How do my pistons look?

Looks like you're burning some oil on 2 of them while the top 2 seem almost too clean like they getting washed with coolant.

 

Really hard to judge. It would help if you could keep track of which cylinder is which. Maybe too, crank the engine (manually, using bolt on end of crankshaft, at right end) so that each pic is at bottom-dead-centre. And focussed.

What’s the miles on it? How recently acquired? How’s it running?

 

I would not be happy with that going on inside of any internal combustion engines that I own at the moment I can say that I mean if it was running correctly and not making a racket and all of that I might run it until I could be through with it but if it's one of my keeper vehicles I'll move over to another one and put this one in the bay and have a look at it when I have time that's why I have several generation twos so we're never under the gun and out of transportation that's when you make foolish decisions quickly and waste piles of money.

 

From the pictures alone; I'd guess that this motor has high mileage and hardened valve guide seals. This allows oil to drop into the combustion chamber causing that black tar on the piston heads. Even on the clean piston heads, you can make out the trail between intake and exhaust valve. I believe 'v sport wagon' is correct; there's probably a head gasket issue or someone has temporary patched it with some chemical head-gasket sealant - so they could sell the car. If the car is running OK now, there's no telling how long that sealant is going to "hold-up", assuming you don't run into cooling system issues (sealant partially occluding your cooling system). Luckily were going into the winter months, so your probably good til next spring or summer.

Sorry for the bad news. You asked for opinions and I wouldn't have touched this one, unless it was FREE. That's assuming that everything else is in pristine condition.

 

You're in Western New York? Generally there anything made today that doesn't have a heated and cool temperature controlled garage in those areas is maybe a 5-year car if you're lucky My Corollas and upstate New York would eat up brake lines pretty quick and back in those days that was something I wasn't really willing to replace and they were very costly to buy this is like 1985 '86 83 in that area these parts were a lot more costly then before the internet really took off and all that so usually I would just come down south or lots of my family lived by corolla's down in the south take them up north turn them to salvage in 3 years or so go back down south where family still lives by another one or two Corollas drive them back home this went on quite a while because up there cars just disintegrate. Then I moved down south because I got smart and wanted to get out of that permanent shoveling snow and nonsensical weather and taxes were rising up north and everything was going really crazy and everything was almost free down here when I moved here quite hysterical I'm never look back now the four cars that I have will last forever just from not being someplace.