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There's not even a copy to buy if you wanted to spend $350 on one right now. You can spend $1000 for the only CIB available though, a deal! One at a time baby. I haven't really bought lots since I was collecting NES carts over a decade ago and I've only become pickier with time. It's tough to find a lot that has all stuff I want right now, is all in nice shape, as complete as I want it, and is selling for enough of a discount.

Set fillers are so expensive right now. $350 for Frankenstein: The Monster Returns just to check the box, jeez. I pick at the Atari and Activision sets and one day might go after PS1 or PS2 but money and spacewise sets are a bad value for me compared to individual wants right now, and I love sets.

I have never even seen a picture of a real Tom Clown, floppy or cartridge. If you ever come across one let me know. Someone asked the Belarusian guy who dumped it to post a pic years ago and he didn't follow up There are a couple reports on Usenet that the other 3 Realtec games were found at Kay-Bee Toys in the US, so those came out here. Tom Clown is a mystery being apparently bundled with the Realtec Magicom on a floppy, a disk copier it's difficult to find discussions of period, let alone in English. You can find some pictures of it all on Mega Drives on the non-English internet. IMO Tom Clown never had any kind of real US release someone can show me the slightest evidence it did.

My strategy is to get something like a Kadabra ASAP and spam Psychic through the entire game.

Boxes are going to get knocked around in handling and packing too, preventing 9.8s straight from factory cases. The grade should be the condition of the wrap, not the condition of the wrap minus what we think might have happened at the factory. I've got Atari games with these crappy holes in them but I don't look at them and sell "A+ for you, you get a gold star for trying your best!"

Here's a compiled list of prices from Reddit. Most of these must be all time highs for what these games have ever sold for, barring the highest of high end restorations for some. Even in the Covid boom these prices are nuts. There is some mega collectible stuff in here (Varkon, Tattoo Assassins, Spirit, Joust pinball) and some common and C-list games fetching outrageous prices (Twilight Zone, Flash Gordon, Apollo 13?????, $10,000 for Bad Cats???????????, $14,000 Back the Future????????????) You can check Pinside.com for an idea of what these games normally sell for on the second hand market. Has the spec life come to 400lbs arcade equipment? Popular franchises are clearly getting a huge boost over the best playable stuff, which is usually the most desirable in terms of games you're going to have occupying this much space in your house.

Ha, I randomly went to HA to look at A+'s and this is the third one I looked at. Avert thine eyes. https://comics.ha.com/itm/video-games/gravitar-wata-94-a-sealed-1988-red-box-2600-atari-1983-usa/a/312137-67007.s?ic4=ListView-ShortDescription-071515 I hope you guys are buying the game not the grade, etc.

Looks like it went down in value. Sealed copy used to be worth $1056, now it's only worth $247!

This loose SE that "sold" for 30k is back up for sale. I'm surprised the seller didn't wait for his old sale to age out of Ebay history so it would only exist on price tracking websites and make it harder to realize the sale didn't go through. If anyone is actually spending $10,000s based on price history of "sold" items these days, truly godspeed to you. https://www.ebay.com/itm/284446164213

I've played Pokemon games for a decade now saying "Oh that was... fine. Maybe the next one will be amazing!"

Sun/Moon is where I really started questioning why I even still play Pokemon games, because man does the formula not change at all. Game Freak is a technically incompetent developer with no ambition. I feel bad for Pokemon fans who play every underwhelming gen of games while watching every other major franchise pushing technology and offering new experiences. It's the biggest franchise ever, we're in the world of the latest GTAs, Assassin's Creeds, Breath of the Wilds, Horizons (which all came out years ago)... and the latest Pokemon open world game looks like a PS2 BOTW knock off and isn't going to have every Pokemon in it. Imagine the justice a Capcom, Ubisoft, or Rockstar could do an open world Pokemon game... just to bring it up to the standards of the 2010s, not even offering anything truly new! Now realize we will literally never even have that game.

I would understand this more if it was a CIB set selling for a huge premium. I don't know how many rich Saudis are collecting carts in UGCs.

My best guess would be it was damaged or worsened when they actually put it in the case, but after they graded it. But could just be loose grading. Buy the game, not the grade But real answer, it's a sealed River Raid who cares.

I think as time goes on, more younger, modern gamer, and graded collectors will enter the hobby and will care more about what a game represents than its gameplay value. I mean, look at black box mania. Soccer, Mach Rider, and Gumshoe aren't the best NES has to offer but are lately some of the more desirable NES games just because they're in that set. I think Super Metroid obviously holds up incredibly well, but teenagers of today might think anything older than Xbox 360 is archaic and anything older than that they buy purely to put on a shelf. Or people collect who don't play older games at all and just like the history. There will eventually be a crop of people playing old games like Gears of War and Halo 3, which they think is the "first era of games that's actually playable", which is something collectors of every generation thinks about their preferred console generation. Except N64, nobody knows what N64 people think.

Nothing on N64 is even rare. You could literally click BIN on Ebay for every single cart for way less. Either the buyer messed up and doesn't know what an N64 box is or massively overpaid for readily available games, which wouldn't be a sign of things to come but a sign of the present.

The only reason I want Jaguar games is because Jaguar emulation is bad. This concept affects the arcade market too. Games that you can't just throw on a MAME cabinet like Paperboy and 720 get premiums. And if you're going to take up that amount of real estate in your house, it might as well be a game you can't just play on MAME and get the same experience.

The PAL copies look 100% complete with the baggies and everything, the US copies aren't. Also nothing in this market makes sense and everything is volatile by the week, so who knows.

It's truly the last hidden gem of NES. Never forget.

Or type iddqd idkfa idclip and blast through all the levels because playing it like an 8 year old in the 90s is the truuuuue Doom experience.

Games are too expensive now to take risks. And why bother when you can just rerelease a game and everyone is just as excited. The first KOTOR game in 17 years was announced... KOTOR 1... and the crowd went wild! Switch is the most beloved console in long time and people cite it's library full of ports and rereleases as a positive. It's great if you haven't played those games but I wouldn't call it exciting. There's still indie games with new ideas or made for niche audiences though (and still a lot of reskinned Metroids and pixel platformers). You can find cool new interesting games, they just don't come with the amazing next-gen technological boost that playing Super Mario Bros, GTA3, or Bioshock for the first time did. Baba is You is a very "Oh, there are ideas in puzzle games that we still haven't explored in the past 40 years" experience, but you don't need an Xbox 7 Million to play it.

I've beat Ninja Gaiden III without dying except for the last act timer, so I always take a death on the last checkpoint in the game here to reset the timer. I gotta learn some speed strats one day. The timer is ridiculous. Beating the entire 9-part stage plus 3 bosses on one timer is the hardest part of any Ninja Gaiden game IMO. I wonder if they intentionally made the timer difficult as the final NG challenge or just figured most people would probably die at some point to reset it.

Yes, all the versions not on PC are the worst version (Actually I think @Sumez corrected me a while ago that the latest console versions made in Unity are excellent now).

Don't ruin history the first time you play itttttttt. Brutal Doom is pretty cool though.

Doom is 10/10, my favorite computer game. I love the nonlinear exploration and individual levels. They can be big, open labyrinthine backtracking complexes or more linear action levels. There are gimmicky levels full of secrets and giant open rooms just full of a million dudes (more of that in Doom II really). You can spend an hour going through an episode taking your time exploring or you can crash through it at top speed and do every level in like 2 minutes. It's the full package. They literally and unfortunately don't make games like this anymore. The 3D maze aspect of FPS is almost completely gone now in favor of bad guys shooting galleries or an entire focus on multiplayer, and I personally loved the maze. 2016 Doom isn't really anything like Doom. It's like a Quake III/Serious Sam game with Martian horror paint on it. It's entirely linear with a bunch of single player Quake III jump pad arena battles. Still a super cool game because of how fast and violent it is. I'd personally take Quake or Quake III over it though. 8/10

We used to hide it in the recycling bin when the custodian came around to delete it, haha.