July 4, 2009 by Nathan
My wife and I are set to take possession of of new house on August 27th. Over the past couple days I have been going through my collection and weeding out extras, doubles, and stuff I am no longer interested in. Today I took a grocery bag full of TG-16 stuff down to Re-Play Games and made a straight trade for this:
Oh baby. With this must covetted aquisition I am only one CIB game away from a complete Dragon Warrior set (1-4 and 7) and only 5 away from a complete Dragon Warrior / Quest set. I am still missing the boxes for the first 4 Famicom games, and I am missing a CIB Dragon Warrior 2 for the NES. Re-Play has a minty fresh Dragon Warrior 2 CIB sitting in their display case, and I imagine by the end of the month I will have dug out a 100 dollars more worth of stuff that I can part with. The Famicom games can be had for practically nothing CIB ($15-25 a piece, probably less if I avoid Ebay).
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Tags: cib, nintendo, rpg, Dragon Quest, finds, square-enix, enix, dragon warrior, role playing game
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June 29, 2009 by Nathan
Sorry for the lack of updates this month, but my wife and I are in the process of purchasing a house.
Finally! We have been looking since November of last year, but in the past couple years the housing market in my city has absolutely exploded, and the recession hasn’t even touched my home province, so needless to say finding an affordable house that is not in a slum has been pretty cutthroat.
We are just waiting for the bank to tell us that we make enough money to sign over a large portion of it to them, but the deal is as good as done.
Why should you care? Well, there is a extra room in the basement of out future digs, and that means a whole new Temple of Doom. I am going to use Video Games Are Rad to document the creation of my new game room. Everything from custom shelving, to cable routing and paint, I will post it all here. Our possession date isn’t until the end of August and I have some more stuff to post between now and then, but pretty much all of our fiances are tied up in lawyers fees and title insurance and inspection fees so I doubt I will have a spare dime to put towards the collection until September. I will hopefully get a new post up Friday, but no promises because we are beach bound Tuesday for Canada Day at Grandview Beach.
Until then…
Tags: game room, news, retro, room of doom, updates, video games
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June 3, 2009 by Nathan
As you may, or may not know, last year a story started circling around the internet about a pirate version of Final Fantasy 7. Low and behold, this was not just any old pirate, like a burnt CDR of the much revered PlayStation title. No, this was something different.
A Chinese company called ShenZhen Nanjing Technology developed a “port” of Final Fantasy 7 for the Famicom, which is the Japanese Nintendo. The game itself was actually released for a Famicom clone called the SUBOR. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: aeris, aerith, chinese pirate, cloud, Famicom, final fantasy 7, finds, nintendo, pirate, sephiroth, square, square-enix, squaresoft
Posted in Art of Collecting, finds | 3 Comments »
May 27, 2009 by Nathan
I got some pretty sweet finds over the past few weeks, so I am chronicling them all here in a super sized post. Let’s begin…
I finally got a complete copy of Final Fantasy 6 for the Super Famicom. This game has such beautiful box art, I wish the NTSC releases followed suit. I also picked up a complete copy of Super Mario World (which are quite difficult to find, considering that the game was packed in sans-box with 80% of Super Nintendo’s sold. I would say the overall condition is about 7/10. The manual is a little busted up, but thankfully it is indistinguishable from the manual that came with the SNES bundle and is extremely common. I also picked up Chibi Robo for the Gamecube, which I had never played before, but have always heard good things about. Lastly I picked up a CIB copy of Robot Versus The Terminator for the SNES. Although a pretty average game (compared to the Genesis version, which rules), but the totally awesome feature of the SNES version is the box. Read the rest of this entry »
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May 26, 2009 by Nathan
I know that there were no new posts last week, but rest assured that I will have something new by tomorrow or Thursday. I have some great finds and other stuff to post, including my copy of FanGamer’s glorious Mother 3 handbook that came in the mail last week. If you have seen pictures online, than I can confirm that in person it looks every bit as stunning. Seriously, it’s better than 90% of professionally authored, licensed strategy guides I own. Check the pics below (from the fangamer.com. I will have a full review on Friday.
Order the Mother 3 handbook (for only $20!) here. See you later in the week.
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May 13, 2009 by Nathan
This past Monday my brother and had a chance to see the spectacle that is Video Games Live. I highly recommend seeing this show if it ever comes through your city. I wasn’t too high on the Halo or Need for Speed: Undercover portions of the set, but everything else was absolutely amazing. I especially liked the Metal Gear Solid selection, which was fucking amazing to hear played live by a full symphony orchestra, but the best part of the entire show in my opinion was the Chrono Trigger / Cross medley. If you thought that the SNES classic had some awesome music, than the live version will blow your mind. The show ended with two encores, One Winged Angel and Castlevania, both of which were brutally awesome. After the show it was announced that there would be a meet and greet in the lobby. So…
Being the total nerd that I am, I even went back home after the show and grabbed the pack-in poster from my copy of the highly underrated Genesis masterpiece of carnage and blood lust that is RoboCop Versus The Terminator. I rushed back to the theater (which is only a few blocks from my house) just in time to wait in line for an hour at the meet and greet. But it was all worth it:
Oh yeah. Tommy Tallarico, the co-creator and MC of Video Games Live. He was also the composer and soundtrack director of such games as Color a Dinosaur, Anotehr World, Prince of Persia, and of course, RoboCop Versus TheTerminator (which he co-composed with Mark Miller, whom composed the music for the Toe Jam and Earl games). I am such a nerd that I couldn’t go to sleep without going back and getting my poster signed. This baby is mos def frame bound. Now if I can just convince my wife to let me hang it in our living room…
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May 11, 2009 by Nathan
This is a chronicle of my quest to own my 15 favorite Nintendo Entertainment System game complete in the box (CIB)… Play catch up on my progress by checking out the following posts:
The First Post
Update #1
Update #2
The second I opened the package that came last Friday I had a flood of nostalgia well up and smack me right in the face. So many memories… I recounted my experience of receiving Final Fantasy as a kid in my Insert-O-Rama article last week, so I won’t rehash it here. I will say that I was just as excited as I remember being when I first got my hands on the game when I was 9 years old. A huge plus was that the copy I got 22 years later is only a couple grades below my sealed copy was in the summer of 1991. Read the rest of this entry »
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May 7, 2009 by Nathan
I am in the midst of doing a spring cleaning/reorganization of my game room, and while I was going through all my games I realized that I have quite a few high value games. My collecting philosophy has never been to collect games for the sole reason that they are valuable. I prefer to buy games that are not only playable, but games that are actually good games. Bubble Bobble 2 for NES may be worth $500 complete, but I have absolutely no interest in owning it because frankly, I hated the original Bubble Bobble. That’s not to say that there aren’t really goods games that are worth a lot of money, and I seem to have a nice little stash of ‘em. Sure, I may not have a collective of games worth $400 or $800 a piece, but as a byproduct of acquiring only awesome video games, I think they are pretty decent. Here are a few and their estimated Ebay values, in no particular order.
Suikoden 2 – PS1, Released Sept. 1999 – Approx. Value: $140
This one is a favorite in my collection. The best game in the entire series, Suikoden 2’s high value can be attributed to an extremely low print-run, a lack of additional printings, and the success of the PS2 Suikoden sequels. Anyway you cut it, this is perhaps the rarest and most valuable North American PlayStation game. My copy is in mint condition. Seriously, I don’t think that there has ever even been a finger print on the media side of the disc and the manual has never been removed from the jewel case. Beautiful. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: chrono trigger, cib, dragon, Dragon Quest, dragon warrior 4, genesis, nes, nintendo, playstation, ps1, Sega, snes, streets of rage 3, suikoden 2, super nintendo, valuable games, video games
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May 5, 2009 by Nathan
There once was a time when the RPG was not all that popular outside of Japan. Sure there was the Ultima series, but that was more for the hardcore computing crowd, with their fancy thousand dollar PC’s. It wasn’t until the late 80’s with the North American release of SEGA’s Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System that the home video game console got it’s first taste of the role playing game. The perception was that the games were too complicated and challenging for North American video game players, and as such game publishers tried their damnedest to give us all the help they could.
Handbooks, maps, monster charts, and tip sheets were among the shwag included right in the game box throughout the 8 and 16-bit era of console role playing games.
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Tags: chrono trigger, Dragon Quest, dragon warrior, final fantasy, handbook, inserts, manual, maps, nintendo, Role Playing Games, rpg, snes, super nintendo, zelda
Posted in Art of Collecting, Featured Article | 1 Comment »
April 30, 2009 by Nathan
A chance occurrence today resulted in one of my greatest finds ever, both personally and collection wise. I took a close up shot of the price tag before I peeled it off, because it such an unbelievable price. I had the afternoon off work because my wife and I had a couple appointments with our real estate agent to look at some houses, and we had about 40 minutes of time to kill between showings, so we stopped at the Salvation Army Thrift Store halfway between destinations just to kill time. And low and behold sitting on a shelf in the housewares section was this beauty:
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