#748 & #749 - P'Radikus Conflict and Panic Restaurant. Wait. Whaaaa??

P'Radikus Conflict
eBay
I dunno...July 2013? August? Whatever.

Some time last year I bought P'Radikus Conflict off eBay. Once it arrived in the mail I gave it about 10 minutes, didn't much care for what was happening and so it got shelved. I cared so little about it that I didn't update the blog...surely the world has been dying to know the truth!

I really have lost interest in the unlicensed set.

Now this next one...well here's a chilling tale of whimsy and frivolity!

 
Panic Restaurant
GamesPlus - Copperfield
8/22/14

I came home last Friday after a rousing day of inservice meetings and classroom preparation. School was set to start the following Monday, and that night there was to be a lock-in retreat we hold for our advanced level students in the school gym. You haven't lived until you've slept on an air mattress in a high school gymnasium. Luxury in its most pure and highest form.

I was only going to be home for a couple of hours to mentally prepare for what was ahead of me that evening. I cruised Facebook and a game shop that stocks retro wares in town posted up a picture of their recent trade-ins: Bomberman II, Fire 'n Ice and Panic Restaurant. Quite a trio of hard to find NES titles! I had already picked up Fire 'n Ice in a NintendoAge.com deal a couple of years ago and Bomberman II was a $5 pickup at the shadiest flea market in the Houston area.

But that Panic Restaurant. One of the final 3 games I needed to complete my licensed NES set, and the only one of the 3 even remotely in my price range. The cost of the game has more than doubled in the last few years as game prices across the board are skyrocketing. I'm glad I did the bulk of my collecting back when things were a little more sane and fun.

I'd been checking eBay and other places on the web and never felt like a deal was close, even as my 'max offer' kept going up to keep pace. When I saw the picture posted to Facebook, I figured I'd give them a call to feel them out on price and hopefully have them open the cart to check the authenticity of the game's guts. I actually almost bit on a copy on eBay from Mexico a few weeks ago, but an incorrect label was a giveaway that the cartridge was a bootlegged fake. Such a shame that this is even something that has to be considered when shopping for uncommon video games...

The clerk at the store was kind enough to check out the circuit board and authenticate it to my satisfaction, and even offered a 10% discount if I would pick the game up that evening. The store was about 45 minutes away, and I had that lock-in to get to in a couple of hours. I decided to give it a shot, and the game was afoot.

I still didn't want to pay their asking price out of pocket, but I knew I had some surplus games on my shelf that were worth a bit of scratch, as well as a PSP and a Dreamcast that I'd been threatening to break up with for the longest time. So I dumped a bunch of stuff in a box and brought them to trade in the hopes of getting a better deal.

Well, let me just say that I goofed in that regard. The trade-in value I knew would not be what I could get from just selling the games outright, but I was in a rush and wasn't thinking clearly when I accepted what they offered me. To be honest, I left a lot of cash on the table and traded away some valuable games. But what's done is done and it DID lower my total bill by about 30%. I wound up 'spending' far less than I ever would on eBay, but by far the most I'd personally spent on any one single game.

I was late to the lock-in, by the way. Really late.

I played the game after returning home from my night on the gym floor and guess what? Panic Restaurant is a fun little platformer. It's a short one, I beat it in an evening, but it was a good time and quality game. Taito's late era NES titles are well made.

So this leaves Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak and Stadium Events for a complete licensed set. I never expected to own Stadium Events, but until a couple of years ago, Flintstones was not an impossibility. We live in the present, however, and the price of F2 has gone into stupid crazy orbit. That, along with my dissatisfaction with unlicensed collecting, would appear to make this my last little gray square.

I'm not shuttering the blog, even though it has been more than a year since I last posted anything to it. In fact, I am teaching a video game design course this year at school, and part of my curriculum will be to have students write a gaming blog. Maybe this will inspire me to write more than I have been, as I enjoy it and hopefully you enjoy reading it. Until next time, EXCELSIOR!

#746 & 747 - Big Nose Freaks Out & Nobunaga's Ambition 2

  
 #746 - Big Nose Freaks Out
eBay
2/12/13

#747 - Nobunaga's Ambition 2
eBay
7/21/13
 
Well, well, well.  What have we here?  Hello, little blog.  Don't see much of you around here lately...that's ok.  You look marvelous.

Ummm...so. It's been a while, hasn't it?  Well, to be honest, there hasn't been much to write about, nor have I had much of an inclination to write about random whatever stuff, so LGS has gone dormant.  Think of it as an offseason.

I haven't been buying much of anything NES for a while now, mainly because there isn't a whole lot left for me to pick up.  As I mentioned a couple of posts back, the games I've got left to add to the collection are expensive and scarce.  But that's no excuse for not mentioning the Big Nose Freaks Out gold cart I ordered back in February.  Really, I meant to do a little write-up about it, but it's not an interesting story.  I got it on eBay.

In fact, I already had a copy before I got the gold cart.  Camerica (the publisher of this and other unlicensed games, as well as a partner of some kind with Galoob for the ultimate cheater's device known as the Game Genie) had a sort-of-a-good idea on their hands in the form of the Aladdin Deck Enhancer.  The idea was that all NES games have a certain number of physical parts in common, from the circuitry to the plastic case.  So then, why not develop and sell a plastic shell that held these common parts and sell mini-cartridges with different games on them and undercut the fully manufactured games?  Thus the Aladdin Deck Enhancer was born, along with a handful of these mini-cartridges that you could swap out to play the different games.

While it seems like a good idea, the games available were unlicensed and while that doesn't necessarily mean they are bad games, they were doomed to be shoved to less visible markets apart from the Toys 'R Us and Wal-Marts of the day.  Low sales led to the scrapping of the idea and the switch to more conventional cartridges - although these were gold and required some fidgeting with a switch on the back to bypass the NES lockout chip.  Oh, and you still couldn't buy them from a normal store.  Fully sealed Aladdin Decks and mini-cartridges are rather common - evidence of a bulk sell-off of old stock.

I already had the Big Nose Freaks Out mini-cartridge, but if you're going to 'collect them all' then the gold cart must be added to the list.  Check. Done.  Moving along.

Nobunaga's Ambition 2 is a game I've been hunting down for quite some time - longer than I cared to, actually.  It's a strategy/sim game, which I'm discovering I'm no longer TOTALLY against (Fire Emblem: Awakening is a strategy game that I'm enjoying quite a bit, although the mechanics for that game are way different from Nobunaga...see below...).  But really - what DO you do here?  I built some flood protection and cleared land...then my townfolk rebelled against me.  Maybe I shouldn't have sold all their food to the neighbors...?

My inability to wrap my feeble mind around how to play these kinds of games, especially one whose style is cramped by limitations of an 8-bit home console, made Nobunaga 2 a low priority in my early collecting days.  I looked back at some price guides circa 2010 and saw that this game held steady at about $25 a pop, but I had bigger fish to fry back then.

I've mentioned it on this blog before, but one day, as if by some capitalist magic spell, all copies of Nobunaga's Ambition 2 disappeared from the Internet.  Amazon, eBay, half.com...all out of stock.  Suddenly...ONE copy came back into the light - from an eBay seller that regularly overprices their inventory.  What was once available all day long for only $25 was now being listed at $150.  WTF.

So it sat...and sat...and sat.  I don't think anyone ever bought it at that price - but when people who did have copies to throw up on eBay did a search and saw that there was only one copy and it was $150..."Well then," they thought. "This must be a RARE and VALUABLE game...I will also list mine for $150..."

 

And that's the way things have been for the last year or so.  See the price charting screenshot above.  Finally, enough copies have gone up that the relative scarcity of this title has been diminished and enough open auctions have ended at a more realistic price that I was able to launch into some minor bidding wars and nab this copy for what ended up being just over double what it would have been 3 years ago.  Video game collecting is no longer  an inexpensive hobby, folks.  I'm just glad I got most of my NES stuff before the everyone buying and selling threw caution to the wind and inflated the entire market.

If you're a new collector, Frankie says relax.  Have some patience and don't hit every "buy it now" that you see.  Open auctions will always net you a better deal.  Be patient and a good deal will come your way.

There are still piece of shit resellers on eBay trying to get $150 for a copy.  Fuck them.

#745 - Chiller

#745 - Chiller
NintendoAge
1/17/13

On a lark I was cruising the NA sell/trade forum and found another Canuck with an impressive list of games for trade.  He was looking for some popular N64 titles to swap for some of the harder to find NES games, and lucky for me I just so happened to have some dupes on hand.

My sister is moving soon and, as part of the purge of as many of her possessions that she doesn't wish to relocate with her, I inherited her N64 and a stack of games.  Among them were copies of Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and MarioKart 64.  I had long ago scooped these up for a few bucks on some forgotten flea market trip, so I was able to set her carts aside as trade bait for the future.

Chiller is an unlicensed NES cart from American Game Cartridges where you have the novel option of 2-player light gun/zapper action.  It's got some (for the time) mature subject matter as you splatter the screen with red pixels that are meant to be blood.  It's charming in a way.  In any case, the cartridge is one that has seen a price spike in recent years.  I could have walked away with this game for $20 a couple years back but for some reason I passed on it.  When I came to my senses and tried to go back to the comic book store where I found it, the store had closed up.  Now eBay copies are 2 or 3 times that, which makes my trade look pretty good in my eyes.  I'm sure the NA member I sent the N64 games to will make out just fine reselling them as Zelda and Mario games always carry a premium.

This completes my AGCI collection - Chiller, Death Race and Shockwave are all together:

2012 - Year in Review

Thankfully the world didn't implode this year under the rule of a resurrected ancient Mayan overlord.  But, for every right there must be a wrong...news that the world's least talented baby will be born out of the joining of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West means that 2013 will offer up its own end-of-the-world speculators.

As far as this blog is concerned, it has come to this - a limp clip show to end the season.  No new retro games were under the tree this year and rightfully so.  eBay resellers can bite me.  So instead, I offer up the dirty twin of year-end top 10 lists, a 'year in review' article!

Collecting Nintendo got ever more difficult this past year.  Prices on the rare and fun games jumped (in some cases by 400%) seemingly out of nowhere.  There are way more collectors out there now than even just 3 years ago, and NES-era games are by far the most popular.  Some, like me, are nearing the end of a complete NES set, so the last few hard to find titles are getting quite difficult to obtain at a reasonable going rate.

That said, I was able to add 14 NES games to the collection this year.  In order:

TMNT: Tournament Fighters
Dragon Warrior IV
Baby Boomer (unlicensed)
Fire 'n Ice
Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers 2
Cowboy Kid
Robodemons (unlicensed)
Zombie Nation
Bandit Kings of Ancient China
Stack Up
Dragon Fighter
Godzilla 2
Bonk's Adventure
Stunt Kids (unlicensed)



It's funny to me, because when I first started collecting I could go to the local retro game shop and make use of 'buy 3 get 1 free' deals on $3 games and walk out with a sack of a dozen carts at a time.  Now it's taken a whole year to pick up just 14 - goes to show how difficult it is to finish off a set on a budget.

Of the games I acquired, Zombie Nation was probably my favorite for a couple of reasons.  First, the story behind the game is weird and fun - fly through cities as the head of a samurai warrior spirit and take down the possessed Statue of Liberty?  Yes, please.  In addition, I picked up the game off eBay literally only a few days before the price on it somehow tripled.  No kidding - sellers online are asking $150 or more for this game when I believe I picked it up for around $50.  Just goes to show you the advantage of going after open auctions vs. 'buy it now' options.

With the lack of true-blue NES carts to be had, I expanded the collection in other ways.  The 'How to Score More Points' VHS starring video game CHAMPION Skip Rogers is a nostalgic favorite for me and many others my age that were in to Nintendo back in the early '90s.

Speaking of nostalgia, I was reunited with my good 'ol robotic operating buddy, R.O.B. thanks to a sweet Craiglist deal.  Sure, he's no fun to play with, but he looks great sitting beside the TV in the nerd cave, which I also took a photographic tour of to mark the first anniversary of Little Gray Squares.  Looking at the analytics of the blog itself, the post regarding Universal Game Cases is my most popular - mostly from people Googling the cases and somehow being directed here.

Add in a couple of oddball carts - a Transformers game for the Japanese Famicom (that I still don't have an adapter to play) and a reproduction of the cancelled Star Trek: The Final Frontier game and you've got my NES collecting for 2012.  All in all, it was a great year, and I'm very lucky to have the ability to collect something as frivolous as obsolete video games.  Hopefully in 2013 I'll have the good fortune to stumble across one of the final four carts I need to finish off the set - maybe under a pile of old magazines in some crazy lady's flea market booth or in some misspelled eBay auction that nobody but me sees.

In the meantime, I'll try my hand at this new Nintendo WiiU...I hear you can play Super Mario Twins on it!

#744 - Stunt Kids - Where Are You, Nick Powell?

#744 - Stunt Kids
NintendoAge.com
11/19/12

It's been nearly 5 months - FIVE MONTHS! - since I've added a new cart to the collection, not counting the odds and ends I've picked up in that time.  As you could probably tell by reading the last year's worth of updates, I've lost some interest in the unlicensed collection.  The games I have left to add to that set are at once rare, expensive and crappy in terms of quality gameplay.

But just because I've slowed down in actively seeking the bastard games of companies like Color Dreams and Active Enterprises, doesn't mean I wouldn't pick one up if the chance arose.  Recently I was in the mood to play Millipede after I played in a tournament at the Houston Arcade Expo.  After cleaning and scrubbing the pins on my copy of the game yielded nothing but a garbled digital mess on my TV, I figured I needed to go ahead and repurchase the game.  Luckily, Millipede is only a couple of bucks.  Double-luckily, a member on NintendoAge was selling his copy along with a list of other carts.  Stunt Kids was on the list, the price was right and I saved on shipping by buying the two games together.

As a game, Stunt Kids reminds me most of Excitebike with cartoonier characters and more obstacles to navigate.  It's made by Camerica/CodeMasters, who as far as unlicensed game companies go, are second only to probably Tengen in terms of quality.  Most of the oddball gold and silver carts from their catalog are decent enough with a good variety of games - sports, action, platformers, etc.

Also, Nick Powell - I have your game.

The Final Four

Many apologies for the total lack of updates for the past month...and for the sporadic updates lately in general.  Trust me, I haven't lost interest in writing for this blog, and I've definitely had my eyes peeled for the remaining NES carts I need for my collection.  But as it goes, I haven't picked much of anything up in the last few months.  Ask any Nintendo collector and they'll tell you that the market has exploded in the last year and a half and prices have gone crazy.

So what I thought I'd do today is reveal the remaining 4 games I would need to obtain to consider my licensed NTSC Nintendo collection complete.  Here they are, in reverse order of likelihood that I'll ever get my greedy little paws on them.

Stadium Events

For NES collectors, this is the grail game for the collection.  According the story that by most has been accepted as truth enough, Stadium Events was given a limited release by Nintendo licensee Bandai.  The game was meant to be paired with the Family Fun Fitness pad that allowed players a new control experience.  Once the big N saw the possibilities ($$$) in such a peripheral, they purchased the license for the game and pad, pulled Stadium Events off the shelves and replaced it with World Class Track Meet (same excat game, different title screen) and the Power Pad.  If you're like me, then you have fond memories of cheating at the game with your cousins by getting down on your knees and using your hands to break world records in the 100 meter dash and pissing off your parents downstairs with all the noise.

So there you have it - an early release, the requirement of a peripheral to play plus a short shelf life equals a rare game.  It's estimated that only a few hundred made it out into the public's hands before the recall, and of course even fewer would have lasted the 25 years since then.  Prices for carts are a sure 4-digit proposition.  I have a mortgage and two car notes - so unless I stumble upon one in an old lady's flea market booth, then this one won't be adorning my shelves.

Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Peak

Here we have another rare game with an interesting story.  From what I've read and heard, F2, as it is shorthanded by the collector community, was a late-era release for the NES that was only available as a Blockbuster rental exclusive.  Any carts that you see now are former rentals that were either sold to the public after Blockbuster began to liquidate their NES stock, or were taken home by employees.

Because of the ex-rental nature of the game, collectors of boxed or (gasp) sealed games have fits with this one as very few copies stayed partnered with the cardboard.  In the last 18 months I've seen the price online jump 300% for just the cartridge - way out of my range.  However, it is common looking enough that it has been obtained rather cheaply from retail stores unwise to its value, or in pawn shops/flea markets/garage sales at a bargain.

Panic Restaurant

Taito published some of the best games on the NES.  Bubble Bobble is a top 5 favorite of mine, PowerBlade is sorely underrated and Arkanoid is hypnotic and frustratingly difficult, but extremely fun.

But Taito collecting is a double-edged sword.  Games like Bubble Bobble Part 2, Little Samson and Power Blade 2 have all seen massive spikes in value and are often among the last to be added to a complete collection.

Panic Restaurant falls into that category - about 2 years ago it could be had for $75 whereas nowadays they fetch $150-200 - yet another victim of reduced availability and being a highly playable platformer.

I've come close a couple of times to getting a hold of a copy (in the wild even!) but as of now I'm still waiting.

Nobunaga's Ambition 2

Goddamn strategy games.  I could've picked this one up ages ago for $25 which I didn't feel was extroardinarly high, but I put it off because quite frankly the game didn't interest me much.  I figured I could just pick it up later any time.  But then something happened.  All of the copies (there used to be many) online dried up.  eBay, Half.com, Amazon, etc. all ran out of stock.  I'm convinced, though I lack any solid proof, that some jerk bought up all the copies and manipulated the market.  Explain how else the price of the ONE copy on eBay would be posted up at $150+.

Look, I'm all for someone making a buck and getting the most they can for the goods they are selling.  But if I'm right then this just takes the fun out of collecting games.  I try my best to give reasonable deals to others on the rare occasion that I sell off some games.  If I use eBay I usually start my auctions at .99 cents.

So that's my rant on Nobunaga 2.  Game that I have no interest in playing, therefore I'm not going to spend a big chunk on it.  I'll trip on it one day at the flea, pick it up for a buck and be done with it.

Thank you for reading Little Gray Squares.  I hope to have more content for you in the future - if I can add to my collection you'll know about it soon enough.

What Does God Need With a Nintendo Game?

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
9/6/12
www.gamereproductions.com 

Another little oddity to add to the collection; what you see here is a reproduction cartridge of the abandoned 1989 game based on the fifth (and crappy crap) Star Trek movie: The Final Frontier.  Actually, saying that The Final Frontier is a crap movie isn't fair - it's not a bad movie, just a not-as-good movie as the others in the franchise (of which I am a huge nerd fan).  It has it's good moments, it has it's not good moments, but it's a movie I've seen a few times and never really hated the way many people seem to.

The game on the other hand?  Well, I played through the first couple of levels after opening the package today...and it's...um...not great.  Star Trek V is one of those games that suffers from lack of creativity and imagination.  You run to the right and shoot bad guys.  There's not much variety (so far).  Maybe things get spicy in later levels, but I haven't gotten that far yet.  It IS kind of fun to see the typos - particularly playing as "Scotto" in stage 2.

For whatever reason, the game was cancelled before it was released.  I've heard it's because the movie didn't do that well (even though it grossed more than $70 million worldwide) and/or because the game wasn't that good (which is true, but that didn't stop whoever was responsible for letting 'Adventures of Tom Sawyer' out of the bag).  So all those teases for a new Star Trek game in the 'coming soon' section of Nintendo Power (RIP) were for naught.

But no matter!  All it takes to get a copy now is a PayPal account and an email to a NES reproduction artist - in this case it was www.gamereproductions.com.  What most repro makers do is take common existing carts, remove the circuit board, whip up some voodoo magic, slap on a new customized label and voila!  New Nintendo game.  The whole process is really cool - I wish I had the gadget know-how to pull them off myself.  Sure, most of the ROMs that the repro makers used can be found online for free, but there's something fun about holding an actual cart in your hand and playing the game on a real NES.

This was the first reproduction cart I've purchased, and I'm impressed with the quality of the construction (fun factor of the game notwithstanding).  I'll probably look into getting a few more - there are some PAL and Japanese exclusives and more unreleased games that I'd be interested in playing.

The only other cart like this that I have is the homebrew title Battle Kid: Fortress of Peril.  I loved this game - it's a cross between I Wanna Be the Guy, MegaMan and Metroid, programmed by one dude and manufactured with 100% new parts and released by www.retrousb.com.  Any NES fan owes it to themselves to purchase a copy and give it a spin.  Battle Kid is better than most officially released NES games that had entire development teams working on them.