phart010

16 hours ago, Tanooki said:

That's still a hell of a nice find.  If you decide to part with it maybe I could make it complete.  I take it it's the 3.5" disk version of the game?

I wouldn’t mind. I believe it was the 3.5” but not 100% sure. I know it’s not from the CD era, but don’t know if they did 5” floppy versions of maniac Mansion. Do you have a trades list?

I got a big box of maniac mansion on pc. I don’t collect that stuff, but it was at a flea market with a bunch of junk so I picked it up for cheap.

Looks pretty complete except missing the disks. I was thinking to keep the NES cart inside but now I’m thinking that’s kind of a dumb idea.

I don’t have an issue with reproductions. All legalities aside, my main issue is with counterfeiting. Counterfeiting is the act of deception when you try to pass something off as authentic when it is actually a fake. In my opinion reproductions should not be designed to look like originals so that there is no confusion. If you want to make reproductions, fine, but use different label art or change the color of the shell or something so it is obvious that it’s not original 

1 hour ago, Lincoln said:

that is bonkers. no pity for lrg on that. how could you possibly think that's going to be profitable at they scale they do business.

I think this is one of those cases where they wanted to do it no matter what but then tried to build a business case after the fact just to self justify the decision.

My brother bought a Tesla Model 3 with the pretext that he’d rent it out and it would pay for itself. We ran the numbers beforehand on a spreadsheet and the math didn’t add up. Even assuming the most optimistic set of conditions would perpetually recur month after month, we calculated that he would narrowly miss earning enough to make the monthly payment+insurance. The math hurt his head so much that he just went ahead and just ordered the car. 

If I’m not mistaken, the guy who owns LR is also a collector (With a lot of money, apparently).

11 hours ago, MiamiSlice said:

Thing is, with systems like Super Nintendo, N64, etc, Nintendo was the only entity that could manufacture the actual cartridges. No one else was allowed to print them. If you made your own, you had to manufacture your own shells, PCB's, etc. and they would never be identical to the official ones. So it's an official, sanctioned printing, but it's not an official cart. It's made to the best standards that an unofficial cart can be, just like the 30th anniversary Mega Man X cart from iam8bit (also official, sanctioned by Capcom). 

So I think the reason people call them bootlegs is they are not official carts. Kind of like the licensed vs. unlicensed NES games debate. 

To throw a wrench into things, there were some NES games like Smash TV by Acclaim, which were official and licensed, yet Acclaim manufactured the cartridge due to special agreements with Nintendo  

37 minutes ago, Lincoln said:

@phart010do you have a source on the $100k figure? That is an absurd amount to dump into something like this. You're talking like 10s of thousands of units sold to break even

There was an article where they interviewed the owner of Limited Run. If you search for it you should find it.

Just as an FYI if turns out that it was 50k assume I had a brain fart

Edit: It was actually $150k. Here’s the Kotaku article

https://www.google.com/amp/s/kotaku.com/two-guys-making-new-sega-cd-jewel-cases-are-in-an-accid-1825364528/amp

I bought the Amazon cases back in the day and read the interviews with limited Run as this was unfolding.. Here’s what happened:

Limited Run and the guy from Alaska were independently doing it at the same time without knowledge of each other. The guy in Alaska came to market first with a made in China product. Limited Run found out and was very upset because they just spent like $100k on precision tooling for a near perfect mold from an American company. 

LR wanted to price them at a premium, but they felt that they couldn’t do it anymore because this guy had already established  the market price. But apparently his quality was very poor, the cases didn’t lock close or even hold together (I would know, bought them).

They ultimately ditched the idea of selling the cases, but since they had already paid for tooling they are using them for some special editions. There are a handful of LR special collectors edition that have a Saturn style case. These are typically games that were envisioned as Saturn style retro games

The only practical thing to do is reproduction media. I know.. I don’t like this idea either, but just being a realist.

I talked with the guy from Limited Run at their pop up shop. I said I think they should reproduce Saturn games. Sega is on board to license their stuff to smaller companies. But apparently the special machinery that made the Saturn disc swivel pattern is lost in history. LR would have to re-engineer a way to make the Saturn swivel to reproduce these discs (Sega isn’t gonna do it, they just want to give licensing rights in return for free money). Then there’s the issue of having enough demand for a given title.

The right way to do it would be to offer the lImiteds and CIBs as they do, but then also offer a low cost “disc only” option for like $10. I bet for some less popular titles they would do good with “disc only” runs (with alternate reproduction disc art). This would be an option for people that already have CIB’s but their disc has succumbed to disc rot, scratches or cracking

I never had a dog but I always thought if I had one I’d name him Turbo

On 2/18/2020 at 8:44 PM, RegularGuyGamer said:

I hear the argument I just don't get the mental gymnastics a person needs to do to enjoy fake boxes. Like, do you print Michael Jordan rookie cards? Do you go to home Depot and lacker up some cedar and tell people it was from the old floor of the staple center? Do you go down to China Town and rock fake a Rolex and Gucci? 

It comes down to having it and just looking like you have it. Printing a box and throwing a game in it isn't special. It's embarrassing. Would you buy a Pontiac fiero and put a Lamborghini body kit on it too?

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/288230444877229667/

I SO wanted to have a Fiero with a Lamborghini body kit back in the day

46 minutes ago, Bubbapauls said:

Most people worried about this type of situation donate items with a Donation Agreement Contract where the donor retains the rights to the donated items until the museum no longer uses them or they purchase them from the owner. So, if the museum goes under the item would go back to you or your heirs.

 

I wonder how practically enforceable something like that would be. If the museum didn’t uphold their end of the agreement and they went under, you have no one to go after.

Not to mention that the act of donating the  item means that you no longer want the responsibility of the item anymore. It’s not that you don’t care about the item anymore, you just want to be assured that it has been transferred into good hands, hopefully for perpetuity

I’ve been thinking a lot about this topic lately. I have an item in my collection that I believe to be pretty rare. I’ve never seen another one before or even any information about it to research it. At some point when I am done enjoying collecting, I had always thought that it would be better off at a video game museum for preservation purposes.

However, I got to thinking about whether video game museums (or even any private museums for that matter) are as bulletproof as we’d like to think they are. For example let’s say someone has a private museum and ,God forbid, they were to pass away. All of that persons belongings at that point become inheritance to their family and would probably go up for private sale at an estate auction or something like that. So basically if I donated a valuable item for what I thought to be a good cause in this scenario, ultimately it would eventually become private profit in the hands of the museum curators surviving family. In that case I (and the item) would have been better off just selling the item to someone who would take good care of it.

Even in the case of a more organizational type of private museum, with a board of several people managing the organization, if there were some sort of disagreement or falling out among the management and the organization were to get dissolved, what would happen with the items? Lacking government funding, what if the organization were not making enough money to pay the rent on the museum. What would happen to the items in the museum if the organization were evicted from the building?

I want to buy all of the Dragon Quest games on DS. Would like to buy them complete, minty good condition and preferably all of them together as a set.

The games I want are:

Dragon Quest IV

Dragon Quest V

Dragon Quest VI

Dragon Quest IX

I also have a bunch of Limited Runs for switch, might be willing to do trades

4 hours ago, Sumez said:

Mega Man Unlimited is a fan game (though Capcom gladly approves of those with few compromises), so I wouldn't say that counts.

That said, I didn't know about this, so it's pretty interesting.

It’s a fan game. But if nobody told you that, you would have never known

I remember using this on international flights to Japan in the 90s. Did not know it was in any way affiliated with Nintendo. 

I can tell you that it was incredibly laggy, and button presses often did not register. The menus were convoluted and difficult to navigate. And with a 15+ hour flight, there was A LOT of time to mess with it, I can confirm for certain that there were no Nintendo games to be played. It was just the same old boring puzzle games that they always had on these things

I’ve done intermittent fasting. It’s real good. It’s hard to do for the first few days , but once you’ve gotten past that point it’s actually not that hard to keep the mind off of food.

I wonder if @Bronty would trade the Contra painting for it one for one ?

2 hours ago, arch_8ngel said:

Those prices above (from another forum where someone evidently had price sheet access) were apparently minimum orders of a million units.

I'm sure that means that the LRG guys are paying WAY more per unit for their relatively small orders.

People often give publishers a hard time over decisions over seemingly negligible amounts of money.

“Why didn’t they just pay the extra 50 cents to put it on a bigger cartridge size?”

But when you look at it from the publishers perspective if they are going to sell a million copies, that’s 0.50 x 1,000,000 = $500,000 that they are just giving away. Or if they are going to sell 5 million copies, then it’s $2.5 million dollars.

I don’t think that they take into account that some people will decide to not buy based on the media size that they use. And realistically, the percentage of buyers that would consciously choose to not buy just because they are pissed over not having the complete game on the cartridge is probably pretty low.

Do democratic contenders announce their running mates before getting nominated or do they typically wait until after?

 I could see the benefit in teaming up with someone strategic before getting nominated in order to win more popularity to win the primaries. But it could also be a bad move because someone might be a highly desirable pick for Vice President regardless of who they are running with so some people may want to wait until the air is clear before committing to partnering 

Yang just dropped out.. Dang

1 hour ago, TDIRunner said:

It's funny because while I consider Terminator 2 to be one of the greatest movies of all time, it's really the only one I've ever enjoyed.  I want to see the new one, but I have a hard time believing that it will be anything near 2.

It’s in redbox now, go check it out and discuss here

This is like saying Harry Potter movies are not JK Rowling movies because she wasn’t involved in the adaptation. Or Stephen King movies are not Stephen King movies because he’s just a writer.

Cameron wrote the story for this movie and owned it. He probably can’t handle the stress of directing anymore because he’s old.

21 minutes ago, peg said:

Terminator ended with part 2.  Everything after that (without Cameron) was studio budget fanfiction trash, similar to Disney Star Wars.  Yes, Cameron did have his name attached to this mess, but if you read any of the interviews, he really didn't have much to do with it.  He never even went to the set to see what they were doing and described his approach to producing as "hands off" lol.  If you know anything about Cameron, he is definitely not a "hands off" person when it comes to his movies, he is known to be a hard ass and basically pisses everyone off he works with in order to get what he wants.

TLDR: James Cameron had basically nothing to do with this movie other than pimping his name out to advertise it.

What are you talking about. He wrote the story

51 minutes ago, CodysGameRoom said:

 

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The John Connor bit at the beginning didn't bother me. I actually thought it was cool and also it's pretty ballsy to do. And it solves the problem of constantly having someone else play John.

I personally loved all the Arnold stuff. It mostly brought much needed levity to the film and was quite enjoyable for me. 

—————————-

I feel the John Connor part was Cameron’s way of saying FU to Terminator 3. It introduced an immediate plot line conflict between Terminator 3 and Dark Fate and challenges you to question which storyline is canon. They can’t coexist. So I have to pick one or the other. And I’m obviously going to pick the storyline that Cameron wrote

I was born in the 80’s, so Terminator 2 was a big deal growing up. By the time I was in college, Terminator 3 came out but it wasn’t done by James Cameron, and the movie just was not that good. I felt like Terminator was just ruined from that point on.

Just saw Terminator Dark Fate last night. I had my reservations, because I felt that this one might be excessively ‘woke’ but I figured I should at least give it a try since Cameron was involved. I have to say that this movie was pretty good. Given that the lead roles are all females, in what was traditionally a machismo franchise, I had to ponder about this over night. The reality of the world we are living in today is an increasingly female empowered one, so as a reflection of reality in the current world situation and even into the future, this concept is actually quite appropriately realistic.

Anyhow, I just wanted to reflect on the movie and have some discussion. I thought the movie was pretty good. I know some people these days are not interested in seeing it based on the cover, but in my opinion it is a worthy sequel to Terminator 2. Moreso than Terminator 3 was.

More on that. It’s funny how Cameron just took ownership of the series and said Terminator 3 never happened because it wasn’t his movie. This movie takes place directly following the events of Terminator 2 and disregards Terminator 3’s plot significance entirely. I like that. I wish that game developers would do this sometimes and just ditch plot lines that they screwed up on and pretend that they never happened. Personally I wasn’t a fan of Metroid Fusions storyline (I liked the game) and I feel that Nintendo should just pretend like Samus never got infected with the X virus.