DaddyMulk

Bumping this because I have an orphan Registration Card that matches none of the above. Fan Club type rather than Contest. System order (Question 3) matches the card for Splatterhouse 2, as does the Namco logo on the reverse side, but it doesn’t have the game’s name printed in the lower right. Any ideas? 
 

I preordered my copy a few weeks before release and picked it up on 6/23/91. Mine is South SF, Printed in Japan.

Sonic & Knuckles had a unique tray because it also has a larger cartridge hole than standard trays to hold the bulkier cart. Boxes for S&K by themselves aren’t too hard to find on eBay.

I always assumed this was a later release (and thus wouldn’t have the Thriller music). Do all of them have Thriller? I have both my launch copy (Thriller music) and a copy of the later revision, and both have color manuals/the labels going the correct way.

Warspeed on Sega Genesis. Compared to anything else published by Accolade (or their Ballistic label), there seem to be a disproportionate number of these out there that are either trashed or covered in rental stickers.

Doreen (mentioned earlier by Dain) isn’t real, right? I mean, this must have been written by a bot, right? https://www.watagames.com/learn/blog/

20 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

Sorry just went by your 'Uh Mario' comment and went with it.  That didn't feel like an explanation, more like humor.

No worries. The second one was an attempt at humor, but yeah, mixing actual info with the jokes can be deadly.

On 8/9/2021 at 10:46 AM, Tanooki said:

Japanese name is why dude. Area 88.  But romanized in Japanese print it's E-ri-a (Area) Hachii juu(80) Hachi(8).  Hence E8.

As a translator with 20 years of experience, I’m well aware of this. I was trying to explain it to the non-native speakers out there. 

UN Squadron: SNS-E8-USA (“Area 88”, which begins with a short E sound of sorts in Japanese).

With UM, I assume they’d run out of letters at the point and didn’t know how to abbreviate it until some kind soul said, “Uh…Mario?”

A couple of interesting mistranslations I don’t think many people are aware of (as a translator, I love this stuff):

*Completing Super Monkey Ball without dying gives you a message that says, “You didn’t miss a thing!” “Miss” (a borrowed word pronounced more or less the same in Japanese) often refers to dying in video games. The intended meaning of the source text was “You didn’t lose any lives!”

*”I always wanted a thing called ‘Tuna Sashimi’!” from the opening section of Darius II: According to an interview with someone who worked on the game, whoever translated this line for them kind of botched it due to a lack of context. What they wanted to  say was more akin to, “Let’s make sashimi out of ‘em!”

Unrelated to translation, but something I’d like to know even more about: A friend of mine interviewed Chris Tang for his podcast a while back, and one thing he mentioned briefly is that a lot of Sega of America’s early production runs of games (when they started shifting manufacturing over here) were actually done at Tengen’s facilities where he worked at the time, including a pretty big chunk of launch copies of Sonic 2.

15 hours ago, LeatherRebel5150 said:

Aren’t almost all Genesis PCB’s the same except for a handful like Virtua Racing and like Grindstormer?

I wouldn’t say so. Sega didn’t manufacture all of the third party games on its system, and not even all of their first-party stuff was manufactured using their facilities. Off the top of my head, Tengen, Namco, Konami, EA, Accolade, Acclaim and Majesco all manufactured some/all of their own carts.

11 hours ago, goldenpp72 said:

The one in question I am looking for is Fatal Fury 2

Here you go. Looks like mine was made around May, 1994. 

My phone? I took pictures of all of my PCBs last year (roughly 850 or so counting variants). I did it mostly for my own research, but I’ve thought about setting up a site someday with photos and the like.

But if you have a board in particular in mind, just post it here, and I’ll be happy to compare it to what I’ve got on file.

5 minutes ago, Dr. Morbis said:

I'd say having nothing to do with the development of a game other than to say that the main character has to "get rid of the hair" would be considered by most to be pretty uninvolved...

I actually went to a seminar conducted by Steve Golson at Replay FX in Pittsburgh  in 2015 that was a one hour lecture about Ms. Pac-Man from the start of GCC to the release of the arcade game in Feb 82, and he never once mentioned Namco of Japan having anything to do with it, or the comment about the hair, but hey, maybe it just slipped his mind at the time

Right, the development was 95% handled by GCC. But up until this interview, it was a fairly commonly-held belief that Midway released Ms. Pac-Man without Namco’s knowledge.

On 4/21/2021 at 10:38 PM, Dr. Morbis said:

You also have it listed as being developed by Namco.  Are you aware that the game was not released in Japan, and not only did Namco have nothing to do with it's development, they didn't even know it was happening?

The myth about Namco being unaware/uninvolved was actually debunked several years ago in an interview with the creators conducted by Benj Edwards (“The MIT Dropouts Who Created Ms. Pac-Man: A 35th-Anniversary Oral History”).

Here’s part of it:

On 4/16/2021 at 6:25 PM, DaddyMulk said:

Awesome, thanks! 9538 = Made one week after my numberless copy. 
 

We’d need more data to be sure (or someone cracking open a sealed copy), but we’ve now got two copies of the numberless one made about 6 months after the game’s initial release.

Just a quick update: I obtained another copy of the numberless WSB95 CIB. It has the same chip dates as my other copy/isacin’s. Again, I’m hesitant to jump to conclusions with limited data, but it certainly looks like this batch came after the numbered ones.

On 4/3/2021 at 9:00 PM, isacin said:

Hi, @DaddyMulk. Here are a couple of pictures of my World Series´95 copy. Hope it helps !

 

Awesome, thanks! 9538 = Made one week after my numberless copy. 
 

On 4/5/2021 at 12:21 PM, supergamboy said:

Fascinating, so I'd always thought that the version without '95 was the first print.  But you guys are thinking they might have dropped the '95 in a later print to keep selling it past 1995? How shitty, haha.

We’d need more data to be sure (or someone cracking open a sealed copy), but we’ve now got two copies of the numberless one made about 6 months after the game’s initial release.

I just obtained a copy of the World Series Baseball ‘95 variant missing the ‘95, and I noticed something that I haven’t seen documented elsewhere: The “95” has also been removed from the review quote on the box from GameFan. I’ve seen this variant cited as a misprint before, but this makes me think that the title change was deliberate.

Also, mine wasn’t a sealed copy, but the cart manufacturing date was later than my other copy (9537, versus 9511 on my regular release). And box swapping happens of course, but if anyone with the missing text variant could check the PCB on theirs as well, it might help to solidify that this was a later print. 

I list stuff all the time on eBay (nothing graded; I’m not touching that gonzo side of the market) and look at a few different things when pricing what I’ve got: Past sales on eBay, the condition of what I have relative to both sold items and what’s available currently, what supply and demand looks like currently, etc. It sounds complicated, but I can often find that sweet spot to sell my wares quickly and maximize my profit.

I might use one of the tracking services as a guide if there is no past sales data (and if there are none of what I’m selling currently listed), but they seem to be lacking lately, especially when it comes to individual components (I sell a lot of manuals). ProTip: If a site tracks individual components and the total values of these for a certain game is less than half of what a CIB copy sells for, then their component data might be far off from reality.

I have no idea how many stores actually did this, but a local place here did rent some Mega Drive, SFC and Japanese Neo Geo stuff.
 

I also used to rent anime tapes in the early 90s from a local Japanese grocery store that were recordings of television broadcasts (completely on the up and up, I assure you!). I’m sure some of these types of establishments rented Japanese games as well.

Too many to list them all, but here are a few of my favorites:

Arcade Cabs:

$60 for a pretty minty Gauntlet that I mentioned in another thread, thanks to the storage site owner just wanting it gone.

$1 (yes, $1) for a Nintendo Vs. two-sided cab with a dead monitor on one side (the side they showed during the auction, LOL) that had been converted to JAMMA. It had a Wild West C.O.W. Boys of Moo Messa PCB inside that I flipped for around $200. (I got a second Vs. cab that day with the same board and good monitors for around $75 and still have both of those)

eBay:

I started buying the Genesis games I didn’t have but had always wanted around 2008. High on my list was that weird looking Link to the Past-type game from Atlus. I snagged a minty CIB copy for $39, which seemed like a lot back then. But it’s a pretty cool game I guess. I wonder how much it goes for today? /s

I won an auction about five years ago for a mixed lot of Genesis games that looked like they might not all be ordinary consumer products. And, sure enough, it included four prototypes and two Accolade Test Cartridges (the same as the games released AFAIK, but still pretty cool). I made enough selling back the non-prototype stuff to recoup what I spent to win the auction.

Pricing Errors:

About 10 years ago, I found a boxed Dreamcast broadband adapter at a local gaming convention for $8. I’m pretty sure they didn’t check the package and just assumed it was the regular modem (which was never sold separately to begin with AFAIK).

Around the same time, I found a 32X Pitfall cart for $2 at a game store (the price sticker said “Genesis”, so it was likely what they had listed as the price for that version of the game).

Miscellaneous:

One of my favorite purchases from my time in Japan was a pretty sizable PC Engine collection I got at a flea market (around 1999).

I saw all these games lined up from a distance in a big cellophane-wrapped package and went over to take a look. It was priced at around $400, and I was already about to take out my wallet when the guy running the booth said, “How about 30,000 yen?” ($300) Well, yeah!

There wasn’t anything too rare or valuable in there, but it was a solid collection for that price: A boxed Core Grafx, a briefcase unit (original PC Engine + CD-ROM in their dock), a PC Engine GT, lots of controllers, and around 80 CIB games (lots of Shmups and very little junk). I’m pretty sure I still have every piece from that sale to this day.

I have plenty  more the share at some point, but right now, this thread needs some Mega Drive love. 

My Snake’s Revenge has an (R) and should be a first print: I haunted my local Toys R Us until this one finally came out, paid $43 for it and got ticked off when they marked it down to $20 less than six months later. 

As stated elsewhere, I’m trying to complete my collection of Genesis manuals. I have 60 to go, but I’m going to start here with 20 of the lower-value ones I’m looking for and will update as I cross some of these off my list. 
 

I’m willing to buy these at fair market value and in good condition, but I also have plenty to trade: I have several hundred spare Genesis manuals and cases/boxes, several hundred SNES manuals, and around 100 NES manuals. So if you have any of the following but are hunting for some of these yourself, just let me know what you’re looking for and maybe we can work out a trade.

The List:

F-117 Night Storm

The Duel: Test Drive II

Fun ‘n Games

Warpspeed

Deadly Moves

Lawnmower Man 

DJ Boy

Klax

Rampart

Sylvester and Tweety in Cagey Capers

Trampoline Terror

Math Blaster

B.O.B.

Sesame Street Counting Cafe

The King of Monsters 2

Pink Goes To Hollywood

Shadow of the Beast II

Bimini Run

Skitchin’

World Heroes

About 10 years ago, I visited a store near me that I frequented. This place was alright, but it wasn’t really an enthusiasts’ store: More like a VHS/DVD/CD outlet that also happened to carry games. Their retro game prices were slightly high, but they balanced this out by almost always offering Buy 2 Get 1 Free.

And they had something truly amazing on this day: 10 sealed copies each of Sonic 3 (clamshell) and McDonald’s Treasure Land Adventure. But wait, it gets better: For whatever reason, they’d priced them at their going rate for used copies of the same games! My recollection is that Sonic was $12 and McD $9. But wait, it gets even better: Yes, B2G1F applied to these as well.

So I wound up buying all of them for maybe $175 or so (apologies: I don’t recall the exact amount, but it was a bit under $200). Unfortunately, this was me spending money I barely had, and I had bills to pay at the time, so I immediately began selling them off to recoup my investment.

I held on to about half of them over the next 10 years and would sell a couple off here or there to shore up my finances. Today I have only one of each left, along with a copy of McD that I opened for my personal collection (it is a great feeling to have that on my shelf and know that it’s only been played a few times, and only by me).

In the end, I probably made my investment back tenfold, if not more, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. But obviously I’d have made far more from them if I’d managed to hold on to them until this past year. (And it does burn me that I sold at least one or two of the McD’s for less than what an open CIB copy goes for today)