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Regret?

Friday, June 30th, 2017

I own about 2000 video games, almost all of which still have their box and manual and are in ‘as-new’ condition. A couple of dozen are even ‘mint’ condition (still in the factory sealed wrapping). About 50 maybe were used. It’s a big collection, and contains some real gems worth many times what I paid for them.

Virtually all of these are recorded in a massive Excel file that I’ve been keeping for over two decades. This arose because I used to have to keep records for my contract reviewing I did years back, but I’ve kept it up ever since. This is what I use for my annual ‘year in review’ posts regarding my collection (as well as the system-specific posts).

I’m pretty pleased with my collection – more so in recent years as I’ve sunk myself more and more into retro gaming. I do believe that one day I’ll set them all up again and be able to play decades worth of games whenever I wish. Very few of these games are what I consider ‘bad’, and I would enjoy replaying almost all of them.

This is one of the reasons why I regret something that happened over an 18 month period from June 2000 until Devember 2001: I traded in for store credit exactly 92 games. I can’t say for sure I regret doing this, but I certainly wish I could go back and tell myself it was a terrible, terrible idea. Granted I got decent money for them (trading in wasn’t as much of a scam then as it is now) with which I purchased many (about 44 actually) new games, but I do still wish I owned every single game I traded in. The principle reason I did this wasn’t for the money, it was because of space (we were in the apartment then). Plus EB Games was trying to move into used game sales and were offering very generous prices in those days (about half new retail cost).

This post discusses these tradeins in detail, including prices, specific game titles, and the ones that I probably should have kept in my collection 🙂

Dreamcast

I traded in only six Dreamcast games, for which I was given approximately $100. Three of these were (bad) RPGs, one was an action game and two were Capcom fighting games. Today, the approximate value of these games would be about $154, which is less than I paid for them back when I bought them.

No regrets therefore from a price point of view, but I would like to play Armada again.

Gameboy Advance

Why did I trade in GBA games? It’s not like they take up much space at all!! The list – only four games – is arbitrary as well. A mystery then, but one not worth spending too much time on since the four games only cost me $63 in total and I got almost $50 in credit for them!

However…. one of those games – Klonoa – cost me only $19.99 new, gave me $12 credit, but can easily fetch $80 today! In fact the four games today are worth over $135, or more than double what I paid. Given the four of them in boxes could have fit anywhere, I probably should have kept them!

Gamecube

I only traded in two games (Pikmin and Super Monkey Ball) and could easily buy both of them today for much less than the trade-in credit I got in 2001 were I interested. Which I’m not 🙂

Nintendo 64

I gutted my Nintendo 64 collection, trading in a whopping 16 games (more than half what I had bought), which gave me about $430 in credit. While Nintendo 64 games haven’t started spiking in price like NES or SNES games, they are creeping up and today these 16 are worth about $550.

One of them is notable, Kirby 64. I bought it with credit, and traded it in only 14 days later for $40! Today it could fetch $80. I don’t particularly miss it, but I do miss games like Doom 64, Jet Force Gemini and a few iconic N64 games such as Starfox, Mario Kart and Paper Mario. Why on earth did I trade in Nintendo first party classics?!?

Sega Saturn

I only traded in three Saturn games, none of which were good. For Baku Baku, Golden Axe The Duel and Winning Post (a horseracing game I actually purchased new for $60!!) I got about $65 in credit. These three games today are worth over $250 combined!

Why so high? It turns out Winning Post was a rare game even when it came out. Coupled with the unusual genre, and the fact it’s apparently a pretty good game, means it commands a high price now – up to $200 in good condition. I probably should have kept that one 🙂

Playstation

Here’s where the regret gets closest to the surface. In those 18 months I traded in 44 Playstation games (from a collection of about 120). This was more than any other system, and I estimate I got about $530 in credit from all these games.

Some were bad, some were middling, many were good. And a few were great. Perhaps more than anything else on this list I can’t easily explain just why I traded some of these in. When I look at how much they have appreciated in the years since the decision to part with them becomes even more inexplicable.

Take the two Tomba games for instance, which were great platformers. Or the three Playstation installments from the Armored Core series – all of which I played to death. Or Koudelka, the first installment in the fantastic Shadow Hearts RPG series. Or Tales Of Destiny 2. Or Tron Bonne. Why oh why didn’t I keep these games?

All 33 today would retail in good condition (with box and manual) for about $1400. A couple are worth more than twice what they cost back in 199x. Tron Bonne alone is a $200+ game… that I traded in for about $9. If only I had known!

Playstation 2

And then we get to the PS2 era, which was a young console during this period. Even so I managed to dispense with 17 games for this system, many within months of buying them. For this I got about $380 in credit, which was good in the day, and on which most was spent getting more PS2 games!

Today… these games are worthless! In fact I could buy back all 17 in good condition complete for probably $150! Only one is ‘worth’ anything (Grandia Extreme, about $30) but I have no desire to own or play it any way!

In other words, I made the right call on the PS2 games I got rid of 🙂

Sega-CD

Here’s a bonus. I actually have seen about 20 additional games leave my collection in the last 24 years. Some of these were returned to the shops, some were given away to family but one special game was sent to Victor Ireland, boss/owner of the company Working Designs who I reviewed games for.

Vic had been very generous to me over the years, sending me lots of free games and even getting me a Japanese N64 before they were out in America (not to mention Pokemon for the gameboy before the USA release). I knew he was attempting to complete a collection of the entire USA Sega-CD library and I actually helped him with this, sending him a few games that I stumbled across that I knew he didn’t have. Some of these games (such as Space Adventure Cobra) I purchased two copies of and kept one. One game though was in my own collection, but had been quite rare, so I just gave it to him. That game was Keio Flying Squadron.

I had bought this game in very late 1994 for the Sega-CD and loved it. It was a shoot-em-up featuring a cute girl and lovely graphics and had a good amount of challenge. I played it a lot and thought it was a great game, especially at the very low price of $20 new.

I kept it for 8 years, and then in 2003 sent it to Vic since I knew his Sega-CD collection lacked only a very few games and this was one of them.

Here’s the reason he never found it: it’s super rare. As a result it’s now easily the most expensive Sega-CD game. In fact it’s worth $1200. Yep, twelve-hundred dollars. And I gave it away…

(But had I kept it would Keio even be my most ‘valuable’ game? Are you interested in the answer to that? Should I do a post on the gems in my collection? Let me know…)

Posted in Games, Otaku | Comments Closed

Japanese Gamebooks

Thursday, June 15th, 2017

At the Mandarake rare bookstore in Nakano mall, I happened to notice the attendant (a stunning Italian lass cosplaying as Sailor Moon) packaging some sort of Japanese RPG rules book for sale. I asked if they had any others – daring to think I may finally, after six trips to Japan, find a gamebook – and she directed me to the glass case outside. There I saw this:

And this:

And more, including some AD&D books and quite a few Japan-specific titles. Almost all in fantastic condition but also sporting fantastic price tags. As a rule of thumb, estimate ¥100 at about $1.

I would have needed over $1000 to buy all the Fighting Fantasy titles alone…

Now it’s hard to leave me speechless these days, but this sight did. I’ve been looking over and over again every time we’ve visited Japan for gamebooks and never ever seen a single one before. My mind was blown; I was overcome. But it was early days in the trip, which means I wasn’t yet at the point I was spending without reason. So I only bought one item – the cheapest one – this:

FF Gamebook 19, Demons Of The Deep. I bought it when it was first released in 1986 but at the time wouldn’t have known (or cared!) that it was also released in Japan.

Here’s an interior shot:

You can see there’s little trace of western influence here, with vertical text and using Japanese numbers! The presentation is beautiful though, with very sharp printing and perfect reproduction of the art.

The book comes with a separate adventure sheet with rules on the back:

And includes a nice section at the end detailing the other available gamebooks:

It’s noticeable smaller (and thinner) than the western editions too. Here it is compared to my UK and US imprints:

I’m enormously happy to finally own a non-English FF book, and something about it being as exotic as in Japanese makes it quite special.

And yet I do regret not buying more. I wasn’t going to spend over $300 for Sky Lord, but why didn’t I buy at least Out Of The Pit? Silly me!

Now I move toward the next challenge: a non-English Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Given it was published in over 20 languages that shouldn’t be too difficult. Should it?

Posted in Books, Gamebooks, Miscellaneous, Otaku | 1 Comment »

Broadway

Monday, May 29th, 2017

I just wrote a lengthy post but the app I used to blog from my phone crashed and it was all lost! So here’s an abbreviated version…

Yesterday we spent the day at Nakano Broadway mall, a Mecca for fans of anime/games/manga/toys etc, filled with shops that look like this;

And this…

We’ve been many times but it gets better every trip. It’s not for those with shallow pockets though; I think as the awareness of this place has grown so have the price tags!

I saw countless amazing things but none more so than Japanese imprints of the FF books I collect. That deserves its own post in the future though; watch for it!

Broadway isn’t just shops, there’s also a few arcades and lots and lots of gashapon (toy vending) machines:

We love all this stuff. It was a great day 🙂

Posted in Games, Miscellaneous, Otaku, Toys, Trip | 1 Comment »

Gore Magala Girl

Friday, May 19th, 2017

That’s the figure/kit I got for my birthday. It was time to set it up!

But first a brief explanation. This is a figure inspired by this guy, Gore Magala:

He’s one of the enemies in Monster Hunter, and his armour – once you defeat him and collect enough parts to make it – is very distinctive:

So this figure kit, while not reproducing the in-game appearance of the armour, is inspired by Magala. Here’s the contents:

So many parts! There are several configurations the figure can be displayed in, and I wanted the dress-with-umbrella mode. This required use of the wings, folded around to form each half of the dress:

The problem was… it’s very difficult to assemble! The pieces hardly wanted to go together, and once I got it mostly done I couldn’t get the dress around her.

The archer mode was just as difficult, and since I didn’t want to use glue or modify the pieces I eventually just settled for replacing her normal clothes with the armour…

…and displaying her in ‘dual swords’ mode:

I think I’ll call her Momo 😉

I think I could easily get the wings attached and set up like the image on the back of the box, but I want to finish filling my new curio first to see how much space I have.

Final review: looks great, incredibly (over) engineered, very challenging to assemble!

Posted in Miscellaneous, Models, Otaku, Toys | Comments Closed

My Collection: NES

Wednesday, May 17th, 2017

I owned an NES way back in prehistory (ie. ‘The Australia Era’) and – at the time – played to death all the classics like Super Mario Brothers, Zelda 1 and 2 and Metroid. A couple of years after arriving here in the US, with the SNES in decline and the Playstation and Saturn already released I bought my second NES. It was September 24, 1995 to be exact, cost me $49.99, and I also spent an additional $90.50 buying up a library of 15 games.

I unpacked the NES from deep storage last weekend for a whirl and was pleasantly surprised to find that it still worked, that I actually had a TV that I could connect it to (a non-trivial exercise in this day of HDMI-only ports) and that – most incredibly – the batteries on every single game still worked!

The NES was released way back in 1983, and discontinued in the USA in 1995. I actually bought mine in a fire-sale after it had been discontinued, and therefore mine is the last version of the console ever manufactured. It’s amusing to me that I owned both the first and last versions, and wish I still had the one I bought back in 1987 (when it was first released in Australia).

After the initial flurry of purchased in September 1995, I bought the odd game here and there over the next six months and then stopped. I remember playing it avidly during this time, and the save files on my games support this, with most of the RPGs having maximum-level parties saved. But I suspect somewhere during 1996 I packed it into storage and moved on to the 16-bit CD-based machines.

With the unusual exception of Christmas 2002 (on which day someone gave me Ultima 2 NES for a gift!?) I hadn’t purchased any new games until a couple of weeks ago, when I got these guys for $5 apiece:

This was mostly because I watch lots of retro gaming online, and wanted to try out some shooters on the NES. These three are all ports of fondly-remembered arcade games and are brutally difficult on the NES. I was laughing out loud as I was in some cases getting game overs within a minute of starting, and remembering how such difficulty was the norm rather than the exception in those days 🙂

Then I dug out the RPGs…

That’s my actual party in Ultima 2, strangely named after the noble gasses! The game is a reasonably faithful port of the old PC classic but runs so slowly as to be almost unplayable by todays standards. I found this to be true for almost all of the ‘CRPG-type’ games (such as Bards Tale, Ultima, Wizardry etc.) and since the games can’t be accelerated when played on original hardware I doubt they hold much appeal today.

There are however certain exceptions, such as this still-playable and wonderfully-packaged Japanese installment in the Might and Magic series:

Or Solstice, a game that has become a bit of a cult-classic among certain aging ‘isometric‘ fans 😉

This latter one is ludicrously difficult, and yet I recall spending hours upon hours playing it way back when!

Here’s a photo of most of my NES library:

Almost everything in the above photo cost me $5, with a few (DW4, Startropics 2, FF1) costing $10-15. About half of the boxed games were new (you can still see the plastic wrap on many) and include all the manuals, maps etc. Needless to say these are in pristine condition. Even many of the used games came with most of the inclusions as well, and everything in the photo still works and (if applicable) has a working battery.

As with much of my game collection a lot of this material has gained value over the years. While I didn’t exhaustively check, Castlevania 3 as an example cost me $5 new (the price tag was still on the wrapper!) and now would fetch twenty times that. Amusingly my most ‘valuable’ game may be Godzilla 2 (which was also purchased new): boxed copies on ebay sell for over $200!

If you’re wondering about the major gaps in my collection – SMB, Metroid etc. – I have ports of them on other systems so never felt the need to get them for the NES. As you can see I prioritized RPGs, and as such ended up building a collection worth a nice amount these days. But I’ve got no plans on selling it, and back into storage it will all go.

By the way if you have any requests for the next one of these posts let me know. There’s a great many systems left to cover (basically I own everything since the NES excluding the 360 and XBox1) and I do plan on getting to them all eventually.

Posted in Games, Otaku, Retro, Tech, Time | Comments Closed

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