#695 Romance of the Three Kingdoms 2

Game #695

Romance of the Three Kingdoms 2

Paid $20

4/26/11 - Player 1 Video Games

Well, I don't have much to say about this one other than it was a bit of a splurge considering I'll likely never actually play the game. There are 2 genres that don't interest me whatsoever: strategy games and RPG's. I'm more of an action/platformer fan - I prefer moving left to right and jumping on/shooting things in my way to a level goal. Spending dozens of hours crafting an army or grinding to level up just isn't my thing.

The thing is, a lot of the remaining games on my list are strategy or RPG's. I guess they don't get produced in very large quantities. Combine that with the fact that fans of these types of games seek them out and tend to hang on to them and what you get are relatively high priced pickups. I could wait around and hope to snag one at a bargain price, but with these games I've given up on that strategy. They just don't come up that often. See? I'm just too impatient.

OK - next post I actually DO have a good bargain to share. Stay tuned.

#693 & #694 Impossible Mission II & Mermaids of Atlantis

Games #693 & #694

Impossible Mission II & Mermaids of Atlantis

Traded for a bag of magic jelly beans

4/24/11 - The Easter Bunny

What's the best way to obtain new games for the collection? When they're given as gifts! We've always thrown a couple of small gifts into the Easter basket along with the chocolate eggs and jelly beans - last year I was left boxed copies of Hogan's Ally and Duck Hunt (more on those in a later post). I've even received eBay gift cards that sure come in handy. This year the Easter Bunny threw down a couple of little BLACK squares - the SEI-published version of the PC port Impossible Mission 2 and the AVE cart Mermaids of Atlantis. As far as games go, they're not much to write home about, but as collector's pieces they can be tough to cross off the list.

These are both obviously unlicensed games (I call them bootlegs, but that term isn't entirely accurate). I've got a whole separate shelf for these funky shapes and colors. Here's a quick guide to unlicensed games:

Tengen games are rather easy to track down and feature a good number of quality titles. Tengen began as a licensed publisher, but fell out of favor over Nintendo competing with their own version of Tetris (among other problems). There are solid ports such as Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Gauntlet and Fantasty Zone as well as the excellent RBI Baseball series. The good-to-crap game ratio is fairly consistent with the normal gray licensed carts.

Camerica games are a shiny gold color and can be hit or miss. Their MicroMachines game is a good racer and there are some solid platformers such as the Dizzy and Big Nose games. There's a quirky dipswitch on the back of the cartridge that is supposed to help the game bypass the NES' lockout chip technology. If position A doesn't work, just try position B!

Bunch/Color Dreams/Wisdom Tree are hard to find aside from the religious games and only a couple of other common ones. This leads to the premium pricing online despite the games themselves being almost universally craptastic. Go play Raid 2020 and wonder if anyone who worked on it was proud of the final product. Most of the blue carts themselves are turning a puke/booger green after all these years thanks to a fire retardant chemical mixing with the coloring - sort of how a lot of old Super Nintendo systems you see look brown.

AVE carts are black and seem to be programmed well enough, but the games are just too simple or repetitive to be fun for very long (see: Venice Beach Volleyball, Solitaire, Blackjack). Notice in the picture the AVE version of Impossible Mission II - same game, different cart.

Beyond these companies you can get into AGCI, Caltron/Myriad, Active and a couple of other minor companies that only released 1 or 2 games. Like I said before, these are rare and therefore command a higher price among collectors and resellers, but if you're looking for a fun game to play, look elsewhere.

Next time...buying games I don't like!

#692 - Die Hard

Game #692
Die Hard
Paid $20
4/22/11 - Game Over Video Games

An Easter weekend trip to San Antonio and Six Flags Fiesta Texas came with some built-in time for a little game hunting. My wife actually lived in S.A. for a few years, but this was before I started collecting so the whole city for me is an untapped resource. My only find (in admittedly limited searching) was at a newly opened Game Over store location. I had heard of the chain before from a video made by ScrewAttack.com, it's half retro game store and half museum. Lined up and down the walls are vintage systems, boxes and pieces of advertisement fluff from years past. It was very fun to just walk around and look at the cool stuff in the glass cases.

Speaking of glass cases, my new copy of Die Hard went almost unnoticed until I showed a sales guy my list and he pointed out the cart hidden under a couple of other titles. Yeah, $20 isn't so great of a deal on this one, but the only other time I saw this game for sale it was $35 and the label was ripped. According to the NA collection tracker, this is the cart that put me over 90% completion, and with this few remaining games I've decided to take a slightly below market value price tag as something I won't pass up.

What really will stand out from this visit is the first thing my eyes went to as I scanned their inventory. There amongst the MegaMan 2's and Ninja Gaidens sat a slightly off-white cart with a boring label that someone had drawn little people on with pencil. The price tag read $999.99. The game was Myriad 6-in-1 - one of the most highly sought after titles by completionist collectors. The game itself is the same as the unlicensed Caltron 6-in-1 but with a new label slapped on by Myriad once they bought out the Caltron stock. Very few of these exist and they command a high price tag. There are about half a dozen titles I know I'll never own unless I really luck out at a flea market or garage sale, and this is definitely one of those. I imagine that a collector with deeper pockets or who has been searching for this game for years would jump at a cool $1k price - but for me, right now, all I could do was look at it and take my crummy Die Hard game home. I did have to laugh that the label was drawn all over with pencil and a big "#14" was written on it with a magic marker.

Next time...what has the Easter Bunny brought for this blogger???

#691 - Wacky Races

Game #691

Wacky Races

Paid $13

4/15/11 - MicroPlay

Let’s start right away with the most recent addition to the collection, a cart-only copy of Wacky Races. Although only ranked a 6 on the NintendoAge rarity list, this is the only copy of the game I’ve come across and eBay only lists 3 available at the moment (all above $30).

I had my hands on the game a couple of months ago when I walked into a store called MicroPlay. Looking through the windows of the shop all I could see were walls of anime DVDs and VHS tapes and a few Japanese toys and trinkets. I’ve found video games in all sorts of wacky places (Pun? Get it? Because of Wacky Races…I’m sorry…) so I decided to walk in anyway. The Nintendo 64 sign hanging up on the wall was a positive signal that some retro games were hiding out somewhere.

At first I was disappointed, there were NES games under a glass case. Hmm…$30 for MegaMan 2? $20 for Yoshi? Oh brother…things were not looking good. Of their limited stock (only about 2 dozen carts) I had them all but one, Wacky Races. The $13 price tag seemed high to me, so I passed on it. After some research online later revealed the going rate to be 2 or 3 times that, and the fact that I’ve yet to come across this cart a little over 2 years of sifting through game stores, flea markets and garage sales, I decided to go ahead and bite.

So I go out of my way on after work one day to pick it up – and the shop is closed. Well, maybe she keeps odd hours – closed on Mondays or something like that. I check back a couple of days later, closed again. A check in to the nail salon next door revealed this charming nugget – “Oh her? She makes her own hours. Sometimes she won’t be open for a whole month.” Gee, that must be nice.

I give up for a couple of weeks and finally decide to try again. Huzzah! Open! Game purchased. She even threw in a ‘free’ Nintendo black dust cover. Thanks, I’ll add that one to the pile.

The game turned out to be a not so bad platformer, if a bit on the easy side. 77 out of 768 left to go.

A Quick Introduction

Well here it is, another dork cluttering up the web with some self-serving, ultimately unnecessary blog about some personal subject that really nobody else should care about. Thanks for visiting, it’s going to be fun!

A quick introduction…I’m 28 years old living in Houston with my wife, my cat and nearly 700 original Nintendo Entertainment System games. I’ve had a Nintendo since I was about 6 years old; in fact I still have my original deck and my original copy of Super Mario Bros. that should have worn out and stopped working by now. I’ve played video games on and off over the years and I’ve (regrettably) tossed out pieces of nostalgia I wish I could get back (I vividly recall an incident involving a basket full of original Transformer toys, a garage sale and $20) but I always made sure to hang on to the Nintendo.

A couple of years ago I was looking online and found a great site – www.nintendoage.com – that included a forum of fellow Nintendo fanatics and even better, a list of every game available for the system complete with a tool function to check them off as you added them to your stash. The idea to go for them all (768 in total) was rattling around in my head for a while when I found a lot of about 20 games at a pawn shop. My offer to the shop owner of $20 for them all was accepted and my collecting hobby was born.

Since then I’ve purchased and traded my way up from that 20 game start – right now my count is 691 cartridges from that NA list. For me, the fun in this hobby is the hunt and finding a great deal – it’s no fun to just go on eBay and pay whatever ridiculous amount someone else thinks the game should cost. The subsequent posts to this blog will be my countdown of the final 77 games I need for my collection, plus some of my best collecting stories.

I hope you enjoy the blog and I hope that I don’t lose interest and abandon it after a few posts. Zing!