm fairly certain they didn't ask anyone whether they would like to buy a guarantee for their game disc -- in case it ever gets scratched -- for the low, low price of three dollars (as we all know employees at EB Games and GameStop routinely do).

There were racks of Sega Genesis cartridges as far as the eye could see. I saw obscure collectibles that had me clutching my stomach, doubled over with craving pangs. Now this is the kind of consumer experience that gamers sorely deserve! It really blows that we have to tolerate GameStop's lazy, crappy employee attitudes and thinly veiled wallet grabs during checkouts. All of the chains -- including Best Buy and Future Shop -- generally treat gamers like we are worm farmers.

We're people, goddammit. We're here to spend money. A lot of money, usually. The least you can do is alphabetize and be nice to us and stop trying to sell us guarantees that we don't need, as if we're all banjo-picking hayseeds that just fell off the damn apple truck.

Damn it, now I'm all worked up again. Damn it all!

Bottom line: Frequent GameBuzz, and you too might find yourself daydreaming, in front of a case of Master System classics, about moving to Montreal -- the really old part of Montreal -- and making little "Buzzes" with that girl with weird eyeglasses.

As Pep? Le Pew would say: "Le sigh."

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• The Jones Report: It's Hard Out There for a Game Journalist
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