AmandaCathedral's (Fill the Shelf) NES Collection Progress!! (07/63)

[AmandaCathedral | 148]

Hello again! I mentioned in my welcome thread that I'm now in a good spot in my life, and I can now do something I've always wanted to, which is fill my small childhood bookshelf completely full of boxed NES games! The shelf in question can fit 63 games if they're in plastic protectors, so it's going to be slow going. I've been starting with the really early first party Nintendo games that had the nice multi-coloured game logos on black background, and more importantly the adorable pixel art on the front covers. The first NES game I ever owned was Popeye, which is why pixel art Olive Oyl is my profile picture.

I only started about a month ago, and lucked into a pretty remarkable find at a nearby game store. I picked up a boxed copy of Urban Champion for $100, and best of all the tab on the back hasn't been touched at all! When I started looking for these early games I wasn't going to fret too hard about the tabs being in nice shape, but seeing as how this was the first game I found for my new collection, I was really happy about it. Urban Champion is a game I really enjoy, and it's always been sad to me that it gets so much undeserved hate.

The second game I found at a different game store, and is one of my favourites of the early days, which is Gyromite! I had an NES Robot as a kid, and I've never liked that thing due to how many times a spinning gyro would fall off the platform and scrape my hand. ROB the Robot is no buddy of mine since it's a dangerous toy!

The way I play Gyromite is more fun! Since the point of ROB is to push buttons on the second controller, I just do it myself! The game is too easy that way, so I came up with my own rules to make the game more interesting without ROB. In the "Feed the Smicks" challenge as I like to call it, you can't kill any Smicks, (the green guys), and you have to feed all the turnips to them as well. You can't clear a stage until they've finished eating and gone on their way again, and since enemies have a habit of screen wrapping in Gyromite, the level is invalidated if a Smick screen wraps, forcing you to exit the stage and go back in.

It makes the game into more of a genuine puzzle platformer, and some of the levels become really complicated this way. Level 18 in particular is the hardest stage in the game to not kill any Smicks, as you have to juggle two of them between pillars to keep them from falling in a hole. You need to get past that hole to grab the final dynamite, but to do so you need to lower a pillar that will squish any poor Smicks that fall into the hole! It's quite a puzzle.

Lastly I have Popeye and Duck Hunt which I have less to say about, except that Popeye was the first NES game I ever owned, and holds a special place in my heart. It's such a cute and charming game, and whenever I see some hideous M rated game from the modern era, I think even more fondly of how sweet and innocent NES Popeye is. It really is a timeless classic. I was able to clear three loops once, but that's the best I've ever done.

In case you're wondering, the top of the Popeye box isn't torn at all, but the tab has been completely removed. It's not an issue to me, but I know some collectors wouldn't like it. I was just happy to find the game at a price I liked. 

That's all I have so far, but I'll be posting updates as I get more games, and I'll be looking in other people's threads to see what people are collecting! I hope to have some fun here, and I hope you'll keep an eye out for posts from me! See ya soon!

Edited February 27, 2021 by AmandaCathedral
Updated the thread title.

[croagunk | 798]

Nice finds!

[guitarzombie | 924]

Thats a very healthy way of collecting IMO.  I only had space for a large shelf and that was about it.  So to me it was quality vs quantity.  Prevented me from buying stuff I really didn't want unless it was a stupid deal or rare.

[MrWunderful | 2,927]

 

Great start.  What else are you looking for CIB?

 

CIB NES is the pinnacle of retro game collecting too, so smart choice!

[AmandaCathedral | 148]

I'm looking for a lot of things, and I'll probably post a more cohesive list some time in the future.  For now my gaming budget is gone for the month, so I'm trying not to worry too much about what I'm missing while I have no gaming money. Though I know it's next to impossible to totally block it from one's mind.

I'm not aiming for every pixel art, early NES game, but there are more of them I'm after. As for some of the third party stuff, Batman, Ninja Gaiden, and Ninja Gaiden II are high on my list. I also like Ninja Gaiden III, but I don't think I like it enough compared to the first two to justify the higher cost.

I don't want to tell everything I'm after though. Otherwise there would be no mystery to the thread.

I'll say though that some of the other early games I'm looking for are Hogan's Alley, Donkey Kong Jr., Balloon Fight, Mario Bros., Golf, Excitebike, and a couple of others. I'm hoping to get those first, but availability of the pricey ones combined with only having so much money to spend might make it take months.

I'll keep the thread updated as I buy games, so keep an eye out if you're interested.

[Dr. Morbis | 2,088]

Great start to the collection!  Are you Canadian, by chance, because the Mattel versions you have pictured are what I grew up with back in the '80's... it's all coming back to me now...

[AmandaCathedral | 148]

Observant!

Yup, for the first party Nintendo games, I'm trying to get the Canadian variants. I'm always happy when Canada actually gets acknowledged by video game companies, so I love the Nintendo Canadian prints.

[AmandaCathedral | 148]

Some mail arrived for me yesterday! This was a bundle I bought for $100 Canadian, and I'm really happy about it! (Not pictured is a boxed Gauntlet II that came with it that I intend to sell off)

Kung Fu is obviously for the Canadian pixel art set, and it's nice to get another good tab on the back! The cover is somewhat sun faded, but I'm not terribly picky about condition outside of squashing. It's a nice addition to the set, and the fact that it came with two other games I was planning to get made it worth it.

I have a soft spot for Hudson even though their games tend to be pretty low budget. They have a knack for disguising that by getting other developers to make games for them to publish, such as the Turbografx 16 classic called "Super Star Soldier".

Hudson fans in the loop though are aware of their games of questionable quality, but Milon's Secret Castle is a game I genuinely love, and feel is sadly underrated. As a kid I only played the Game Boy version which is in a perpetual state of frame rate slowdown, so I'm really looking forward to when I can set a day aside to solve all the riddles of the castle again in glorious colour at a proper frame rate.

Starship Hector is the last game of the bundle, and it's the one I'm the most happy to have gotten. It's impossible to describe what a nightmare this game feels like to play. Enemies are weirdly designed and zip around in wildly unconventional ways, which makes the game feel really stressful and creepy in a way other shoot 'em ups can't replicate.

So far I've only managed to get past the first stage, and unlike Milon's Secret Castle which offers a continue code in the manual, there's no such luxury in Starship Hector. It's only six stages long, but it's still going to be a brutal game to try and finish.

That's all for today! I have one more game in the mail for me, and then it will probably be nearly a month before I can buy any other boxed games. Nobody said this would be a fast process, and honestly I wouldn't want it to be.

Edited February 27, 2021 by AmandaCathedral

[T-Pac | 7,537]

@AmandaCathedral - sick NES collection! I'm also a fan of the pixel-art graphics for those early Nintendo releases. Those are commonly referred to as NES 'black box games'. Might be helpful to know in case you're looking into them further online in collector forums like this. I'm excited to see more of your updates down the line!

-CasualCart

[AmandaCathedral | 148]

1 hour ago, CasualCart said:

@AmandaCathedral - sick NES collection! I'm also a fan of the pixel-art graphics for those early Nintendo releases. Those are commonly referred to as NES 'black box games'. Might be helpful to know in case you're looking into them further online in collector forums like this.

Thank you!

I know they're generally called the black box games, but seeing as how Kid Icarus and Rad Racer are two of my absolute favourite NES games, (and high on my priority list) I've always included the silver ones as part of the set. I tend to just call the full set of 33 games the "NES Pixel Art" set.

The fact that the boxes are black isn't even their most distinguishing feature, so I always found the terminology to be strange.

Edited February 28, 2021 by AmandaCathedral

[AmandaCathedral | 148]

Hello again! I have one more addition to the collection, and I likely won't get any more for a while after that.

I should start out by saying that I decided to sell off Starship Hector, as it's a pretty awful game actually. I got a steal on it with the lot of four it came in, so by selling the Gauntlet II and Starship Hector, I pretty much made all of my money back and in the end got a boxed Kung Fu and Milon's Secret Castle for about $25.

I also sold it because I spotted a "Box Only" listing for something important on my high priorities list, and I figured It'd be worth it to sell Hector to get money for that instead. (I won't ruin the surprise just yet!)

Today I'm adding another pixel art game to the collection, which is BASEBALL!!

Admittedly not one of Nintendo's best games, but when you get a close ball game going, there's still a lot of fun to be had with it.

I wasn't planning on picking this one up so soon, but the low ball offer I sent on ebay actually got accepted, so it was well worth it to try!

It turns out to have been a smart move too, as searching for the pixel art games that are just the name of the sport such as "Soccer" and "Tennis" is really frustrating, and "Baseball" brings up the most unwanted results.

That's about it for me this month aside from one more box by itself, so while the counter at the top of the topic stays the same, I have a much nicer line up of games to play until the next time I can buy more. As a final note, here's a shot of the pixel art games I have so far.

I'm going to try and get as many of these as is reasonably possible, but I do have a list of ones that I genuinely think are great, and are higher priority. I'll put a list of those below as well. The ones I want the most are the following.

Popeye, Donkey Kong Jr., Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros., Urban Champion, Balloon Fight, Duck Hunt, Hogan's Alley, Excitebike, Wrecking Crew, Golf, Soccer, Slalom, Rad Racer, Gyromite, Kid Icarus.

Hopefully I can fill them out sooner than later, but since I'm being picky and looking for Canadian prints, it could take a long time due to availability. I'll keep an eye out for them always, but I may start picking up some third party classics next month instead if I can't find any of them.

Until next time!